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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Java @Contented annotation to help reduce false sharing

  - by Dave

  See this posting by Aleksey Shipilev for details -- @Contended is something we've wanted for a long time. The JVM provides automatic layout and placement of fields. Usually it'll (a) sort fields by descending size to improve footprint, and (b) pack reference fields so the garbage collector can process a contiguous run of reference fields when tracing. @Contended gives the program a way to provide more explicit guidance with respect to concurrency and false sharing. Using this facility we can sequester hot frequently written shared fields away from other mostly read-only or cold fields. The simple rule is that read-sharing is cheap, and write-sharing is very expensive. We can also pack fields together that tend to be written together by the same thread at about the same time. More generally, we're trying to influence relative field placement to minimize coherency misses. Fields that are accessed closely together in time should be placed proximally in space to promote cache locality. That is, temporal locality should condition spatial locality. Fields accessed together in time should be nearby in space. That having been said, we have to be careful to avoid false sharing and excessive invalidation from coherence traffic. As such, we try to cluster or otherwise sequester fields that tend to written at approximately the same time by the same thread onto the same cache line. Note that there's a tension at play: if we try too hard to minimize single-threaded capacity misses then we can end up with excessive coherency misses running in a parallel environment. Theres no single optimal layout for both single-thread and multithreaded environments. And the ideal layout problem itself is NP-hard. Ideally, a JVM would employ hardware monitoring facilities to detect sharing behavior and change the layout on the fly. That's a bit difficult as we don't yet have the right plumbing to provide efficient and expedient information to the JVM. Hint: we need to disintermediate the OS and hypervisor. Another challenge is that raw field offsets are used in the unsafe facility, so we'd need to address that issue, possibly with an extra level of indirection. Finally, I'd like to be able to pack final fields together as well, as those are known to be read-only.

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• Why are MVC & TDD not employed more in game architecture?

  - by secoif

  I will preface this by saying I haven't looked a huge amount of game source, nor built much in the way of games. But coming from trying to employ 'enterprise' coding practices in web apps, looking at game source code seriously hurts my head: "What is this view logic doing in with business logic? this needs refactoring... so does this, refactor, refactorrr" This worries me as I'm about to start a game project, and I'm not sure whether trying to mvc/tdd the dev process is going to hinder us or help us, as I don't see many game examples that use this or much push for better architectural practices it in the community. The following is an extract from a great article on prototyping games, though to me it seemed exactly the attitude many game devs seem to use when writing production game code: Mistake #4: Building a system, not a game ...if you ever find yourself working on something that isn’t directly moving your forward, stop right there. As programmers, we have a tendency to try to generalize our code, and make it elegant and be able to handle every situation. We find that an itch terribly hard not scratch, but we need to learn how. It took me many years to realize that it’s not about the code, it’s about the game you ship in the end. Don’t write an elegant game component system, skip the editor completely and hardwire the state in code, avoid the data-driven, self-parsing, XML craziness, and just code the damned thing. ... Just get stuff on the screen as quickly as you can. And don’t ever, ever, use the argument “if we take some extra time and do this the right way, we can reuse it in the game”. EVER. is it because games are (mostly) visually oriented so it makes sense that the code will be weighted heavily in the view, thus any benefits from moving stuff out to models/controllers, is fairly minimal, so why bother? I've heard the argument that MVC introduces a performance overhead, but this seems to me to be a premature optimisation, and that there'd more important performance issues to tackle before you worry about MVC overheads (eg render pipeline, AI algorithms, datastructure traversal, etc). Same thing regarding TDD. It's not often I see games employing test cases, but perhaps this is due to the design issues above (mixed view/business) and the fact that it's difficult to test visual components, or components that rely on probablistic results (eg operate within physics simulations). Perhaps I'm just looking at the wrong source code, but why do we not see more of these 'enterprise' practices employed in game design? Are games really so different in their requirements, or is a people/culture issue (ie game devs come from a different background and thus have different coding habits)?

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• Office lights on or off in programming department? How to decide? [closed]

  - by smp7d

  At my company, the programmers who sit in the same area are constantly fighting over whether the lights stay on or off. Because there is no official policy it makes it a particularly sticky situation. We are a typical cube-farm and we have those typical cube-farm fluorescent lights and smaller ones at our desks. With the lights off, it is difficult to read and you would probably need to turn on your desk light (which some people do anyway). All programmers in our department do most of their reading on their monitor because of the nature of our business. Some feel that we should have a vote to decide whether the lights stay on or off. A couple who prefer 'lights on' feel that the vote would need to be unanimous to turn them off as having them on is the more natural office setting. Those who want them off point out that all other departments keep their lights off. I have heard all of the arguments: -Fluorescent lights cause eye strain -Reading in dark causes eye strain -The desk lights can be used if light is needed -People from other departments feel uncomfortable approaching us in the "dark" -The monitors are harder to see in the light ... Right now, some of the developers turn off the lights and some turn them on. It really just depends who last walked by the switch. I am a bit sick of the controversy as it feels a bit childish at the moment. I'm tired of hearing about it and I'm tired of having to talk about it. I tried to help them decide but as I explained, voting wasn't enough. Do other programming departments have this same argument? What is the standard or traditionally accepted option in a programming area? Are there any good reasons for one way or the other outside of preference? How can we decide fairly? EDIT Just a little more info... We do not have clients/visitors come into our office. We do have windows and hall lights that make our environment plenty bearable with the lights off. It kind of resembles a meeting room that has the lights off during a powerpoint presentation.

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• I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I don't feel like I know how to program.

  - by wp123

  I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I see websites like Stack Overflow and search engines like Google and don't know where I'd even begin to write something like that. During one summer I did have the opportunity to work as a iPhone developer, but I felt like I was mostly gluing together libraries that other people had written with little understanding of the mechanics happening beneath the hood. I'm trying to improve my knowledge by studying algorithms, but it is a long and painful process. I find algorithms difficult and at the rate I am learning a decade will have passed before I will master the material in the book. Given my current situation, I've spent a month looking for work but my skills (C, Python, Objective-C) are relatively shallow and are not so desirable in the local market, where C#, Java, and web development are much higher in demand. That is not to say that C and Python opportunities do not exist but they tend to demand 3+ years of experience I do not have. My GPA is OK (3.0) but it's not high enough to apply to the large companies like IBM or return for graduate studies. Basically I'm graduating with a Computer Science degree but I don't feel like I've learned how to program. I thought that joining a company and programming full-time would give me a chance to develop my skills and learn from those more experienced than myself, but I'm struggling to find work and am starting to get really frustrated. I am going to cast my net wider and look beyond the city I've grown up in, but what have other people in similar situation tried to do? I've worked hard but don't have the confidence to go out on my own and write my own app. (That is, become an indie developer in the iPhone app market.) If nothing turns up I will need to consider upgrading and learning more popular skills or try something marginally related like IT, but given all the effort I've put in that feels like copping out. EDIT: Thank you for all the advice. I think I was premature because of unrealistic expectations but the comments have given me a dose of reality. I will persevere and continue to code. I have a project in mind, although well beyond my current capabilities it will challenge me to hone my craft and prove my worth to myself (and potential employers). Had I known there was a career overflow I would have posted there instead. Thanks again!

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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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• How to be successfull at BDD Specifications Workshops?

  - by sigo

  Today we tried to introduce BDD in our software development process by having a specification workshop. For this workshop we had 2 developers, 1 tester and 1 business analyst. The workshop lasted 1h30 and by the end of it we managed to figure out some BDD scenarios for our new feature. We tried to focus on finding the scenarios that we could miss, and the difficult ones. At the end of the workshop some people were actually unhappy with the workshop. One developer felt he wasted his time as he was used to be given out the scenarios directly by the business analyst and review them with her. The business analyst didn't feel confident with our scenario coverage (Had a feeling that we could have missed out other important stuff) but more importantly felt that this workshop was also a waste of time as she could have figured out all these scenarios by herself and in a shorter period of time. So my question is how that kind of workshop can actually work. In the theory, given you have a new feature to develop, you put the tree 'amigos' (dev/tester/ba) in the same room so that they can collaborate together on writing the differents requirements for the new feature using examples. I can see all the benefits from that. Specially in term of knowledge sharing and common product/end goal/done vision. But in practice, we still think it is more cost effective to first have a BA to work on his own on the examples and only then to have the scenarios to be reviewed/reworked by the 3 'amigos'. By having the BA to work on his own, we actually feel more confident that we are less going to miss out stuff + we still get to review the scenarios afterward to double check. We don't think than simple brainstorming/deliberate discovery is actually enought to seriously cover all the requirement for a feature. The business analyst is actually the best person for that kind of stuff. The thing we just do is to review what she wrote and see if then we have a common understanding (which could then lead to rewrite some of her scenarios or add new ones she could have missed). This workshop lasted 1h30, and by the end of it, we didn't feel confident enought about wha we did...sure we could have spent more time on it but honestly most people get exhausted after 1h30 of brainstorming. So how can you get that to work effectively in practice ?

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• Object Oriented Design of a Small Java Game

  - by user2733436

  This is the problem i am dealing with. I have to make a simple game of NIM. I am learning java using a book so far i have only coded programs that deal with 2 classes. This program would have about 4 classes i guess including the main class. My problem is i am having a difficult time designing classes how they will interact with each other. I really want to think and use a object oriented approach. So the first thing i did was design the Pile CLASS as it seemed the easiest and made the most sense to me in terms of what methods go in it. Here is what i have got down for the Pile Class so far. package Nim; import java.util.Random; public class Pile { private int initialSize; public Pile(){ } Random rand = new Random(); public void setPile(){ initialSize = (rand.nextInt(100-10)+10); } public void reducePile(int x){ initialSize = initialSize - x; } public int getPile(){ return initialSize; } public boolean hasStick(){ if(initialSize>0){ return true; } else { return false; } } } Now i need help in designing the Player Class. By that i mean i am not asking for anyone to write code for me as that defeats the purpose of learning i was just wondering how would i design the player class and what would go on it. My guess is that the player class would contain method for choosing move for computer and also receiving the move human user makes. Lastly i am guessing in the Game class i am guessing the turns would be handeled. I am really lost right now so i was wondering if someone can help me think through this problem it would be great. Starting with the player class would be appreciated. I know there are some solutions for this problem online but i refuse to look at because i want to develop my own approach to such problems and i am confident if i can get through this problem i can solve other problems. I apologize if this question is a bit poor but in specific i need help in designing the Player class.

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• Windows Phone 7, taking the mobile out of mobile

  - by markritchie

  I’ll start off this blog entry with a little background which is necessary for you to understand my situation. I moved from to the UK to Germany about three years ago and while I can converse in German, English is still very much my first language and the language I want my content delivered in. I happily purchased a HTC HD7 when WP7 was released here in Germany thinking foolishly that Microsoft really would get internationalization and localization as it’s at the heart of their business and developer products. Overall I’m very happy with my WP7, the camera sucks but that’s more HTC’s fault that Microsoft, but other than that it’s a very promising platform. My problems started when I purchased my first app. Initially everything appeared to be fine and things were as smooth as things had been with my previous free applications, however about a month after I received an email from Zune informing me that the credit card that they had registered against my account had expired. No problem I foolishly thought; I’ll simply add a new one. I don’t want to bore you with the details of what I’ve been through other than to take the low-lights: trying numerous websites, posts on Microsoft Answers and a tweet to Microsoft Support all to no avail. Today somebody suggested that I call the Xbox support line in the UK as they had solved their billing problems this way. So I called up the Xbox support line since I hadn’t resolved the problem using the Zune portal to resolve my problem with my WP7 (anybody else thinks Microsoft might need some consolidation here). After being on the phone with a very friendly representative in Ireland I was informed that because my British credit card has a billing address in Germany they are unable to accept it as a credit card. Because my Live ID and Zune Tag are registered in the UK they cannot take my card. Their solution is that I have to create a new Zune Tag that has its locale in Germany and then associate it with my phone. Now, first thing I go to register for a Zune Tag with a German locale it very kindly switches into German for me, nothing quite like reading a EULA in a language you’re not fluent in. I’ve no idea how this will affect the apps that are available to me in the app store, and I’m pretty sure it means that all my Xbox live achievements will become history. And what if I was to move to say France at some point do I have to go through all this again? At the end of the day I’m trying to set something up so I can give them my money and they’re making it VERY difficult for me. Could you imagine walking into a book store when you were on holiday and being told by the clerk that they couldn’t take your credit card because you came from another country?

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• Is it reasonable to insist on reproducing every defect before diagnosing and fixing it?

  - by amphibient

  I work for a software product company. We have large enterprise customers who implement our product and we provide support to them. For example, if there is a defect, we provide patches, etc. In other words, It is a fairly typical setup. Recently, a ticket was issued and assigned to me regarding an exception that a customer found in a log file and that has to do with concurrent database access in a clustered implementation of our product. So the specific configuration of this customer may well be critical in the occurrence of this bug. All we got from the customer was their log file. The approach I proposed to my team was to attempt to reproduce the bug in a similar configuration setup as that of the customer and get a comparable log. However, they disagree with my approach saying that I should not need to reproduce the bug (as that is overly time-consuming and will require simulating a server cluster on VMs) and that I should simply "follow the code" to see where the thread- and/or transaction-unsafe code is and put the change working off of a simple local development, which is not a cluster implementation like the environment from which the occurrence of the bug originates. To me, working out of an abstract blueprint (program code) rather than a concrete, tangible, visible manifestation (runtime reproduction) seems like a difficult working environment (for a person of normal cognitive abilities and attention span), so I wanted to ask a general question: Is it reasonable to insist on reproducing every defect and debug it before diagnosing and fixing it? Or: If I am a senior developer, should I be able to read (multithreaded) code and create a mental picture of what it does in all use case scenarios rather than require to run the application, test different use case scenarios hands on, and step through the code line by line? Or am I a poor developer for demanding that kind of work environment? Is debugging for sissies? In my opinion, any fix submitted in response to an incident ticket should be tested in an environment simulated to be as close to the original environment as possible. How else can you know that it will really remedy the issue? It is like releasing a new model of a vehicle without crash testing it with a dummy to demonstrate that the air bags indeed work. Last but not least, if you agree with me: How should I talk with my team to convince them that my approach is reasonable, conservative and more bulletproof?

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• High traffic chat - how to check if there is new message and show it for all users

  - by user2633999

  I already had question about this but obviously it was not accepted very well, apparently too long when it's actually more information so you could have given me better answer. Ok, I will be much clearer now. Best possible logic to develop scalable chat in terms of stability, storing/reading messages on chat, updating chat on new message for all users etc.? I have most of this developed, the logic I think I miss is -- check if there is new message and show it for all users. I have this implemented but it crashes the site due to its traffic of 300k-400k people, so that's my main question. The chat is PHP based and uses Pusher (www.pusher.com) for instant messaging but it lacks what I need because it's more like a websocket. I'm using hardcoded files to keep messages (want to avoid database as much as possible). It's a no extension type of file, I'm sure you know. I'm getting crash with $fp = fopen(..., "w"); // pretend ... is the path and filename fwrite($fp, $msg); //hardcode the message fclose($fp); where $msg is the message itself. I'm having 1 file per message. I show last 150 messages = 150 file accesses and reads, yeah it's too much I guess. I have better logic now which I'm pursuing and that is 1 file with last 50-100 messages at all time. Sure it should be much better. How does it crash, that's the trickiest part because everything seems ordinary, believe me it is difficult to determine what exactly crashes the site, but in like 5 minutes when I try to open the site it's gone, then I put the old content without chat and is back online again. I'm having jquery post every 1 second to check if there is new message. I'm using timestamp in a special file where I keep the time last message was sent and if ((time() - time in file) <= 2) = reload last 150 messages including the last one. Too much input/output, write/read or however to say it I think is what crashes the site.

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• Tiling Problem Solutions for Various Size "Dominoes"

  - by user67081

  I've got an interesting tiling problem, I have a large square image (size 128k so 131072 squares) with dimensons 256x512... I want to fill this image with certain grain types (a 1x1 tile, a 1x2 strip, a 2x1 strip, and 2x2 square) and have no overlap, no holes, and no extension past the image boundary. Given some probability for each of these grain types, a list of the number required to be placed is generated for each. Obviously an iterative/brute force method doesn't work well here if we just randomly place the pieces, instead a certain algorithm is required. 1) all 2x2 square grains are randomly placed until exhaustion. 2) 1x2 and 2x1 grains are randomly placed alternatively until exhaustion 3) the remaining 1x1 tiles are placed to fill in all holes. It turns out this algorithm works pretty well for some cases and has no problem filling the entire image, however as you might guess, increasing the probability (and thus number) of 1x2 and 2x1 grains eventually causes the placement to stall (since there are too many holes created by the strips and not all them can be placed). My approach to this solution has been as follows: 1) Create a mini-image of size 8x8 or 16x16. 2) Fill this image randomly and following the algorithm specified above so that the desired probability of the entire image is realized in the mini-image. 3) Create N of these mini-images and then randomly successively place them in the large image. Unfortunately there are some downfalls to this simplification. 1) given the small size of the mini-images, nailing an exact probability for the entire image is not possible. Example if I want p(2x1)=P(1x2)=0.4, the mini image may only give 0.41 as the closes probability. 2) The mini-images create a pseudo boundary where no overlaps occur which isn't really descriptive of the model this is being used for. 3) There is only a fixed number of mini-images so i'm not sure how random this really is. I'm really just looking to brainstorm about possible solutions to this. My main concern is really to nail down closer probabilities, now one might suggest I just increase the mini-image size. Well I have, and it turns out that in certain cases(p(1x2)=p(2x1)=0.5) the mini-image 16x16 isn't even iteratively solvable.. So it's pretty obvious how difficult it is to randomly solve this for anything greater than 8x8 sizes.. So I'd love to hear some ideas. Thanks

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• PMDB Block Size Choice

  - by Brian Diehl

  Choosing a block size for the P6 PMDB database is not a difficult task. In fact, taking the default of 8k is going to be just fine. Block size is one of those things that is always hotly debated. Everyone has their personal preference and can sight plenty of good reasons for their choice. To add to the confusion, Oracle supports multiple block sizes withing the same instance. So how to decide and what is the justification? Like most OLTP systems, Oracle Primavera P6 has a wide variety of data. A typical table's average row size may be less than 50 bytes or upwards of 500 bytes. There are also several tables with BLOB types but the LOB data tends not to be very large. It is likely that no single block size would be perfect for every table. So how to choose? My preference is for the 8k (8192 bytes) block size. It is a good compromise that is not too small for the wider rows, yet not to big for the thin rows. It is also important to remember that database blocks are the smallest unit of change and caching. I prefer to have more, individual "working units" in my database. For an instance with 4gb of buffer cache, an 8k block will provide 524,288 blocks of cache. The following SQL*Plus script returns the average, median, min, and max rows per block. column "AVG(CNT)" format 999.99 set verify off select avg(cnt), median(cnt), min(cnt), max(cnt), count(*) from ( select dbms_rowid.ROWID_RELATIVE_FNO(rowid) , dbms_rowid.ROWID_BLOCK_NUMBER(rowid) , count(*) cnt from &tab group by dbms_rowid.ROWID_RELATIVE_FNO(rowid) , dbms_rowid.ROWID_BLOCK_NUMBER(rowid) ) Running this for the TASK table, I get this result on a database with an 8k block size. Each activity, on average, has about 19 rows per block. Enter value for tab: task AVG(CNT) MEDIAN(CNT) MIN(CNT) MAX(CNT) COUNT(*) -------- ----------- ---------- ---------- ---------- 18.72 19 3 28 415917 I recommend an 8k block size for the P6 transactional database. All of our internal performance and scalability test are done with this block size. This does not mean that other block sizes will not work. Instead, like many other parameters, this is the safest choice.

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• Is it smart to take a year off from school to get experience?

  - by user134147

  firstly I apologize if this question is not appropriate for the site, but I've seen other similar (though slightly deviant) questions on this sight before and I know the people here are the most qualified to answer my question. Anyways, I'm currently between my sophomore and junior years at a 4 year university, and after a bit of deliberation I've decided on computer science as a major (BA, by the way, as a BS would require me to stay at least an extra year the way our program is set up). I've been interested now in programming for a few months and I've developed a passion for it in a very short time. I began learning C++, migrating to Java recently when I learned my school focuses on this language. Now, I should mention that the concept of higher education has never sat well with me, so part of my motivation for wanting to take time off is to truly challenge myself and see what I can accomplish when I actually try at something. The autodidact in me finds it difficult to focus on my passions while trying to keep a high GPA in unrelated classes. However, I understand the times we live in and therefore would plan to complete my degree after this year. So my question is whether or not the skills I learn in a year off from college could justify the time off from school. Unfortunately, I don't believe I know enough yet to gain any professional experience (internship, etc.) so I would mostly focus my time on learning Java and another language, possibly Wordpress (to gain an understanding of web programming concepts as I have not yet decided what field I want to get into, and to make some money to fund my off-year), and to delve into security concepts, which also interest me. I'm hoping I could work on projects, such as simple applications or contributions to open source software during this time to enhance my resume once I do finish school, so I can find a job out of college easier. I do not want to be the new hire who knows nothing beyond the concepts of his Java textbooks. Does anyone have any input about these thoughts of mine, or any ideas for where I should focus my studies or how high I might set the bar for my work? Thanks a lot everyone!

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• Help yourself . if you like

  - by rachelp

  At Red Gate we enjoy talking to our customers. Really! If you've read recent blog posts by members of some of our customer-facing teams, you'll have spotted the pleasure they take in their work. In case you missed those posts, here they are: From our Finance team: Finance: Friends, not foes! From our reception desk: The Front line of Communication However, we recognise that sometimes our customers would like to be able to solve their problems or answer their questions without talking to us - they're in a hurry, it's outside office hours . or perhaps they just prefer not to pick up the phone and call.   Self-service customer care So we've begun a programme of work to enable more self-service; whether it's finding the answer to a "how do i.?" question or getting access to a record of what product licenses they own, we want to make it much easier for our customers to get hold of this information for themselves. If they want to.   Phase 1: make it easier to find information We decided to start by tackling findability. We've got loads of useful information on our website, but it's sometimes difficult to find, so we've been working on improving our site search. Step 1 has been to replace the search engine, clean up the search UI, and make it consistent across the site. We're nearly there! The idea is that if we improve the site search it will be easier - and much more pleasant - for people to find the information they need. The new search will go live some time in April, and then we'll be gathering feedback, looking at web analytics (more about this in an earlier article), and working out what improvements we still need to make. We'd love to hear what you think, so do give your feedback or drop us a line. Or pick up the phone and call, if you like.   What do you think? While I've got your attention, I'd love to hear what people think about self-service customer care. Do you like to call, email, live chat . or do you prefer to dig around and find out answers yourself? Who's getting it right: what self-service sites do you like? p.s. Watch this space for news of phase 2.

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• Task scheduler "hidden" only hides task, not process

  - by Brandi

  I am trying to make an application that acts like a desktop application for all the computers in our network. I have already got a windows forms app that works like I want it to, and I'm using the task scheduler to start it on login. We would really like it if the process as well as the task is hidden from the task manager in order to avoid accidental deletion. Selecting "Hidden" in the task scheduler hides the task (good!) but the process is still visible (not good enough). I tried using the option to run as "SYSTEM" or "LOCAL SERVICE" so that the user would get "access denied" when trying to delete or just wouldn't even view it by default. However, running as a service makes the process invisible on Vista and 7, and the point of my app is to display information interactively. (User can click, sort, etc). Is there any other alternatives to either run the process as someone/something besides the logged in user and still have the logged on user be able to see and interact with it? (Therefore it would list as someone else's app?) From what I've read on the internet, the only ways to actually hide something from the task manager seem hacky and/or difficult and rather involved. I don't really want to write a bunch of C or whatever only to maybe not have it work on Vista/7 anyway. Besides which, for a legitimate app with a legitimate use, I shouldn't have to go to those extremes... I see "Access Denied" all the time for system processes... why is it so hard for me to do the same? So does anyone have any simple solutions? Is it easier than I think to just list something in the task manager as another user? Thanks in advance for any replies.

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• VMWare ESXi, change the default path for a VM

  - by glenatron

  For some reason VMWare ESXi has decided that one of my VMs is on a completely different path to the path it is actually on. So my VM is on /vmfs/volumes/long-guid-here/my-vm-name but when I try to open it I get the message "File < unspecified filename was not found." Which is not really surprising as unspecified filenames are quite difficult to locate. I thought it was just the swap file, which was down in the .vmx file as /vmfs/volumes/long-guid-here/old-vm-name/old-vm-name.vmsd but when I changed that in the vmx it made no difference. What I can't figure out is where VMWare is getting the old-vm-name from- when I look in the "Settings" pane it believes the working file location to be "[datastore-name] old-vm-name\" and I can't find anywhere to change it. Now the files themselves are all named for old-vm-name - so the directory is /my-vm-name/old-vm-name.vmx and so on. Is this the cause of my problems or is there some arcane configuration option elsewhere around the VMWare machine that I need to be tinkering with?

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• Internet Explorer 8 crashes on Citrix, Windows 2003

  - by Workshop Alex

  Difficult to decide where this Q fits best. It's server-related and programming-related. But it's a user-problem so I'll put it here, first... I work on a (Delphi) application that uses an Internet Explorer component to show information to the user. It's not a web application, just a desktop application which creates HTML pages to display them within a browser component. Some of the information on these webpages are retrieved from a web server, while other information is provided "live" by the application itself. It works quite well, but it adds an IE-process (child process) next to my application. And this IE process seems to eat a lot of system resources. For normal users, this is not a real problem, so it's not an issue that I want to fix in the code. But one customer of this application uses it with about 100 users on a Citrix/Windows 2003 environment and they complain about problems with the application. IE8 tends to crash, not show, hang or cause other mayhap. Then again, I've warned them that -officially- I won't support any Citrix environment. But I'm willing to help them to find a solution to fix this, and if need be I could make minor changes to my code to help fix this issie. (If possible.) But basically, I need a solution that any user/administrator on this Citrix environment can follow/use. Any ideas on how to resolve this resource problem?

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• Performance analytics via DBMS "plugins", or other solution

  - by Polynomial

  I'm working on a systems monitoring product that currently focuses on performance at the system level. We're expanding out to monitoring database systems. Right now we can fetch simple performance information from a selection of DBMS, like connection count, disk IO rates, lock wait times, etc. However, we'd really like a way to measure the execution time of every query going into a DBMS, without requiring the client to implement monitoring in their application code. Some potential solutions might be: Some sort of proxy that sits between client and server. SSL might be an issue here, plus it requires us to reverse engineer and implement the network protocol for each DBMS. Plugin for each DBMS system that automatically records performance information when a query comes in. Other problems include "anonymising" the SQL, i.e. taking something like SELECT * FROM products WHERE price > 20 AND name LIKE "%disk%" and producing SELECT * FROM products WHERE price > ? AND name LIKE "%?%", though this shouldn't be too difficult with some clever parsing and regex. We're mainly focusing on: MySQL MSSQL Oracle Redis mongodb memcached Are there any plugin-style mechanisms we can utilise for any of these? Or is there a simpler solution?

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• VMWare Workstation 6.5.5 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit) Odd Problem

  - by Android Eve

  I managed to successfully install VMWare Workstation 6.5.5 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 10.04 (64-bit). It works well and somehow feels faster and snappier than the same exact version on Ubuntu 8.04. However, there is one slight issue, somewhat hurting productivity: When the guest VM is Microsoft Windows (2K, XP), the mouse cursor turn from an arrow to a hand when it hovers over the Task Bar. When the mouse moves, this hand cursor blinks and the system doesn't respond to mouse clicks. When I move the mouse cursor back to the desktop area, it functions normally. That is, the problem exists only in the Task Bar area. Obviously, this makes it very difficult (read: impossible) for me to use the Start Menu, SysTray and the rest of the Task Bar. My workaround for now is to launch programs via their Desktop shortcuts or via the keyboard. Note: The same exact VMWare Workstation 6.5.5 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 8.04 (64-bit) doesn't exhibit this problem. Anyone seen this problem before? Do you know of a solution (or better workaround) to this problem?

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• kickstart: reference floppy drive via %ksappend or %include

  - by virtualeyes

  Having trouble getting %ksappend or %include to work when referencing a local floppy drive. Booting off remote server's cd-rom drive I am able to load the CentOS 6 minimal install image, and then add ks=hd:fd0/ks-jvm.cfg to boot params to load kickstart init file from floppy disk. That works fine. The problem is that I want to load a streamlined generic init file off the floppy and then, within the init, %ksappend or %include specific config files relative to the type of server I'm building (JVM, MySQL, Apache, etc.) I do not have DHCP, networking needs to be specified statically, so %ksappend and %include both fail when attempting to reference http://some-LAN-IP/foo.cfg since networking has not yet been set. The kickstart setup only works when I glob in the entire config into a single file, which is great, but ugly and difficult to maintain when I return later, having forgotten the original setup. At this point I'd be happy if I could get %ksappend or %include working with a floppy drive reference in the %post section; that would consolidate a lot of common boilerplate that all kickstarts will rely on (sshd_config, rsync config, resolve.conf, and so on) Thanks for providing the magic floppy drive reference that is eluding me!

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• Static IP for dynamic IP

  - by scape279

  I have a dynamic IP address. I would like to have a static IP, but Virgin Media don't allow static IPs for residential broadband services, even if you ask them really nicely and offer to pay for it without switching to a business tariff. I am already registered with a dynamic DNS service which is updated by my router eg me.example.com will always resolve to my dynamic IP. This is fine for some circumstances, but not if you can only enter an IP address into configuration files/hardware etc like firewalls, subversion services etc etc. Is there a way I can have a static IP address 'forwarding' to my dynamic IP? Would a possible solution involve tunnelling? Setting up a private proxy? Please note the following: I am able to buy an IP address from my web host. I have access to a webserver and I am able to create custom DNS zones. I'm happy to have a webserver running at home if necessary also. I do not wish to change broadband providers. I have zero control over the services that require the IP address entering so I cannot tackle the problem that way round (services I need to access are at work). PS I've tried googling this issue, but it is very difficult to search for as most results are related to dynamic dns (which I already have set up and isnt quite what I'm after)

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• Implement QoS/Bandwidth Management or Upgrade Bandwidth?

  - by Michael

  A question that I'm faced with currently. Here's my setup: Cisco ASA 5510 15Mbps Internet Connection @ $1350/month The bandwidth was originally meant for 35-45 people but we've grown quite quickly to roughly 60-65 people. Needless to say, when I check bandwidth logs it's almost always spiked at 15Mbps. I did use Wireshark to do some poking around to see what was hogging up our bandwidth but with everything running through CDNs and Cloud Services it proved difficult to get a good grasp of where our bandwidth was going. So the question is do I ONLY implement bandwidth management through ASA OR upgrade the Internet to 50Mbps ($1600/month) and then implement bandwidth management through ASA? Any suggestions on how to segment the 15Mbps connection if we decided ONLY to go with the bandwidth management solution? Thanks. UPDATE 1 Installed PRTG and used packet content to monitor the traffic. As I suspected still pretty vague. My Top Connections include the following: a204-2-160-16.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com ec2-50-16-212-159.compute-1.amazonaws.com a204-2-160-48.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com a72-247-247-133.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com mediaserver-sv5-t1-1.pandora.com Other than the Pandora destination, the rest doesn't tell me much on how to properly control the bandwidth. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks. M

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• Can compressing Program Files save space *and* give a significant boost to SSD performance?

  - by Christopher Galpin

  Considering solid-state disk space is still an expensive resource, compressing large folders has appeal. Thanks to VirtualStore, could Program Files be a case where it might even improve performance? Discovery In particular I have been reading: SSD and NTFS Compression Speed Increase? Does NTFS compression slow SSD/flash performance? Will somebody benchmark whole disk compression (HD,SSD) please? (may have to scroll up) The first link is particularly dreamy, but maybe head a little too far in the clouds. The third link has this sexy semi-log graph (logarithmic scale!). Quote (with notes): Using highly compressable data (IOmeter), you get at most a 30x performance increase [for reads], and at least a 49x performance DECREASE [for writes]. Assuming I interpreted and clarified that sentence correctly, this single user's benchmark has me incredibly interested. Although write performance tanks wretchedly, read performance still soars. It gave me an idea. Idea: VirtualStore It so happens that thanks to sanity saving security features introduced in Windows Vista, write access to certain folders such as Program Files is virtualized for non-administrator processes. Which means, in normal (non-elevated) usage, a program or game's attempt to write data to its install location in Program Files (which is perhaps a poor location) is redirected to %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore, somewhere entirely different. Thus, to my understanding, writes to Program Files should primarily only occur when installing an application. This makes compressing it not only a huge source of space gain, but also a potential candidate for performance gain. Testing The beginning of this post has me a bit timid, it suggests benchmarking NTFS compression on a whole drive is difficult because turning it off "doesn't decompress the objects". However it seems to me the compact command is perfectly capable of doing so for both drives and individual folders. Could it be only marking them for decompression the next time the OS reads from them? I need to find the answer before I begin my own testing.

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• How to replicate Lynda.com transitions in my own presentations (Keynote preferred, Powerpoint possib

  - by jdmuys

  I recently noticed that lynda.com uses in their training videos a very interesting transition that I would like to replicate in my own presentations. They are somewhat similar to the computer screen animations in the "Minority Report" movie: they zoom out to a huge sheet, pan, and zoom back in to a new location. It's very good for navigating deep hierarchies. For example when you are at level 1, you can see level 3, but it's tiny and unreadable. You then transition by zooming in to a deeper level that suddenly becomes legible. I can imagine also to use it using a large "mind map" as a common Ariane thread, to dive into details (and back out) while still taking advantage of the visual memory of the audience. It a bit difficult to describe, I hope I managed to convey the idea. You can see them in action for example there (iPhone programming training): http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=48369 Then click on "What you should know" in the introduction chapter. See for example in that movie between 22s and 24s, then between 27s and 28s. How do they do that? How could I replicate that effect? TIA

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