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• Segmentation and Targeting: Your Tools for Personalizing the Online Customer Experience

  - by Christie Flanagan

  In order to deliver the kind of personalized and engaging online experiences that customers expect today, look to segmentation and targeting.  Segmentation is the practice of dividing your site visitors into distinct groups based on shared characteristics or behavior – for example, a segment may consist of site visitors who have visited pages related to certain product type, or they may consist of visitors within the same age group or geographic area.  The idea is that those within a segment are more likely to have common needs, problems or interests that can be served by your business. Targeting is the process by which the most relevant content, whether an article promotion or other piece of content, is delivered to your visitors based on their segment membership. Segmentation and targeting are used to drive greater engagement on your web presence by delivering content to your site visitors that is tailored to their interests, behavior or other attributes.  You may have a number of different goals for your segmentation and targeting efforts: Up-sell or cross-sell to your customers Conduct A/B testing on your offers and creative Offer discounts, promotions or other incentives for the time and duration that you specify Make is easier to find relevant information about products and services Create premium content model There are two different approaches you can take toward segmentation and targeting for you online customer experience initiatives. The first is more of a manual process, in which marketers manage the process of determining which segments to create and which content to target to those segments. The benefit of this approach is that it gives marketers a high level of control over the whole process which works well when you have a thorough understanding of your segments and which content is most likely to serve their needs.  Tools for marketer managed segmentation and targeting are often built right in to your WEM platform, as they are with Oracle WebCenter Sites. The downside is that the more segments and content that you have, the more time consuming and complicated in can be to manage manually.The second approach relies on predictive intelligence to automate the segmentation and targeting process.  This allows optimization of the process to occur in real time. This approach helps reduce the burden of manual segmentation and targeting and can result in new insights into segments that you may never have thought of on your own.  It also provides you with the capability to quickly test new offers and promotions on your site.  Predictive segmentation and targeting can be achieved by using Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions together. *****Get a taste for how Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions combine to deliver powerful capabilities for predictive segmentation and targeting by watching this on demand webcast introducing Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g or by reading IDC’s take on the latest release of Oracle’s web experience management solution.  Be sure to return to the Oracle WebCenter blog on Thursday for a closer look at how to optimize the online customer experience using these two products together.

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• Criteria for selecting timeout value?

  - by stijn

  Situation: a piece of software reads frames of data from a file in a seperate thread and puts it on a queue, emptied by another thread. That second thread periodically checks on the queue and fails rather gracefully, by showing an error message stating the read timed out, if no data is available within a certain amount of time. Initially this timeout was set to 200mSec. There was no real reasoning behind that constant though, but it worked fine. We measured on a couple of machines and for large data frames, larger than what would be used by customers, a read took like 20mSec whith no other load on the machine. However one customer now gets timeout errors now and then (on the second try all is fine, probably the file is in cache or the virus scanner leaves it alone). The programmers are like 'well, yeah, but that customer's machine is full of cruft, virus scanners, tons of unneeded background processes etc'. Of course the customer is like 'hey this should just work, shouldn't it'? While the programers have a point, since the software is heavy enough to validate the need for a dedicated machine, that does not make the customer happy. Increasing the timeout to 2 seconds, for example, solves the problem. But I'd like to make a proper decision now instead of just randomly pick some magic constant that is probably ok in 99% of cases. What criteria should be used for that? We could just pick a large number, but that feels wrong. (and then we end up with a program that has the horrible bahaviour of hanging when trying to read from a disconnected drive for instance, whereas we'd rather make it show an error right away). Or we could make the timeout value a user setting, but then we need to ducument it clearly and even then not all customers are tech savy enough to really understand what it does. Or we could try and wait until another customer reports timeouts and increase the value again. And again. Until we find something ok for 99.99% of the cases.. Any good practice for this type of situation?

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• The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Create Phase

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

   Originally posted by John Brunswick. In this installment of our Minimalist Approach to Content Governance we finally get to the fun part of the content creation process! Once the content requester has addressed the items outlined in the Request Phase it is time to setup and begin the production of content.   For this to be done correctly it is important the the content be assigned appropriate workflow and security information. As in our prior phase, let's take a look at what can be done to streamline this process - as contributors are focused on getting information to their end users as quickly as possible. This often means that details around how to ensure that the materials are properly managed can be overlooked, but fortunately there are some techniques that leverage our content management system's native capabilities to automatically take care of some of the details. 1. Determine Access Why - Even if content is not something that needs to restricted due to security reasons, it is helpful to apply access rights so that the content ends up being visible only to users that it relates to. This will greatly improve user experience. For instance, if your team is working on a group project many of your fellow company employees do not need to see the content that is being worked on for that project. How - Make use of native content features that allow propagation of security and meta data from parent folders within your content system that have been setup for your particular effort. This makes it painless to enforce security, as well as meta data policies for even the most unorganized users. The default settings at a parent level can be set once the content creation request has been accepted and a location in the content management system is assigned for your specific project. Impact - Users can find information will less effort, as they will only be exposed to what they need for their work and can leverage advanced search features to take advantage of meta data assigned to content. The combination of default security and meta data will also help in running reports against the content in the Manage and Retire stages that we will discuss in the next 2 posts. 2. Assign Workflow (optional depending on nature of content) Why - Every case for workflow is going to be a bit different, but it generally involves ensuring that content conforms to management, legal and or editorial requirements. How - Oracle's Universal Content Management offers two ways of helping to workflow content without much effort. Workflow can be applied to content based on Criteria acting on meta data or explicitly assigned to content with a Basic workflow. Impact - Any content that needs additional attention before release is addressed, allowing users to comment and version until a suitable result is reached. By using inheritance from parent folders within the content management system content can automatically be given the right security, meta data and workflow information for a particular project's content. This relieves the burden of doing this for every piece of content from management teams and content contributors. We will cover more about the management phase within the content lifecycle in our next installment.

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• How to run software, that is not offered though package managers, that requires ia32-libs

  - by Onno

  I'm trying to install the Arma 2 OA dedicated server on a Virtualbox VM so I can test my own missions in a sandbox environment in a way that lets me offload them to another computer in my network. (The other computer is running the VM, but it's a windows machine, and I didn't want to hassle with its installation) It needs at least 2, and preferably 4GB of ram, so I thought I would install the AMD64 version of ubuntu 13.10 to get this going. 'How do you run a 32-bit program on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu?' already explained how to install 32bit software though apt-get and/or dpkg, but that doesn't apply in this case. The server is offered as a compressed download on the site of BI Studio, the developer of the Arma games. Its installation instructions are obviously slightly out of date with the current state of the art. (probably because the state of the art has been updated quite recently :) ) It states that I have to install ia32-libs, which has now apparently been deprecated. Now I have to find out how to get the right packages installed to make sure that it will run. My experience level is like novice-intermediate when it comes to these issues. I've installed a lot of packages though apt-get; I've solved dependency issues in the past; I haven't installed much software without using package managers. I can handle myself with basic administrative work like editing conf files and such. I have just gone ahead and tried to install it without installing ia32-libs through apt-get but to install gcc to get the libs after all. My reasoning being that gcc will include the files for backward compatibility coding and on linux all libs are (as far as I can tell) installed at a system level in /libs . So far it seems to start up. (I can connect with the game server trough my in-game network browser, so it's communicating) I'm not sure if there's any dependency checking going on when running the game server program, so I'm left with a couple of questions: Does 13.10 catch any calls to ia32libs libraries and translate the calls to the right code on amd64? If it runs, does that mean that all required libraries have been loaded correctly, or is there a change of it crashing later on when a library that was needed is missing after all? Is it necessary to do a workaround such as installing gcc? How do I find out what libraries I might need to run this software? (or any other piece of 32-bit software that isn't offered through a package manager)

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• Releasing the new Sample Browser Phone app

  - by Jialiang

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Jialiang/archive/2014/06/05/releasing-the-new-sample-browser-phone-app.aspx Starting its journey in 2010, Sample Browser is achieving its tetralogy by releasing a Windows Phone version Sample Browser today. The new Windows Phone app is the fourth milestone of Sample Browser since we released the desktop version and the Visual Studio version in 2012 and the Windows Store version in 2013. This time, by providing a sample browser designed for a ‘walking’ platform in response to MVPs’ suggestions during last year’s MVP Global Summit, we are literally putting a world of code samples "at developers’ fingertips”. If you like to have a code gallery of over 7000 quality code samples in your pocket, then click here to download our Windows Phone Sample Browser and start a fantastic mobile experience. With Windows Phone version Sample Browser and the Internet, you can search for code samples on MSDN at anytime and anywhere you want, 24/7 and–even to bed. You can also check code sample details and share them with your friends. Compared to the other 3 pieces in the tetralogy (desktop version, Visual Studio version, and the Windows Store version), the Windows Phone version Sample Browser sells itself for convenience and instant connectivity. For those who need to reach code samples under mobile circumstances where no PCs is available, Windows Phone version Sample Browser will definitely be the right service you are seeking for. Aside from sharing samples via emails as the other 3 do, the Windows Phone version Sample Browser also allows you to share the sample via SMS and Near Field Communication (NFC).   What's Next Currently, the Windows Phone Sample Browser only supports online MSDN code searching, but we already plan to upgrade Sample Browser to allow users to do ‘Bing code search’, and add and manage their private code snippets.  We will also upgrade the app to universal app. Universal App is a new concept brought up in the Microsoft Build Developer Conference 2014. It is a new development model that allows for a single app to be deployed across multiple Windows devices such as Windows Phone, Windows 8.1, and XBox. Therefore, once we finish upgrading Sample Browser to a universal app, you can synchronize your own code snippets across different devices; You can also mark a code sample as favorite on your Windows Phone and continue to study the sample when you are on your desktop. By then, sharing data between platforms will be a piece of cake. Also, the user experience of Sample Browser on different platforms will be more consistent.  The best is yet to come!   We sincerely suggest you give Sample Browser a try (click here to download). If you love what you see in Sample Browser, please recommend it to your friends and colleagues. If you encounter any problems or have any suggestions for us, please contact us at [email protected]. Your precious opinions and comments are more than welcome.

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• Our own Daily WTF

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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• Are closures with side-effects considered "functional style"?

  - by Giorgio

  Many modern programming languages support some concept of closure, i.e. of a piece of code (a block or a function) that Can be treated as a value, and therefore stored in a variable, passed around to different parts of the code, be defined in one part of a program and invoked in a totally different part of the same program. Can capture variables from the context in which it is defined, and access them when it is later invoked (possibly in a totally different context). Here is an example of a closure written in Scala: def filterList(xs: List[Int], lowerBound: Int): List[Int] = xs.filter(x => x >= lowerBound) The function literal x => x >= lowerBound contains the free variable lowerBound, which is closed (bound) by the argument of the function filterList that has the same name. The closure is passed to the library method filter, which can invoke it repeatedly as a normal function. I have been reading a lot of questions and answers on this site and, as far as I understand, the term closure is often automatically associated with functional programming and functional programming style. The definition of function programming on wikipedia reads: In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast to the imperative programming style, which emphasizes changes in state. and further on [...] in functional code, the output value of a function depends only on the arguments that are input to the function [...]. Eliminating side effects can make it much easier to understand and predict the behavior of a program, which is one of the key motivations for the development of functional programming. On the other hand, many closure constructs provided by programming languages allow a closure to capture non-local variables and change them when the closure is invoked, thus producing a side effect on the environment in which they were defined. In this case, closures implement the first idea of functional programming (functions are first-class entities that can be moved around like other values) but neglect the second idea (avoiding side-effects). Is this use of closures with side effects considered functional style or are closures considered a more general construct that can be used both for a functional and a non-functional programming style? Is there any literature on this topic? IMPORTANT NOTE I am not questioning the usefulness of side-effects or of having closures with side effects. Also, I am not interested in a discussion about the advantages / disadvantages of closures with or without side effects. I am only interested to know if using such closures is still considered functional style by the proponent of functional programming or if, on the contrary, their use is discouraged when using a functional style.

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• How to deal with MySQL Connector/ODBC error "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock'"

  - by user12653020

  I am sure many users run into a mysterious problem when perfectly working ODBC configurations started failing with errors like: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' The above error message might be preceded with something like [nxDc[yQ]. At the same time odbc.ini specifies in its DSN different SOCKET=/tmp/mysql.sock or a TCP connection SERVER=<remote_host_or_ip>. The question is, what had happened that the ODBC driver started to ignore the DSN options? The clue lies in the corrupted string [nxDc[yQ], which actually was [UnixODBC][MySQL] with each 2nd symbol removed. This is the case of bad conversion from SQLCHAR to SQLWCHAR. The UnixODBC driver manager took a single-byte character string from the client application and tried to convert it into the wide (multi-byte) characters for the Unicode version of MyODBC driver: Initially the piece of the connection string was represented by 1-byte chars like: [S][E][R][V][E][R][=][m][y][h][o][s][t][;] after the bad conversion to wide chars (commonly 2-byte UTF-16) [SE][RV][ER][=m][yh][os][t;] instead of [S\0][E\0][R\0][V\0][E\0][R\0][=\0][m\0][y\0][h\0][o\0][s\0][t\0][;\0] Naturally, the MyODBC driver could not parse the bad string and tried to use the default connection type (SOCKET) with the default value (/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock) Now we know what happened, but why it happened? In most cases it happened because of using ODBCManageDataSourcesQ4 utility or its older analog ODBCConfig. When registering ODBC drivers they put lots of additional options and one of these options badly affects the UnixODBC driver manager itself. The solution is simple - remove or comment out the option in odbcinst.ini file (it is empty by default) set for the driver: [MySQL ODBC 5.2.6 Driver] Description    = Driver         = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5w.so Driver64       = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5w.so Setup          = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5S.so Setup64        = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5S.so UsageCount     = 1 CPTimeout      = 0 CPTimeToLive   = 0 IconvEncoding  =  # <--------- remove this line Trace          = TraceFile      = TraceLibrary   = After applying this simple solution (remove the line with IconvEncoding = ) everything came to normal. Prior to removing that line I tried putting different encoding names there, but the result was not good, so I really don't know how to properly use it. Unfortunately, UnixODBC manuals say nothing about it. Therefore, removing this option was the only way to get things done.

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• kubuntu: wireless manager can't find any networks

  - by timuçin

  I just installed Kubuntu 12.10 and as I knew my wireless driver would not be recognized, I installed it manually through here. I suppose I shall mention that I also had to do this. The driver worked just fine until I restarted my system. Since then I can't even start over. My wireless card is realtek 8723 The oly lead I have is this piece of log: 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <info> wpa_supplicant started 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <info> (wlan0) supports 4 scan SSIDs 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: starting -> ready 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <info> (wlan0): device state change: unavailable -> disconnected (reason 'supplicant-available') [20 30 42] 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <warn> Trying to remove a non-existant call id. 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: ready -> inactive 11/14/12 07:35:21 AM timucin-W150ER NetworkManager[989] <info> (wlan0) supports 4 scan SSIDs I feel really bad that I have been trying so many things and even while I am trying them I get a problem at every step. I am really frustrated. You can the time in the logs, I didn't get up early. Just needed to share my feelings. Even the ethernet cable I have use is short for God's sake, I have had to sit at this massively uncomfortable posture for hours. edit: I discovered something interesting. When I boot my windows I see that my wireless manager says "disconnected" now. However when I start ubuntu after windows and modprobe rtl8723e wireless works just fine. Then again, when I restart ubuntu I am back where I have started. So now I have to start windows, restart my machine and do the modprobe thing to see wireless networks.

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• Specifying and applying broad changes to a program

  - by Victor Nicollet

  How do you handle incomplete feature requests, when the ones asking for the feature cannot possibly write a complete request? Consider an imaginary situation. You are a tech lead working on a piece of software that revolves around managing profiles (maybe they're contacts in a CRM-type application, or employees in an HR application), with many operations being directly or indirectly performed on those profiles — edit fields, add comments, attach documents, send e-mail... The higher-ups decide that a lock functionality should be added whereby a profile can be locked to prevent anyone else from doing any operations on it until it's unlocked — this feature would be used by security agents to prevent anyone from touching a profile pending a security audit. Obviously, such a feature interacts with many other existing features related to profiles. For example: Can one add a comment to a locked profile? Can one see e-mails that were sent by the system to the owner of a locked profile? Can one see who recently edited a locked profile? If an e-mail was in the process of being sent when the lock happened, is the e-mail sending canceled, delayed or performed as if nothing happened? If I just changed a profile and click the "cancel" link on the confirmation, does the lock prevent the cancel or does it still go through? In all of these cases, how do I tell the user that a lock is in place? Depending on the software, there could be hundreds of such interactions, and each interaction requires a decision — is the lock going to apply and if it does, how will it be displayed to the user? And the higher-ups asking for the feature probably only see a small fraction of these, so you will probably have a lot of questions coming up while you are working on the feature. How would you and your team handle this? Would you expect the higher-ups to come up with a complete description of all cases where the lock should apply (and how), and treat all other cases as if the lock did not exist? Would you try to determine all potential interactions based on existing specifications and code, list them and ask the higher-ups to make a decision on all those where the decision is not obvious? Would you just start working and ask questions as they come up? Would you try to change their minds and settle on a more easily described feature with similar effects? The information about existing features is, as I understand it, in the code — how do you bridge the gap between the decision-makers and that information they cannot access?

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• Accounting for waves when doing planar reflections

  - by CloseReflector

  I've been studying Nvidia's examples from the SDK, in particular the Island11 project and I've found something curious about a piece of HLSL code which corrects the reflections up and down depending on the state of the wave's height. Naturally, after examining the brief paragraph of code: // calculating correction that shifts reflection up/down according to water wave Y position float4 projected_waveheight = mul(float4(input.positionWS.x,input.positionWS.y,input.positionWS.z,1),g_ModelViewProjectionMatrix); float waveheight_correction=-0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; projected_waveheight = mul(float4(input.positionWS.x,-0.8,input.positionWS.z,1),g_ModelViewProjectionMatrix); waveheight_correction+=0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; reflection_disturbance.y=max(-0.15,waveheight_correction+reflection_disturbance.y); My first guess was that it compensates for the planar reflection when it is subjected to vertical perturbation (the waves), shifting the reflected geometry to a point where is nothing and the water is just rendered as if there is nothing there or just the sky: Now, that's the sky reflecting where we should see the terrain's green/grey/yellowish reflection lerped with the water's baseline. My problem is now that I cannot really pinpoint what is the logic behind it. Projecting the actual world space position of a point of the wave/water geometry and then multiplying by -.5f, only to take another projection of the same point, this time with its y coordinate changed to -0.8 (why -0.8?). Clues in the code seem to indicate it was derived with trial and error because there is redundancy. For example, the author takes the negative half of the projected y coordinate (after the w divide): float waveheight_correction=-0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; And then does the same for the second point (only positive, to get a difference of some sort, I presume) and combines them: waveheight_correction+=0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; By removing the divide by 2, I see no difference in quality improvement (if someone cares to correct me, please do). The crux of it seems to be the difference in the projected y, why is that? This redundancy and the seemingly arbitrary selection of -.8f and -0.15f lead me to conclude that this might be a combination of heuristics/guess work. Is there a logical underpinning to this or is it just a desperate hack? Here is an exaggeration of the initial problem which the code fragment fixes, observe on the lowest tessellation level. Hopefully, it might spark an idea I'm missing. The -.8f might be a reference height from which to deduce how much to disturb the texture coordinate sampling the planarly reflected geometry render and -.15f might be the lower bound, a security measure.

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• Code testing practice

  - by Robin Castlin

  So now I have come to the conclusion like many others that having some way of constantly testing your code is good practice since it enables fewer people to be involved (colleges and customers alike) by simply knowing what's wrong before someone else finds out the hard way. I've heard and read some about Unit Testing and understand what it's supposed to do and all. The there are so many different types of bugs. It can be everything from web browser not being able not being able to send correct values, javascript failing, a global function messing up a piece of code somewhere to a change that looked good when testing it out but fails in some special case which was hard to anticipate. My simply finding these errors I learn to rarely repeat them again, but there seems to always be new bugs to be found and learnt from. I would guess maybe the best practice would be to run every page and it's functions a couple of times, witness the result and repeat this in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer (and all smartphones apparently) to make sure it works as intended. However this would take quite some time to do consider I don't work with patches/versions and do little fixes here and there a couple of times per week. What I prefer would be some kind of page I can just load that tests as much things as possible to make sure the site works as intended. Basicly just run a lot of cURL's with POST-values and see if I get expected result. But how would I preferably not increase the IDs of every mysql rows if I delete these testing rows? It feels silly to be on ID 1000 with maybe 50 rows in total. If I could build a new project from scratch I would probably implement some kind of smooth way to return a "TRUE" on testing instead of the actual page. But this solution would for the moment being have to be passed on existing projects. My question What would you recommend to be the best way to test my site to make sure that existing functions does their job upon editing the code? Should I consider to implement a lot of edits first, then test manually the entire code to make sure it still works? Is there any nice way of testing codes without "hurting" the ID columns? Extra thoughs Would it be a good idea to associate all of my files to the different parts of my site which they affect? For instance if I edit home.php I will through documentation test if my homepage's start works as intended since it's the only part of my site it should affect.

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• Practices for domain models in Javascript (with frameworks)

  - by AndyBursh

  This is a question I've to-and-fro'd with for a while, and searched for and found nothing on: what're the accepted practices surrounding duplicating domain models in Javascript for a web application, when using a framework like Backbone or Knockout? Given a web application of a non-trivial size with a set of domain models on the server side, should we duplicate these models in the web application (see the example at the bottom)? Or should we use the dynamic nature to load these models from the server? To my mind, the arguments for duplicating the models are in easing validation of fields, ensuring that fields that expected to be present are in fact present etc. My approach is to treat the client-side code like an almost separate application, doing trivial things itself and only relying on the server for data and complex operations (which require data the client-side doesn't have). I think treating the client-side code like this is akin to separation between entities from an ORM and the models used with the view in the UI layer: they may have the same fields and relate to the same domain concept, but they're distinct things. On the other hand, it seems to me that duplicating these models on the server side is a clear violation of DRY and likely to lead to differing results on the client- and server-side (where one piece gets updated but the other doesn't). To avoid this violation of DRY we can simply use Javascripts dynamism to get the field names and data from the server as and when they're neeed. So: are there any accepted guidelines around when (and when not) to repeat yourself in these situations? Or this a purely subjective thing, based on the project and developer(s)? Example Server-side model class M { int A DateTime B int C int D = (A*C) double SomeComplexCalculation = ServiceLayer.Call(); } Client-side model function M(){ this.A = ko.observable(); this.B = ko.observable(); this.C = ko.observable(); this.D = function() { return A() * C(); } this.SomeComplexCalculation = ko.observalbe(); return this; }l M.GetComplexValue = function(){ this.SomeComplexCalculation(Ajax.CallBackToServer()); }; I realise this question is quite similar to this one, but I think this is more about almost wholly untying the web application from the server, where that question is about doing this only in the case of complex calculation.

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• while(true) and loop-breaking - anti-pattern?

  - by KeithS

  Consider the following code: public void doSomething(int input) { while(true) { TransformInSomeWay(input); if(ProcessingComplete(input)) break; DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } Assume that this process involves a finite but input-dependent number of steps; the loop is designed to terminate on its own as a result of the algorithm, and is not designed to run indefinitely (until cancelled by an outside event). Because the test to see if the loop should end is in the middle of a logical set of steps, the while loop itself currently doesn't check anything meaningful; the check is instead performed at the "proper" place within the conceptual algorithm. I was told that this is bad code, because it is more bug-prone due to the ending condition not being checked by the loop structure. It's more difficult to figure out how you'd exit the loop, and could invite bugs as the breaking condition might be bypassed or omitted accidentally given future changes. Now, the code could be structured as follows: public void doSomething(int input) { TransformInSomeWay(input); while(!ProcessingComplete(input)) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); TransformInSomeWay(input); } } However, this duplicates a call to a method in code, violating DRY; if TransformInSomeWay were later replaced with some other method, both calls would have to be found and changed (and the fact that there are two may be less obvious in a more complex piece of code). You could also write it like: public void doSomething(int input) { var complete = false; while(!complete) { TransformInSomeWay(input); complete = ProcessingComplete(input); if(!complete) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } } ... but you now have a variable whose only purpose is to shift the condition-checking to the loop structure, and also has to be checked multiple times to provide the same behavior as the original logic. For my part, I say that given the algorithm this code implements in the real world, the original code is the most readable. If you were going through it yourself, this is the way you'd think about it, and so it would be intuitive to people familiar with the algorithm. So, which is "better"? is it better to give the responsibility of condition checking to the while loop by structuring the logic around the loop? Or is it better to structure the logic in a "natural" way as indicated by requirements or a conceptual description of the algorithm, even though that may mean bypassing the loop's built-in capabilities?

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• Notes - Part I - Say Hello from Java

  - by Silviu Turuga

  Sometimes we need to take small notes to remember things, one way to do this is to use stick notes and have them all around our desktop. But what happening if you have a lot of notes and a small office? You'll need a piece of software that will sort things for you and also it will provide you a quick way to retrieve the notes when need. Did I mention that this will keep your desktop clean and also will reduce paper waste? During the next days we'll gonna create an application that will let you manage your notes, put them in different categories etc. I'll show you step by step what do you need to do and finally you'll have the application run on multiple systems, such as Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. The only pre-requisition for this lesson is to have JDK 7 with JavaFX installed and an IDE, preferably NetBeans. I'll call this application Notes…. Part I - Say Hello from Java  From NetBeans go to Files->New Project Chose JavaFX->JavaFX FXML Application Project Name: Notes FXML name: NotesUI Check Create Application Class and name it Main After this the project is created and you'll see the following structure As a best practice I advice you to have your code in your own package instead of the default one. right click on Source Packages and chose New->Java Package name it something like this: com.turuga.notes and click Next after the package is created, select all the 3 files from step #3 and drag them over the new package chose Refactor, as this will make sure all the references are correctly moved inside the new package now you should have the following structure if you'll try to run the project you'll get an error: Unable to find class: Main right click on project name Notes and click properties go to Run and you'll see Application Class set to Main, but because we have defined our own packages, this location has been change, so click on Browse and the correct one appear: com.turuga.notes.Main last modification before running the project is to right click on NotesUI.fxml and chose Edit (if you'll double click it will open in JavaFX Scene Builder) look around line 9 and change fx:controller="NotesUIController" to fx:controller="com.turuga.notes.NotesUIController" now you are ready to run it and you should see the following On the next lesson we'll continue to play with NetBeans and start working on the interface of our project

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• Response: Agile's Second Chasm

  - by Malcolm Anderson

  William Pietri over at Agile Focus has written an interesting article entitled, "Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)" in which he talks about how agile development has fallen into a common trap where large companies are now spending a lot of money hiring agile (Scrum) consultants just so that they can say they are agile, but all the while avoiding any change that is required by Scrum.   It echoes the questions that I've been asking for a while, "Can a fortune 500 company actually do agile development?"  I'm starting to think that the answer is "usually not"   William ask 3 questions at the end of his article that I will answer here.   1) Have I seen agile development brought in and then preemptively customized (read: made into ScrummerFall)?   Yes, Scrum is hard and disruptive.  It's a spotlight on company dysfunction.  In a low trust environment like most fortune 500 companies Scrum will be subverted by anyone who has ever seen "transparency" translate into someone being laid off.   2) If I had to do it all over again, would I change anything?  No, this is a natural progression, but the agile principles are powerful enough, that the companies that don't adopt them will no longer be competitive and will start to fail.   3) Is this situation solvable?  I think it is.  I think that one of the issues is that you often see companies implementing Scrum, but avoiding the agile engineering practices.  I believe that you cannot do one without the other.  Scrum keeps the ship sailing in smooth deep waters.  The agile engineering practices keep the engine running smoothly and cleanly.  If you implement agile engineering practices without Scrum, you run the risk of ending up with a great running piece of software that is useful to no one.  On the other hand, implementing cargo-cult Scrum without the agile engineering practices and you end up (especially in a fortune 500 company) being steered in the right direction, but with your development practices coming to a dead halt because you have code that can not keep up with the changes in requirements.   If you are trying to do Scrum, make sure that you hire some agile engineering coaches, or else you may find your deveolpment engines grinding to a dead halt in the middle of the open ocean.

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• 2d, Top-down map with different levels

  - by Ktash

  So, I'm creating a 2d, top down, sprite based (tiled) game, and right now I'm working on maps (well, a map editor at the moment, but it will be creating my maps, so basically the same thing). The scenario So, I'm thinking about efficiency and creating a map in pieces. In each piece, I plan on having 'layers'. Basically, I plan on rendering it down to a 'below hero' level, and an 'above hero' level, with the hero rendered in between obviously. There will likely also be a 'on level with hero' layer, but I'm not quite there yet. Not even worrying about events or interaction yet. Just looking to get a hero on the screen. Now for movement, I obviously need to know what tiles can be moved and in what direction. My plan at the moment is each tile getting 8 bits (4 'can enter in direction' bits, 4 'can leave in direction'). This will allow me to limit movement and even allow one way directional movement. The dilemma This works great for a lot of scenarios. It will allow me to store a map in essentially 3 layers, a string, and gives me flexibility going forward. However, I can't create maps that themselves have layers. A good example is a bridge where the user can go under or over the bridge without invalid moves being allowed. I can't create a platform and allow movement underneath. These are things I would like to be able to include in my game. My idea In theory, I could allow multiple hero layers and then allow multiple sets of 'below' and 'above' layers (or sandwich layers). But this complicates my system, and makes movement between maps potentially tricky (If the hero is on the third layer at the edge of a map, but that corresponds to the second layer on the other map, how can I allow or disallow movement). My question Is there a better way to manage multiple maps with multiple levels like this where a users level may be 'connected' on different levels on different maps? Or even... Am I doing this the hard way? Is there a more standard way to handle top-down 2d tiled maps that I am just not aware of? Things to note or that might be helpful This will be done in Javascript (transferred around in JSON) State will need to be transferred quickly, so a map-id and x/y/direction should be enough to get me a boolean 'can move' value Maps will not be standard sized (though they will be in a certain number of tiles) Making an editor tool so that I can have others help, so something that I can create in a tool would be helpful 'Teleportation' locations will likely need to exist to get into building maps and to and from different map sets (which will not necessarily be connected), but have not been created yet (lumping in with events at the moment).

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• Optionally Running SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges with Delgates

  - by Damon Armstrong

  I was writing some SharePoint code today where I needed to give people the option of running some code with elevated permission.  When you run code in an elevated fashion it normally looks like this: SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(()=> {     //Code to run }); It wasn’t a lot of code so I was initially inclined to do something horrible like this: public void SomeMethod(bool runElevated) {     if(runElevated)     {         SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(()=>         {             //Code to run         });     }     else     {         //Copy of code to run     } } Easy enough, but I did not want to draw the ire of my coworkers for employing the CTRL+C CTRL+V design pattern.  Extracting the code into a whole new method would have been overkill because it was a pretty brief piece of code.  But then I thought, hey, wait, I’m basically just running a delegate, so why not define the delegate once and run it either in an elevated context or stand alone, which resulted in this version which I think is much cleaner because the code is only defined once and it didn’t require a bunch of extra lines of code to define a method: public void SomeMethod(bool runElevated) {     var code = new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(()=>     {         //Code to run     });     if(runElevated)     {         SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPermissions(code);         }     else     {         Code();     } }

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• How do you feel about being asked to code during an interview?

  - by Mystere Man

  I have seen a lot of comments about good interview questions and puzzles to require potential developers to solve during the interview process. I have personally had several interviews in which the interviewer has asked me to write some piece of code or solve a problem during the interview, and I have always performed very poorly in these "tests". The reason is simple, as a developer who spends my days talking to computers, I find I have to prepare myself and "switch gears" to be in "interview mode". I prepare myself to make a good impression. When I'm programming, I'm very focused and am totally different from when I'm being "interpersonal". I just can't get into "the zone" when I'm also having to be a charming and witty potential employee. I feel that by asking a developer to prove his skills during an interview, all you're doing is finding out if they can code under pressure, and at the drop of a hat. It has almost no ability to determine how you would perform in a "real life" development situation. Maybe, if you're looking for someone that can code and chat at the same time, i can see how that would be beneficial. But I think you overlook potential candidates that simply do not perform well in such an artificial environment. While I appreciate that a potential employer wants to see what I can do, I don't think an interview is the place for such a test. I mean, suppose a job for an over the road trucker required that you drive while being interviewed. How does that really end well? So I'm curious as to what others think about such situations. Have you failed interviews because you were not in the right frame of mind? Have you failed to make a good interpersonal impression because you were too distracted trying to solve the problem? If you're a hiring manager, or someone that gives interviews, do you even think about such things? Is it really important that someone perform well in an interview? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not against testing applicants. My concern is about testing during an interview. See also: What are the pros and cons for the employer of code questions during an interview? looking at this from the interviewer's point of view.

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• Programming tourism

  - by Andrew_B

  I'm going on vacation to Paris, France for 10 days. Actually, it's my girlfriend's wish to go there but I'm not very interested in visiting, sightseeing, etc. Recently, I came up with an idea of trying to do something like programming tourism. :) I'd like to do something related to programming in a startup-like company. I do not want a salary or any kind of compensation. I want to overview process, social aspects, environment and "what it feels like" to development software in another country. I'm from Russia. I've been a software developer since 2003. I prefer C#4 but I'm ready to use anything Turing-complete. I have some MS certifications and am familiar with all .NETs since 1.1. Currently I'm finishing PhD in CS. I'm interested in multidimensional indexing and I can turn any piece of data and code to OLAP system. :) But it'd take too much time. What can I do? I have no more than one week. I want a totally complete project in a short amount of time. Implement some features in well-tested project Do a code review Debug memory, performance and concurrency issues Do unit testing So, about the questions: Is it legal? I'm ready to sign NDA if it's necessary. I'll have tourist visa. Is it possible? I'm really sure that bureaucratic companies with lots of HRs and PMs will not allow such experiments. But small companies can afford it. I'm ready to guarantee support on my code after leaving home :) P.S. I still havn't started learning French :) I hope it will not take too much time :) P.P.S. Yes, it's girlfriend-approved. What's in it for me? It's fun. It's fun to see new systems and people who created them. It's fun to complete meaningful things. Quickly. What's in it for them? Feature, debug, review or test. If my short-term colleagues will like this style of working I can invite them to make same trip into my company :) I think in Russia it's even more exciting :)

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• Is it unusual for a small company (15 developers) not to use managed source/version control?

  - by LordScree

  It's not really a technical question, but there are several other questions here about source control and best practice. The company I work for (which will remain anonymous) uses a network share to host its source code and released code. It's the responsibility of the developer or manager to manually move source code to the correct folder depending on whether it's been released and what version it is and stuff. We have various spreadsheets dotted around where we record file names and versions and what's changed, and some teams also put details of different versions at the top of each file. Each team (2-3 teams) seems to do this differently within the company. As you can imagine, it's an organised mess - organised, because the "right people" know where their stuff is, but a mess because it's all different and it relies on people remembering what to do at any one time. One good thing is that everything is backed up on a nightly basis and kept indefinitely, so if mistakes are made, snapshots can be recovered. I've been trying to push for some kind of managed source control for a while, but I can't seem to get enough support for it within the company. My main arguments are: We're currently vulnerable; at any point someone could forget to do one of the many release actions we have to do, which could mean whole versions are not stored correctly. It could take hours or even days to piece a version back together if necessary We're developing new features along with bug fixes, and often have to delay the release of one or the other because some work has not been completed yet. We also have to force customers to take versions that include new features even if they just want a bug fix, because there's only really one version we're all working on We're experiencing problems with Visual Studio because multiple developers are using the same projects at the same time (not the same files, but it's still causing problems) There are only 15 developers, but we all do stuff differently; wouldn't it be better to have a standard company-wide approach we all have to follow? My questions are: Is it normal for a group of this size not to have source control? I have so far been given only vague reasons for not having source control - what reasons would you suggest could be valid for not implementing source control, given the information above? Are there any more reasons for source control that I could add to my arsenal? I'm asking mainly to get a feel for why I have had so much resistance, so please answer honestly. I'll give the answer to the person I believe has taken the most balanced approach and has answered all three questions. Thanks in advance

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• Commvault Oracle RMAN Restore to new host

  - by Glenn Stauffer

  We use Commvault Simpana 8 and I have a situation where I have backups of an Oracle database on tape that were taken from Host A. Host A suffered a disk failure (lost its raid configuration) and the sys admins are trying to restore it; in the meantime, I'd working to bring the database back up on another host - Host B. I'm running into problems and am trying to sort out the parameters that need to be passed to the Commvault media agent to get this to work. Unfortunately, I do not have access to Commvault support and the backup person is unavailable. Any one have a clue? The backups are there and the media agent reported a successful write when they ran last night. This is what fails: RMAN run { allocate channel t1 device type sbt_tape parms='SBT_LIBRARY=/usr/local/galaxy/Base/libobk.so,BLKSIZE=262144, ENV=(CvClientName=dbsrv2,CvInstanceName=Instance001, CVOraRacDBName=BBDB, CVOraRACDBClientName=BBDB)'; restore spfile to pfile '/tmp/bbdb.ora' from autobackup; }2 3 4 allocated channel: t1 channel t1: sid=34 devtype=SBT_TAPE channel t1: CommVault Systems for Oracle: Version 7.0.0(Build76) Starting restore at 09-MAY-10 channel t1: looking for autobackup on day: 20100509 channel t1: autobackup found: c-3941155360-20100509-01 released channel: t1 RMAN-00571: =========================================================== RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS =============== RMAN-00571: =========================================================== RMAN-03002: failure of restore command at 05/09/2010 18:01:35 ORA-19870: error reading backup piece c-3941155360-20100509-01 ORA-19507: failed to retrieve sequential file, handle="c-3941155360-20100509-01", parms="" ORA-27029: skgfrtrv: sbtrestore returned error ORA-19511: Error received from media manager layer, error text: sbtrestore: Job[0] thread[26316]: InitializeCLRestore() failed.

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• How to execute msdb.dbo.sp_start_job from a stored procedure in user database in sql server 2005

  - by Ram

  Hi Everyone, I am trying to execute a msdb.dbo.sp_start_Job from MyDB.dbo.MyStoredProc in order to execute MyJob 1) I Know that if i give the user a SqlAgentUser role he will be able to run the jobs that he owns (BUT THIS IS WHAT I OBSERVED : THE USER WAS ABLE TO START/STOP/RESTART THE SQL AGENT SO I DO NOT WANT TO GO THIS ROUTE) - Let me know if i am wrong , but i do not understand why would such a under privileged user be able to start/stop agents . 2)I know that if i give execute permissions on executing user to msdb.dbo.Sp_Start_job and Enable Ownership chaining or enable Trustworthy on the user database it would work (BUT I DO NOT WANT TO ENABLE OWNERSHIP CHAINING NOR TRUSTWORTHY ON THE USER DATABASE) 3)I this this can be done by code signing User Database i)create a stored proc MyDB.dbo.MyStoredProc ii)Create a certificae job_exec iii)sign MyDB.dbo.MyStoredProc with certificate job_exec iv)export certificate msdb i)Import Certificate ii)create a derived user from this certificate iii)grant authenticate for this derived user iv)grant execute on msdb.dbo.sp_start_job to the derived user v)grant execute on msdb.dbo.sp_start_job to the user executing the MyDB.dbo.MyStoredProc but i tried it and it did not work for me -i dont know which piece i am missing or doing wrong so please provide me with a simple example (with scripts) for executing msdb.dbo.sp_start_job from user stored prod MyDB.dbo.MyStoredProc using code signing Many Many Many Thanks in Advance Thanks Ram

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• Ideal Bacula appliance?

  - by Ricket

  I'm an intern at a small company and we (the IT department of two) manage <100 client computers and a handful of servers. Currently we're using a company's appliance to handle backup; it does a small backup every night and a full backup every weekend, and a guy comes on Wednesday to take an offsite backup drive (and gives back last week's drive to swap with it). Lately this system, mainly the appliance, has been having problems, so we are looking for an alternative. I'm researching other companies but also looking into what we might expect from trying to do this ourselves. There will undoubtedly be a large learning curve, but hey, that's what serverfault is for, right? :) So anyway I was looking at Bacula. Feature list sounds great, documentation is plentiful, but it's only software. So my question is, what is the ideal backup server to run the Bacula server software on? And not only the server but other related appliances. Our current backup appliance uses only hard drives, not tape drives. It has several plugged into it at one time, in hotswap bays on the front of the machine. I couldn't help but notice though, it's hardly more than Windows XP with hard drive bays, a PCI eSATA card (which connects to another appliance extension piece with 2 more bays), and their software. Since the company will take back their appliance if/when we cancel with them, where can I go to configure a server with these kinds of things? Maybe I'm being naive, I'm sure Dell (and any other computer company) sells them in the small business section of their website, but I wanted to make sure that there's not some other more recommended place that other companies are getting their hardware from, and that I don't need anything special for Bacula.

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