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• Bug Triage

  In this blog post brain dump, I'll attempt to describe the process my team tries to follow when dealing with new bug reports (specifically, code defect reports). This is not official Microsoft policy, just the way we do things… if you do things differently and want to share, you can do so at the bottom in the comments (or on your blog).Feature Triage TeamA subset of the feature crew, the triage team (which has representations from the PM, Dev and QA disciplines), looks at all unassigned bugs at regular intervals. This can be weekly or daily (or other frequency) dependent on which part of the product cycle we are in and what the untriaged bug load looks like. They discuss each bug considering the evidence and make a decision of whether the bug goes from Not Yet Assigned to Assigned (plus the name of the DEV to fix this) or whether it goes from Active to Resolved (which means it gets assigned back to the requestor for closure or further debate if they were not present at the triage meeting). Close to critical milestones, the feature triage team needs to further justify bugs they take to additional higher-level triage teams.Bug Opened = Not Yet AssignedSomeone (typically an SDET from the QA team) creates the bug item (e.g. in TFS), ensuring they populate all the relevant fields including: Title, Description, Repro Steps (including the Actual Result at the end of the steps), attachments of code and/or screenshots, Build number that they observed the issue in, regression details if applicable, how it was found, if a test case exists or needs to be created etc. They also indicate their opinion on the Priority and Severity. The bug status is left as Not Yet Assigned."Issue" versus "Fix for issue"The solution to some bugs is easy to determine, e.g. "bug: the column name is misspelled". Obviously the fix is to correct the spelling – still, the triage team should be explicit and enter the correct spelling in the bug's Description. Note that a bad bug name here would be "bug: fix the spelling of the column" (it describes the solution, rather than the problem).Other solutions are trickier to establish, e.g. "bug: the column header is not accessible (can only be clicked on with the mouse, not reached via keyboard)". What is the correct solution here? The last thing to do is leave this undetermined and just assign it to a developer. The solution has to be entered in the description. Behind this type of a bug usually hides a spec defect or a new feature request.The person opening the bug should focus on describing the issue, rather than the solution. The person indicates what the fix is in their opinion by stating the Expected Result (immediately after stating the Actual Result). If they have a complex suggested solution, that should be split out in a separate part, but the triage team has the final say before assigning it. If the solution is lengthy/complicated to describe, the bug can be assigned to the PM. Note: the strict interpretation suggests that any bug with no clear, obvious solution is always a hole in the spec and should always go to the PM. This also ensures the spec gets updated.Not Yet Assigned - Not Yet Assigned (on someone else's plate)If the bug is observed in our feature, but the cause is actually another team, we change the Area Path (which is the way we identify teams in TFS) and leave it as Not Yet Assigned. The triage team may add more comments as appropriate including potentially changing the repro steps. In some cases, we may even resolve the bug in our area path and open a new bug in the area path of the other team.Even though there is no action on a dev on the team, the bug still needs to be tracked. One way of doing this is to implement some notification system that informs the team when the tracked bug changed status; another way is to occasionally run a global query (against all area paths) for bugs that have been opened by a member of the team and follow up with the current owners for stale bugs.Not Yet Assigned - ResolvedThis state transition can only be made by the Feature Triage Team.0. Sometimes the bug description is not clear and in that case it gets Resolved as More Information Needed, so the original requestor can provide it.After understanding what the bug item is about, the first decision is to determine whether it needs to go to a dev.1. If it is a known bug, it gets resolved as "Duplicate" and linked to the existing bug.2. If it is "By Design" it gets resolved as such, indicating that the triage team does not think this is a bug.3. If the bug does not repro on latest bits, it is resolved as "No Repro"4. The most painful: If it is decided that we cannot fix it for this release it gets resolved as "Postponed" or "Won't Fix". The former is typically due to resources and time constraints, while the latter is due to deciding that it is not important enough to consume our resources in any release (yes, not all bugs must be fixed!). For both cases, there are other factors that contribute to the decision such as: existence of a reasonable workaround, frequency we expect users to encounter the issue, dependencies on other team to offer a solution, whether it breaks a core scenario, whether it prohibits customer feedback on a major feature, is it a regression from a previous release, impact of the fix on other partner teams (e.g. User Education, User Experience, Localization/Globalization), whether this is the right fix, does the fix impact performance goals, and last but not least, severity of bug (e.g. loss of customer data, security threat, crash, hang). The bar for fixing a bug goes up as the release date approaches. The triage team becomes hardnosed about which bugs to take, while the developers are busy resolving assigned bugs thus everyone drives for Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB). ZBB is when you have 0 active bugs older than 48 hours.Not Yet Assigned - AssignedIf the bug is something we decide to fix in this release and the solution is known, then it is assigned to a DEV. This is either the developer that will do the work, or a Lead that can further assign it to one of his developer team based on a load balancing algorithm of their choosing.Sometimes, the triage team needs the dev to do some investigation work before deciding whether to take the fix; similarly, the checkin for the fix may be gated on code review by the triage team. In these cases, these instructions are provided in the comments section of the bug and when the developer is done they notify the triage team for final decision.Additionally, a Priority and Severity (from 0 to 4) has to be entered, e.g. a P0 means "drop anything you are doing and fix this now" whereas a P4 is something you get to after all P0,1,2,3 bugs are fixed.From a testing perspective, if the bug was found through ad-hoc testing or an external team, the decision is made whether test cases should be added to avoid future regressions. This is communicated to the QA team.Assigned - ResolvedWhen the developer receives the bug (they should be checking daily for new bugs on their plate looking at bugs in order of priority and from older to newer) they can send it back to triage if the information is not clear. Otherwise, they investigate the bug, setting the Sub Status to "Investigating"; if they cannot make progress, they set the Sub Status to "Blocked" and discuss this with triage or whoever else can help them get unblocked. Once they are unblocked, they set the Sub Status to "Working on Solution"; once they are code complete they send a code review request, setting the Sub Status to "Fix Available". After the iterative code review process is over and everyone is happy with the fix, the developer checks it in and changes the state of the bug from Active (and Assigned to them) to Resolved (and Assigned to someone else).The developer needs to ensure that when the status is changed to Resolved that it is assigned to a QA person. For example, maybe the PM opened the bug, but it should be a QA person that will verify the fix - the developer needs to manually change the assignee in that case. Typically the QA person will send an email to the original requestor notifying them that the fix is verified.Resolved - ??In all cases above, note that the final state was Resolved. What happens after that? The final step should be Closed. The bug is closed once the QA person verifying the fix is happy with it. If the person is not happy, then they change the state from Resolved to Active, thus sending it back to the developer. If the developer and QA person cannot reach agreement, then triage can be brought into it. An easy way to do that is change the status back to Not Yet Assigned with appropriate comments so the triage team can re-review.It is important to note that only QA can close a bug. That means that if the opener of the bug was a PM, when the bug gets resolved by the dev it may land on the PM's plate and after a quick review, the PM would re-assign to an SDET, which is the only role that can close bugs. One exception to this is if the person that filed the bug is external: in that case, we leave it Resolved and assigned to them and also send them a notification that they need to verify the fix. Another exception is if specialized developer knowledge is needed for verifying the bug fix (e.g. it was a refactoring suggestion bug typically not observable by the user) in which case it is fine to have a developer verify the fix, and ideally a different developer to the one that opened the bug.Other links on bug triageA quick search reveals that others have talked about this subject, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.Your take?If you have other best practices your team uses to deal with incoming bug reports, feel free to share in the comments below or on your blog. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Dotfuscator Deep Dive with WP7

  - by Bil Simser

  I thought I would share some experience with code obfuscation (specifically the Dotfuscator product) and Windows Phone 7 apps. These days twitter is a buzz with black hat and white operations coming out about how the marketplace is insecure and Microsoft failed, blah, blah, blah. So it’s that much more important to protect your intellectual property. You should protect it no matter what when releasing apps into the wild but more so when someone is paying for them. You want to protect the time and effort that went into your code and have some comfort that the casual hacker isn’t going to usurp your next best thing. Enter code obfuscation. Code obfuscation is one tool that can help protect your IP. Basically it goes into your compiled assemblies, rewrites things at an IL level (like renaming methods and classes and hiding logic flow) and rewrites it back so that the assembly or executable is still fully functional but prying eyes using a tool like ILDASM or Reflector can’t see what’s going on.  You can read more about code obfuscation here on Wikipedia. A word to the wise. Code obfuscation isn’t 100% secure. More so on the WP7 platform where the OS expects certain things to be as they were meant to be. So don’t expect 100% obfuscation of every class and every method and every property. It’s just not going to happen. What this does do is give you some level of protection but don’t put all your eggs in one basket and call it done. Like I said, this is just one step in the process. There are a few tools out there that provide code obfuscation and support the Windows Phone 7 platform (see links to other tools at the end of this post). One such tool is Dotfuscator from PreEmptive solutions. The thing about Dotfuscator is that they’ve struck a deal with Microsoft to provide a *free* copy of their commercial product for Windows Phone 7. The only drawback is that it only runs until March 31, 2010. However it’s a good place to start and the focus of this article. Getting Started When you fire up Dotfuscator you’re presented with a dialog to start a new project or load a previous one. We’ll start with a new project. You’re then looking at a somewhat blank screen that shows an Input tab (among others) and you’re probably wondering what to do? Click on the folder icon (first one) and browse to where your xap file is. At this point you can save the project and click on the arrow to start the process. Bam! You’re done. Right? Think again. The program did indeed run and create a new version of your xap (doing it’s thing and rewriting back your *obfuscated* assemblies) but let’s take a look at the assembly in Reflector to see the end result. Remember a xap file is really just a glorified zip file (or cab file if you prefer). When you ran Dotfuscator for the first time with the default settings you’ll see it created a new version of your xap in a folder under “My Documents” called “Dotfuscated” (you can configure the output directory in settings). Here’s the new xap file. Since a xap is just a zip, rename it to .cab or .zip or something and open it with your favorite unarchive program (I use WinRar but it doesn’t matter as long as it can unzip files). If you already have the xap file associated with your unarchive tool the rename isn’t needed. Once renamed extract the contents of the xap to your hard drive: Now you’ll have a folder with the contents of the xap file extracted: Double click or load up your assembly (WindowsPhoneDataBoundApplication1.dll in the example) in Reflector and let’s see the results: Hmm. That doesn’t look right. I can see all the methods and the code is all there for my LoadData method I wanted to protect. Product failure. Let’s return it for a refund. Hold your horses. We need to check out the settings in the program first. Remember when we loaded up our xap file. It started us on the Input tab but there was a settings tab before that. Wonder what it does? Here’s the default settings: Renaming Taking a closer look, all of the settings in Feature are disabled. WTF? Yeah, it leaves me scratching my head why an obfuscator by default doesn’t obfuscate. However it’s a simple fix to change these settings. Let’s enable Renaming as it sounds like a good start. Renaming obscures code by renaming methods and fields to names that are not understandable. Great. Run the tool again and go through the process of unzipping the updated xap and let’s take a look in Reflector again at our project. This looks a lot better. Lots of methods named a, b, c, d, etc. That’ll help slow hackers down a bit. What about our logic that we spent days weeks on? Let’s take a look at the LoadData method: What gives? We have renaming enabled but all of our code is still there. If you look through all your methods you’ll find it’s still sitting there out in the open. Control Flow Back to the settings page again. Let’s enable Control Flow now. Control Flow obfuscation synthesizes branching, conditional, and iterative constructs (such as if, for, and while) that produce valid executable logic, but yield non-deterministic semantic results when decompilation is attempted. In other words, the code runs as before, but decompilers cannot reproduce the original code. Do the dance again and let’s see the results in Reflector. Ahh, that’s better. Methods renamed *and* nobody can look at our LoadData method now. Life is good. More than Minimum This is the bare minimum to obfuscate your xap to at least a somewhat comfortable level. However I did find that while this worked in my Hello World demo, it didn’t work on one of my real world apps. I had to do some extra tweaking with that. Below are the screens that I used on one app that worked. I’m not sure what it was about the app that the approach above didn’t work with (maybe the extra assembly?) but it works and I’m happy with it. YMMV. Remember to test your obfuscated app on your device first before submitting to ensure you haven’t obfuscated the obfuscator. settings tab: rename tab: string encryption tab: premark tab: A few final notes Play with the settings and keep bumping up the bar to try to get as much obfuscation as you can. The more the better but remember you can overdo it. Always (always, always, always) deploy your obfuscated xap to your device and test it before submitting to the marketplace. I didn’t and got rejected because I had gone overboard with the obfuscation so the app wouldn’t launch at all. Not everything is going to be obfuscated. Specifically I don’t see a way to obfuscate auto properties and a few other language features. Again, if you crank the settings up you might hide these but I haven’t spent a lot of time optimizing the process. Some people might say to obfuscate your xaml using string encryption but again, test, test, test. Xaml is picky so too much obfuscation (or any) might disable your app or produce odd rendering effets. Remember, obfuscation is not 100% secure! Don’t rely on it as a sole way of protecting your assets. Other Tools Dotfuscator is one just product and isn’t the end-all be-all to obfuscation so check out others below. For example, Crypto can make it so Reflector doesn’t even recognize the app as a .NET one and won’t open it. Others can encrypt resources and Xaml markup files. Here are some other obfuscators that support the Windows Phone 7 platform. Feel free to give them a try and let people know your experience with them! Dotfuscator Windows Phone Edition Crypto Obfuscator for .NET DeepSea Obfuscation

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• Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 2

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome back, in part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies. In this blog post I’ll get into the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. Tools => Options => Test Tools Have you visited the treasures of Visual Studio Menu bar tools => Options => Test Tools lately? The options to enable disable prompts on creating, editing, deleting or running manual/automated tests can be controller from here. The default test project language and default test types created on a new test project creation could be selected/unselected from here. Ever wondered how you can change the default limit of 25 test results, this can again be changed from here. If you record a lot of Web Tests and wish for the web test recorder to start with “that” URL populated, well this again can be specified from here. If you haven’t so far, I would urge you to spend 2 minutes in the test tools options.   Test Menu => Ready Steady Test Action! The Test tools are under the Test Menu in Visual Studio, apart from being able to create a new Test and Test List you can also load an existing vsmdi file. You can also manage your test controllers from here. A solution can have one or more test setting files, but there can only be one active test settings file at any time. Again, this selection can be done from here.  You can open the various test windows from under the windows option from the test menu. If you open the Test view window you will see that you have the option to group the tests by work items, project, test type, etc. You can set these properties by right clicking a test in the test list and choosing properties from the context menu.    So, what is a vsmdi file? vsmdi stands for Visual Studio Test Metadata File. Placed under the Solution Items this file keeps track of the list of unit tests in your solution. If you open the vsmdi file as an xml file you will see a series of Test Links nested with in the list Test List tags along with the Run Configuration tag. When in visual studio you run tests, the IDE looks at the vsmdi file to see what tests need to be run. You also have the option of using the vsmdi file in your team builds to specify which tests need to run as part of the build. Refer here for a walkthrough from a fellow blogger on how to use the vsmdi file in the team builds. Web Performance Test – The Truth! In Visual Studio 2010 “Web Tests” have been renamed to “Web Performance Tests”. Apart from renaming this test type there have been several improvements to this test type in visual studio 2010. I am very active on the MSDN Visual Studio And Load Testing forum and a frequent question from many users is “Do Web Tests support Pages that run JavaScript?” I will start with a little bit of background before answering this question. Web Performance Tests operate at the HTTP Layer, but why? To enable you to generate high loads with a relatively low amount of hardware, Web performance tests are driven at the protocol layer rather than instantiating a browser.The most common source of confusion is that users do not realize Web Performance Tests work at the HTTP layer. The tool adds to that misconception. After all, you record in IE, and when running a Web test you can select which browser to use, and then the result viewer shows the results in a browser window. So that means the tests run through the browser, right? NO! The Web test engine works at the HTTP layer, and does not instantiate a browser. What does that mean? In the diagram below, you can see there are no browsers running when the engine is sending and receiving requests. Does that mean I can’t test pages that use Java script? The best example for java script generating HTTP traffic is AJAX calls. The most common example of browser plugins are Silverlight or Flash. The Web test recorder will record HTTP traffic from AJAX calls and from most (but not all) browser plugins. This means you will still be able to web performance test pages that use java script or plugin and play back the results but the playback engine will not show the java script or plug in results in the ‘browser control’. If you want to test the page behaviour as a result of the java script or plug in consider using Coded UI Tests. This page looks like it failed, when in fact it succeeded! Looking closely at the response, and subsequent requests, it is clear the operation succeeded. As stated above, the reason why the browser control is pasting this message is because java script has been disabled in this control. So, to reiterate, the web performance test recorder: - Sends and receives data at the HTTP layer. - Does NOT run a browser. - Does NOT run java script. - Does NOT host ActiveX controls or plugins. There is a great series of blog posts from Ed Glas, i would highly recommend his blog to any one performing Load/Performance testing through Visual Studio. Demo – Web Performance Test [Demo] - Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Test Settings and Configuration   [Demo]–Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Web Performance Test   In this short video I try and answer the following questions, Why is performance Testing important? How does Visual Studio Help you performance Test your applications? How do i record a web performance test? How do make a web performance test data driven, transaction driven, loop driven, convert to code, add validations? Best practices for recording Web Performance Tests. I have a web performance test, what next? Creating the Web Performance Test was the first step towards load testing your application. Now that we have the base test we can test the page behaviour when N-users access the page. Have you ever had the head of business call you and mention that the marketing team has done a fantastic job and are expecting increased traffic on the web site, can the website survive the weekend with that additional load? This is the perfect opportunity to capacity test your application to see how your website holds up under various levels of load, you can work the results backwards to see how much hardware you may need to scale up your application to survive the weekend. Apart from that it is always a good idea to have some benchmarks around how the application performs under light loads for short duration, under heavy load for long duration and soak test the application run a constant load for a very week or two to record the effects of constant load for really long durations, this is a great way of identifying how your application handles the default IIS application pool reset which by default is configured to once every 25 hours. These bench marks will act as the perfect yard stick to measure performance gains when you start making improvements. BUT there are some best practices! => Goal Based Load Testing Approach Since the subject is vast and there are a lot of things to measure and analyse, … it is very easy to get distracted from the real goal!  You can optimize your application once you know where the pain points are. There is no point performing a load test of 5000 users if your intranet application will only have a 100 simultaneous users, it is important to keep focussed on the real goals of the project. So the idea is to have a user story around your load testing scenarios and test realistically. So it is recommended that you follow the below outline, It is an Iterative process, refine your objectives, identify the key scenarios, what is the expected workload, key metrics you want to report, record the web performance tests, simulate load and analyse results. Is your application already deployed in Production? This is great! You can analyse the IIS Logs to understand the user behaviour… But what are IIS LOGS? The IIS logs allow you to record events for each application and Web site on the Web server. You can create separate logs for each of your applications and Web sites. Logging information in IIS goes beyond the scope of the event logging or performance monitoring features provided by Windows. The IIS logs can include information, such as who has visited your site, what the visitor viewed, and when the information was last viewed. You can use the IIS logs to identify any attempts to gain unauthorized access to your Web server. How to configure IIS LOGS? For those Ninjas who already have IIS Logs configured (by the way its on by default) and need a way to analyse the IIS Logs, can use the Windows IIS Utility – Log Parser. Log Parser is a very powerful tool that provides a generic SQL-like language on top of many types of data like IIS Logs, Event Viewer entries, XML files, CSV files, File System and others; and it allows you to export the result of the queries to many output formats such as CSV, XML, SQL Server, Charts and others; and it works well with IIS 5, 6, 7 and 7.5. Frequently used Log Parser queries. Demo – Load Test [Demo]–Visual Studio Ultimate 2010: Load Testing   In this short video I try and answer the following questions, - Types of Performance Testing? - Perform Goal driven Load Testing, analyse Test Run Result and Generate a report? Recap A quick recap of what we have covered so far,     Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, in part III of this blog series I’ll be getting into the details of Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, and the Asp.net Profiler. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. See you on in Part III   Share this post : CodeProject

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• Solving Big Problems with Oracle R Enterprise, Part I

  - by dbayard

  Abstract: This blog post will show how we used Oracle R Enterprise to tackle a customer’s big calculation problem across a big data set. Overview: Databases are great for managing large amounts of data in a central place with rigorous enterprise-level controls.  R is great for doing advanced computations.  Sometimes you need to do advanced computations on large amounts of data, subject to rigorous enterprise-level concerns.  This blog post shows how Oracle R Enterprise enables R plus the Oracle Database enabled us to do some pretty sophisticated calculations across 1 million accounts (each with many detailed records) in minutes. The problem: A financial services customer of mine has a need to calculate the historical internal rate of return (IRR) for its customers’ portfolios.  This information is needed for customer statements and the online web application.  In the past, they had solved this with a home-grown application that pulled trade and account data out of their data warehouse and ran the calculations.  But this home-grown application was not able to do this fast enough, plus it was a challenge for them to write and maintain the code that did the IRR calculation. IRR – a problem that R is good at solving: Internal Rate of Return is an interesting calculation in that in most real-world scenarios it is impractical to calculate exactly.  Rather, IRR is a calculation where approximation techniques need to be used.  In this blog post, we will discuss calculating the “money weighted rate of return” but in the actual customer proof of concept we used R to calculate both money weighted rate of returns and time weighted rate of returns.  You can learn more about the money weighted rate of returns here: http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Money-weighted_return First Steps- Calculating IRR in R We will start with calculating the IRR in standalone/desktop R.  In our second post, we will show how to take this desktop R function, deploy it to an Oracle Database, and make it work at real-world scale.  The first step we did was to get some sample data.  For a historical IRR calculation, you have a balances and cash flows.  In our case, the customer provided us with several accounts worth of sample data in Microsoft Excel.      The above figure shows part of the spreadsheet of sample data.  The data provides balances and cash flows for a sample account (BMV=beginning market value. FLOW=cash flow in/out of account. EMV=ending market value). Once we had the sample spreadsheet, the next step we did was to read the Excel data into R.  This is something that R does well.  R offers multiple ways to work with spreadsheet data.  For instance, one could save the spreadsheet as a .csv file.  In our case, the customer provided a spreadsheet file containing multiple sheets where each sheet provided data for a different sample account.  To handle this easily, we took advantage of the RODBC package which allowed us to read the Excel data sheet-by-sheet without having to create individual .csv files.  We wrote ourselves a little helper function called getsheet() around the RODBC package.  Then we loaded all of the sample accounts into a data.frame called SimpleMWRRData. Writing the IRR function At this point, it was time to write the money weighted rate of return (MWRR) function itself.  The definition of MWRR is easily found on the internet or if you are old school you can look in an investment performance text book.  In the customer proof, we based our calculations off the ones defined in the The Handbook of Investment Performance: A User’s Guide by David Spaulding since this is the reference book used by the customer.  (One of the nice things we found during the course of this proof-of-concept is that by using R to write our IRR functions we could easily incorporate the specific variations and business rules of the customer into the calculation.) The key thing with calculating IRR is the need to solve a complex equation with a numerical approximation technique.  For IRR, you need to find the value of the rate of return (r) that sets the Net Present Value of all the flows in and out of the account to zero.  With R, we solve this by defining our NPV function: where bmv is the beginning market value, cf is a vector of cash flows, t is a vector of time (relative to the beginning), emv is the ending market value, and tend is the ending time. Since solving for r is a one-dimensional optimization problem, we decided to take advantage of R’s optimize method (http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/optimize.html). The optimize method can be used to find a minimum or maximum; to find the value of r where our npv function is closest to zero, we wrapped our npv function inside the abs function and asked optimize to find the minimum.  Here is an example of using optimize: where low and high are scalars that indicate the range to search for an answer.   To test this out, we need to set values for bmv, cf, t, emv, tend, low, and high.  We will set low and high to some reasonable defaults. For example, this account had a negative 2.2% money weighted rate of return. Enhancing and Packaging the IRR function With numerical approximation methods like optimize, sometimes you will not be able to find an answer with your initial set of inputs.  To account for this, our approach was to first try to find an answer for r within a narrow range, then if we did not find an answer, try calling optimize() again with a broader range.  See the R help page on optimize()  for more details about the search range and its algorithm. At this point, we can now write a simplified version of our MWRR function.  (Our real-world version is  more sophisticated in that it calculates rate of returns for 5 different time periods [since inception, last quarter, year-to-date, last year, year before last year] in a single invocation.  In our actual customer proof, we also defined time-weighted rate of return calculations.  The beauty of R is that it was very easy to add these enhancements and additional calculations to our IRR package.)To simplify code deployment, we then created a new package of our IRR functions and sample data.  For this blog post, we only need to include our SimpleMWRR function and our SimpleMWRRData sample data.  We created the shell of the package by calling: To turn this package skeleton into something usable, at a minimum you need to edit the SimpleMWRR.Rd and SimpleMWRRData.Rd files in the \man subdirectory.  In those files, you need to at least provide a value for the “title” section. Once that is done, you can change directory to the IRR directory and type at the command-line: The myIRR package for this blog post (which has both SimpleMWRR source and SimpleMWRRData sample data) is downloadable from here: myIRR package Testing the myIRR package Here is an example of testing our IRR function once it was converted to an installable package: Calculating IRR for All the Accounts So far, we have shown how to calculate IRR for a single account.  The real-world issue is how do you calculate IRR for all of the accounts?This is the kind of situation where we can leverage the “Split-Apply-Combine” approach (see http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/815.html).  Given that our sample data can fit in memory, one easy approach is to use R’s “by” function.  (Other approaches to Split-Apply-Combine such as plyr can also be used.  See http://4dpiecharts.com/2011/12/16/a-quick-primer-on-split-apply-combine-problems/). Here is an example showing the use of “by” to calculate the money weighted rate of return for each account in our sample data set.  Recap and Next Steps At this point, you’ve seen the power of R being used to calculate IRR.  There were several good things: R could easily work with the spreadsheets of sample data we were given R’s optimize() function provided a nice way to solve for IRR- it was both fast and allowed us to avoid having to code our own iterative approximation algorithm R was a convenient language to express the customer-specific variations, business-rules, and exceptions that often occur in real-world calculations- these could be easily added to our IRR functions The Split-Apply-Combine technique can be used to perform calculations of IRR for multiple accounts at once. However, there are several challenges yet to be conquered at this point in our story: The actual data that needs to be used lives in a database, not in a spreadsheet The actual data is much, much bigger- too big to fit into the normal R memory space and too big to want to move across the network The overall process needs to run fast- much faster than a single processor The actual data needs to be kept secured- another reason to not want to move it from the database and across the network And the process of calculating the IRR needs to be integrated together with other database ETL activities, so that IRR’s can be calculated as part of the data warehouse refresh processes In our next blog post in this series, we will show you how Oracle R Enterprise solved these challenges.

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• Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

  - by Jeff

  (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 27, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 27, 2012Popular ReleasesMS CRM Rich Text box: MS CRM Rich Text box: This release contains the final JavaScript for this plug-in. It is tested and verified. Even if someone is unable to use it, can contact me. Suggestions and bug-notifications are always most welcome.Nivo Slider Web Part SharePoint 2010: Nivo Slider Web Part WSP: Web Part encapsulating nivo slider jquery web part. Download the wsp for one click install. Edit the property of the web part to point to any image library and all done. Web part includes jQuery and nivo jquery library. No configuration is required. This web part is a SharePoint 2010 farm solution. Scope for installation is site collection.iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.0: For more info see the iPDC-v1.3.0-Release_Notes document. Changes in iPDC-1.3 : Now iPDC has a centralized file structure. Only a single file for each iPDC and that will store with iPDC-ID. File structure will be explained in release notes document. A setup file for a iPDC will contains the information about: iPDC Server, Connected Source Devices, Connected Destination Devices, and finally configuration frames of sources. Because of this single Setup File previously generated ....Net Code Samples: Code Samples: Code samples (SLNs).Tweetz - Windows Twitter Client Gadget: Tweetz 3.1.5.4: Changed from screen names to regular names in all timelines except search Minor correction in German translation Updated Italian translationSubExtractor: Release 1027: Fix: out-of-memory exception when reading DVDs with very large (over 1GB) cells Fix: AltGr key toggling Italics during OCR Feature: use centered alignment SSA tag for centered text in the upper part of the frame Feature: increased number of subtitle tracks visible in Choose Subtitles step listbox Feature: allow change of palette for entire movieLINQ_Koans: LinqKoans v.02: Cleaned up a bitAutoFixture: 2.11.1: This is an automatically published release created from the latest successful build. Versioning is based on Semantic Versioning. Read more here: http://blog.ploeh.dk/2011/09/06/AutoFixtureGoesContinuousDeliveryWithSemanticVersioning.aspxBlueGem: BlueGem-v1.B Source: Description This is the source of BlueGem -v1.B.XML Schema Documenter: 1.9.4.0: Compatibility fixes for SHFB 1.9.4.0 and Visual Studio 11 Third-Party References Reference Required Used For Sandcastle Help File Builder (version 1.9.4.0) Yes Underlying platform Windows Installer XML (WiX) v3.6 RC0 No Only required to build source code ZXMAK2: Version 2.6.2.1: - fix contended timings for ULA 48/128 early/late - small refactoring for ULA code - fix mistake in timing for CBXX opcodes (thanks to Pegaz for report) - save early/late flag when saving to SZX (works with original ULA's 48/128 only) Use ZXMAK-SPRINTER-2621 package to get emulator with SPRINTER files (select Sprinter model from VM->Settings->Wizard)totalem: version 2012.05.25.1: Beta version speed improvements memory usage improvements smoothness list scrollingJayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0 RC1 Refresh 2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript developers to query and update data from different sources like webSQL, indexedDB, OData, Facebook or YQL. See it in action in this 6 minutes video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlJHgj1y0CU RC1 R2 Release highlights Knockout.js integrationUsing the Knockout.js module, your UI can be automatically refreshed when the data model changes, so you can develop the front-end of your data manager app even faster. Querying 1:N relations in W...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: 00.00.08 for DNN6: BEFORE USE YOU need to install the MSBuild Community Tasks available from http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org For best results you should configure your development environment as described in this blog post Then read this latest blog post about customizing and using these custom templates. Installation is simple To use this template place the ZIP (not extracted) file in your My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Web OR for VB My Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Te...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.53: fix issue #18106, where member operators on numeric literals caused the member part to be duplicated when not minifying numeric literals ADD NEW FEATURE: ability to create source map files! The first mapfile format to be supported is the Script# format. Use the new -map filename switch to create map files when building your sources.myManga: Initial Release - Version 1.0.0.1 - BETA: Leave a Review! This is the initial release of myManga. Please report any bugs. NOTE: There is a bug with MangaReader.net where images are reported 403 Forbidden, this is NOT the fault of myManga but, myManga will through an error and will not download the image.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.3: 2012.05.22 Ver5.6.3 　(1) HTTP????????、ftp://??????????????????????LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.12.5.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionThis release is fixing start up issue.Orchard Project: Orchard 1.4.2: This is a service release to address 1.4 and 1.4.1 bugs. Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4.2: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-NotesSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.0): New fetures:View other users predictions Hide/Show background image (web part property) Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint Euro 2012 Predictor has been developed as a SharePoint Sandbox solution to support SharePoint Online (Office 365) Download the solution havivi.euro2012.wsp from the download page: Downloads Upload this solution to your Site Collection via the solutions area. Click on Activate to make the web parts in the solution available for use in the Site C...New ProjectsAdvStopWatch: This is an wpf project to build a stop watchBlueGem: BlueGem is a simple Rich Text Editor. It also has a system resource monitor.Db4o Extensions: Db4o Extensions is a .NET library to ease database routines like creating composite keys, defining deletion behavior, data validation and transparent persistance.Financial Advisor Toolbox: An attempt to build a set of tools that can be used by a Financial Advisor to help automate some of their daily tasks. The initial release will aim to include "client management" to track clients and their financial profile. ImpresionesJL: This is a great project!K-Dock: K-Dock is a basic WPF library built to allow developers to implement a docking system in their applications. Written in Visual Basic. mouse: ignoreopencv: a personal git mirror for opencvOpenLaunch: OpenLaunch is a new way to make your companies' software more popular. By using a simple framework, developers can integrate their software into OpenLaunch by either their existing project, or by a new project. All help on this project is greatly appreciated, and we are looking for a web developer to create a web interface to the store.Smart Setup: Smart Setup is a PowerShell-based deployment program with using a XML document. It is very flexible with supporting multiple extensions and different configurations for different environment. It's smart and light.UusAhi: Teeme jälle ahju!Win7 Style TreeView: A TreeView with win7 styleWindows Phone 7 Feedback Control: Windows Phone user control for sending feedback directly from the applicationWindows Phone SignalR Helper: Windows Phone SignalR Helper makes it easier for WPDevs to leverage SignalR in making connected real-time Windows Phone applications. Various modes of communication between phone and server will be stubbed out - like real-time Mapping, Chat, Stocks, Game Scores, Object Sync etc.; Re-use or extend to make it work for your own needs. Iterative feature addition planned. Hope this helps!

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• Is Fast Enumeration messing with my text output?

  - by Dan Ray

  Here I am iterating through an array of NSDictionary objects (inside the parsed JSON response of the EXCELLENT MapQuest directions API). I want to build up an HTML string to put into a UIWebView. My code says: for (NSDictionary *leg in legs ) { NSString *thisLeg = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"<br>%@ - %@", [leg valueForKey:@"narrative"], [leg valueForKey:@"distance"]]; NSLog(@"This leg's string is %@", thisLeg); [directionsOutput appendString:thisLeg]; } The content of directionsOutput (which is an NSMutableString) contains ALL the values for [leg valueForKey:@"narrative"], wrapped up in parens, followed by a hyphen, followed by all the parenthesized values for [leg valueForKey:@"distance"]. So I put in that NSLog call... and I get the same thing there! It appears that the for() is somehow batching up our output values as we iterate, and putting out the output only once. How do I make it not do this but instead do what I actually want, which is an iterative output as I iterate? Here's what NSLog gets. Yes, I know I need to figure out NSNumberFormatter. ;-) This leg's string is ( "Start out going NORTH on INFINITE LOOP.", "Turn LEFT to stay on INFINITE LOOP.", "Turn RIGHT onto N DE ANZA BLVD.", "Merge onto I-280 S toward SAN JOSE.", "Merge onto CA-87 S via EXIT 3A.", "Take the exit on the LEFT.", "Merge onto CA-85 S via EXIT 1A on the LEFT toward GILROY.", "Merge onto US-101 S via EXIT 1A on the LEFT toward LOS ANGELES.", "Take the CA-152 E/10TH ST exit, EXIT 356.", "Turn LEFT onto CA-152/E 10TH ST/PACHECO PASS HWY. Continue to follow CA-152/PACHECO PASS HWY.", "Turn SLIGHT RIGHT.", "Turn SLIGHT RIGHT onto PACHECO PASS HWY/CA-152 E. Continue to follow CA-152 E.", "Merge onto I-5 S toward LOS ANGELES.", "Take the CA-46 exit, EXIT 278, toward LOST HILLS/WASCO.", "Turn LEFT onto CA-46/PASO ROBLES HWY. Continue to follow CA-46.", "Merge onto CA-99 S toward BAKERSFIELD.", "Merge onto CA-58 E via EXIT 24 toward TEHACHAPI/MOJAVE.", "Merge onto I-15 N via the exit on the LEFT toward I-40/LAS VEGAS.", "Keep RIGHT to take I-40 E via EXIT 140A toward NEEDLES (Passing through ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO, TEXAS, OKLAHOMA, and ARKANSAS, then crossing into TENNESSEE).", "Merge onto I-40 E via EXIT 12C on the LEFT toward NASHVILLE (Crossing into NORTH CAROLINA).", "Merge onto I-40 BR E/US-421 S via EXIT 188 on the LEFT toward WINSTON-SALEM.", "Take the CLOVERDALE AVE exit, EXIT 4.", "Turn LEFT onto CLOVERDALE AVE SW.", "Turn SLIGHT LEFT onto N HAWTHORNE RD.", "Turn RIGHT onto W NORTHWEST BLVD.", "1047 W NORTHWEST BLVD is on the LEFT." ) - ( 0.0020000000949949026, 0.07800000160932541, 0.14000000059604645, 7.827000141143799, 5.0329999923706055, 0.15299999713897705, 5.050000190734863, 20.871000289916992, 0.3050000071525574, 2.802999973297119, 0.10199999809265137, 37.78000259399414, 124.50700378417969, 0.3970000147819519, 25.264001846313477, 20.475000381469727, 125.8580093383789, 4.538000106811523, 1693.0350341796875, 628.8970336914062, 3.7990000247955322, 0.19099999964237213, 0.4099999964237213, 0.257999986410141, 0.5170000195503235, 0 )

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• Faster method for Matrix vector product for large matrix in C or C++ for use in GMRES

  - by user35959

  I have a large, dense matrix A, and I aim to find the solution to the linear system Ax=b using an iterative method (in MATLAB was the plan using its built in GMRES). For more than 10,000 rows, this is too much for my computer to store in memory, but I know that the entries in A are constructed by two known vectors x and y of length N and the entries satisfy: A(i,j) = .5*(x[i]-x[j])^2+([y[i]-y[j])^2 * log(x[i]-x[j])^2+([y[i]-y[j]^2). MATLAB's GMRES command accepts as input a function call that can compute the matrix vector product A*x, which allows me to handle larger matrices than I can store in memory. To write the matrix-vecotr product function, I first tried this in matlab by going row by row and using some vectorization, but I avoid spawning the entire array A (since it would be too large). This was fairly slow unfortnately in my application for GMRES. My plan was to write a mex file for MATLAB to, which is in C, and ideally should be significantly faster than the matlab code. I'm rather new to C, so this went rather poorly and my naive attempt at writing the code in C was slower than my partially vectorized attempt in Matlab. #include <math.h> #include "mex.h" void Aproduct(double *x, double *ctrs_x, double *ctrs_y, double *b, mwSize n) { mwSize i; mwSize j; double val; for (i=0; i<n; i++) { for (j=0; j<i; j++) { val = pow(ctrs_x[i]-ctrs_x[j],2)+pow(ctrs_y[i]-ctrs_y[j],2); b[i] = b[i] + .5* val * log(val) * x[j]; } for (j=i+1; j<n; j++) { val = pow(ctrs_x[i]-ctrs_x[j],2)+pow(ctrs_y[i]-ctrs_y[j],2); b[i] = b[i] + .5* val * log(val) * x[j]; } } } The above is the computational portion of the code for the matlab mex file (which is slightly modified C, if I understand correctly). Please note that I skip the case i=j, since in that case the variable val will be a 0*log(0), which should be interpreted as 0 for me, so I just skip it. Is there a more efficient or faster way to write this? When I call this C function via the mex file in matlab, it is quite slow, slower even than the matlab method I used. This surprises me since I suspected that C code should be much faster than matlab. The alternative matlab method which is partially vectorized that I am comparing it with is function Ax = Aprod(x,ctrs) n = length(x); Ax = zeros(n,1); for j=1:(n-3) v = .5*((ctrs(j,1)-ctrs(:,1)).^2+(ctrs(j,2)-ctrs(:,2)).^2).*log((ctrs(j,1)-ctrs(:,1)).^2+(ctrs(j,2)-ctrs(:,2)).^2); v(j)=0; Ax(j) = dot(v,x(1:n-3); end (the n-3 is because there is actually 3 extra components, but they are dealt with separately,so I excluded that code). This is partly vectorized and only needs one for loop, so it makes some sense that it is faster. However, I was hoping I could go even faster with C+mex file. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! EDIT: I should be more clear. I am open to any faster method that can help me use GMRES to invert this matrix that I am interested in, which requires a faster way of doing the matrix vector product without explicitly loading the array into memory. Thanks!

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• Java code optimization leads to numerical inaccuracies and errors

  - by rano

  I'm trying to implement a version of the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm in Java and I'm trying to do some optimization by computing just once everything that can be computed just once. This is an iterative algorithm and regarding the updating of a matrix, the clusters x pixels membership matrix U, this is the update rule I want to optimize: where the x are the element of a matrix X (pixels x features) and v belongs to the matrix V (clusters x features). And m is a parameter that ranges from 1.1 to infinity. The distance used is the euclidean norm. If I had to implement this formula in a banal way I'd do: for(int i = 0; i < X.length; i++) { int count = 0; for(int j = 0; j < V.length; j++) { double num = D[i][j]; double sumTerms = 0; for(int k = 0; k < V.length; k++) { double thisDistance = D[i][k]; sumTerms += Math.pow(num / thisDistance, (1.0 / (m - 1.0))); } U[i][j] = (float) (1f / sumTerms); } } In this way some optimization is already done, I precomputed all the possible squared distances between X and V and stored them in a matrix D but that is not enough, since I'm cycling througn the elements of V two times resulting in two nested loops. Looking at the formula the numerator of the fraction is independent of the sum so I can compute numerator and denominator independently and the denominator can be computed just once for each pixel. So I came to a solution like this: int nClusters = V.length; double exp = (1.0 / (m - 1.0)); for(int i = 0; i < X.length; i++) { int count = 0; for(int j = 0; j < nClusters; j++) { double distance = D[i][j]; double denominator = D[i][nClusters]; double numerator = Math.pow(distance, exp); U[i][j] = (float) (1f / (numerator * denominator)); } } Where I precomputed the denominator into an additional column of the matrix D while I was computing the distances: for (int i = 0; i < X.length; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < V.length; j++) { double sum = 0; for (int k = 0; k < nDims; k++) { final double d = X[i][k] - V[j][k]; sum += d * d; } D[i][j] = sum; D[i][B.length] += Math.pow(1 / D[i][j], exp); } } By doing so I encounter numerical differences between the 'banal' computation and the second one that leads to different numerical value in U (not in the first iterates but soon enough). I guess that the problem is that exponentiate very small numbers to high values (the elements of U can range from 0.0 to 1.0 and exp , for m = 1.1, is 10) leads to ver y small values, whereas by dividing the numerator and the denominator and THEN exponentiating the result seems to be better numerically. The problem is it involves much more operations. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a possible solution to get both the code optimized and numerically stable? Any suggestion or criticism will be appreciated.

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• Generating strongly biased radom numbers for tests

  - by nobody

  I want to run tests with randomized inputs and need to generate 'sensible' random numbers, that is, numbers that match good enough to pass the tested function's preconditions, but hopefully wreak havoc deeper inside its code. math.random() (I'm using Lua) produces uniformly distributed random numbers. Scaling these up will give far more big numbers than small numbers, and there will be very few integers. I would like to skew the random numbers (or generate new ones using the old function as a randomness source) in a way that strongly favors 'simple' numbers, but will still cover the whole range, I.e. extending up to positive/negative infinity (or ±1e309 for double). This means: numbers up to, say, ten should be most common, integers should be more common than fractions, numbers ending in 0.5 should be the most common fractions, followed by 0.25 and 0.75; then 0.125, and so on. A different description: Fix a base probability x such that probabilities will sum to one and define the probability of a number n as xk where k is the generation in which n is constructed as a surreal number1. That assigns x to 0, x2 to -1 and +1, x3 to -2, -1/2, +1/2 and +2, and so on. This gives a nice description of something close to what I want (it skews a bit too much), but is near-unusable for computing random numbers. The resulting distribution is nowhere continuous (it's fractal!), I'm not sure how to determine the base probability x (I think for infinite precision it would be zero), and computing numbers based on this by iteration is awfully slow (spending near-infinite time to construct large numbers). Does anyone know of a simple approximation that, given a uniformly distributed randomness source, produces random numbers very roughly distributed as described above? I would like to run thousands of randomized tests, quantity/speed is more important than quality. Still, better numbers mean less inputs get rejected. Lua has a JIT, so performance can't be reasonably predicted. Jumps based on randomness will break every prediction, and many calls to math.random() will be slow, too. This means a closed formula will be better than an iterative or recursive one. 1 Wikipedia has an article on surreal numbers, with a nice picture. A surreal number is a pair of two surreal numbers, i.e. x := {n|m}, and its value is the number in the middle of the pair, i.e. (for finite numbers) {n|m} = (n+m)/2 (as rational). If one side of the pair is empty, that's interpreted as increment (or decrement, if right is empty) by one. If both sides are empty, that's zero. Initially, there are no numbers, so the only number one can build is 0 := { | }. In generation two one can build numbers {0| } =: 1 and { |0} =: -1, in three we get {1| } =: 2, {|1} =: -2, {0|1} =: 1/2 and {-1|0} =: -1/2 (plus some more complex representations of known numbers, e.g. {-1|1} ? 0). Note that e.g. 1/3 is never generated by finite numbers because it is an infinite fraction – the same goes for floats, 1/3 is never represented exactly.

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• Troubleshoot Perl module installation on Mac OS X

  - by Daniel Standage

  I'm trying to install the Perl module Set::IntervalTree on Mac OS X. I recently installed it today on an Ubuntu box with no problem. I simply started cpan, entered install Set:IntervalTree, and it all worked out. However, the installation failed on Mac OS X--it spits out a huge list of compiler errors (below). How would I troubleshoot this. I don't even know where to begin. cpan[1]> install Set::IntervalTree CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.18) Going to read /Users/standage/.cpan/Metadata Database was generated on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 02:58:42 GMT CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.72) Going to read /Users/standage/.cpan/build/ ............................................................................DONE Found 1 old build, restored the state of 1 Running install for module 'Set::IntervalTree' Running make for B/BE/BENBOOTH/Set-IntervalTree-0.01.tar.gz CPAN: Digest::SHA loaded ok (v5.45) CPAN: Compress::Zlib loaded ok (v2.008) Checksum for /Users/standage/.cpan/sources/authors/id/B/BE/BENBOOTH/Set-IntervalTree-0.01.tar.gz ok Scanning cache /Users/standage/.cpan/build for sizes ............................................................................DONE x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/ x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/src/ x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/src/Makefile x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/src/interval_tree.h x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/src/test_main.cc x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/lib/ x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/lib/Set/ x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/lib/Set/IntervalTree.pm x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/Changes x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/MANIFEST x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/t/ x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/t/Set-IntervalTree.t x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/typemap x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/perlobject.map x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/IntervalTree.xs x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/Makefile.PL x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/README x Set-IntervalTree-0.01/META.yml CPAN: File::Temp loaded ok (v0.18) CPAN.pm: Going to build B/BE/BENBOOTH/Set-IntervalTree-0.01.tar.gz Checking if your kit is complete... Looks good Writing Makefile for Set::IntervalTree cp lib/Set/IntervalTree.pm blib/lib/Set/IntervalTree.pm AutoSplitting blib/lib/Set/IntervalTree.pm (blib/lib/auto/Set/IntervalTree) /usr/bin/perl /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/ExtUtils/xsubpp -C++ -typemap /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/ExtUtils/typemap -typemap perlobject.map -typemap typemap IntervalTree.xs > IntervalTree.xsc && mv IntervalTree.xsc IntervalTree.c g++ -c -Isrc -arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -g -O0 -DVERSION=\"0.01\" -DXS_VERSION=\"0.01\" "-I/System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE" -Isrc IntervalTree.c In file included from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/basic_ios.h:44, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ios:50, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ostream:45, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/iostream:45, from IntervalTree.xs:16: /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4420:40: error: macro "do_open" requires 7 arguments, but only 2 given /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4467:34: error: macro "do_close" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4486:55: error: macro "do_open" requires 7 arguments, but only 2 given /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4513:23: error: macro "do_close" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given In file included from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4599, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/basic_ios.h:44, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ios:50, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ostream:45, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/iostream:45, from IntervalTree.xs:16: /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/i686-apple-darwin10/x86_64/bits/messages_members.h:58:38: error: macro "do_open" requires 7 arguments, but only 2 given /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/i686-apple-darwin10/x86_64/bits/messages_members.h:67:71: error: macro "do_open" requires 7 arguments, but only 2 given /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/i686-apple-darwin10/x86_64/bits/messages_members.h:78:39: error: macro "do_close" requires 2 arguments, but only 1 given In file included from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/basic_ios.h:44, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ios:50, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ostream:45, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/iostream:45, from IntervalTree.xs:16: /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4486: error: ‘do_open’ declared as a ‘virtual’ field /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4486: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘const’ /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4513: error: variable or field ‘do_close’ declared void /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4513: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘const’ In file included from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/locale_facets.h:4599, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/bits/basic_ios.h:44, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ios:50, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/ostream:45, from /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/iostream:45, from IntervalTree.xs:16: /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/i686-apple-darwin10/x86_64/bits/messages_members.h:67: error: expected initializer before ‘const’ /usr/include/c++/4.2.1/i686-apple-darwin10/x86_64/bits/messages_members.h:78: error: expected initializer before ‘const’ In file included from IntervalTree.xs:19: src/interval_tree.h:95: error: type/value mismatch at argument 1 in template parameter list for ‘template<class _Tp, class _Alloc> class std::vector’ src/interval_tree.h:95: error: expected a type, got ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::it_recursion_node’ src/interval_tree.h:95: error: template argument 2 is invalid src/interval_tree.h: In constructor ‘IntervalTree<T, N>::IntervalTree()’: src/interval_tree.h:130: error: expected type-specifier src/interval_tree.h:130: error: expected `;' src/interval_tree.h:135: error: expected type-specifier src/interval_tree.h:135: error: expected `;' src/interval_tree.h:141: error: request for member ‘push_back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::LeftRotate(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*)’: src/interval_tree.h:178: error: ‘y’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::RightRotate(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*)’: src/interval_tree.h:240: error: ‘x’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::TreeInsertHelp(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*)’: src/interval_tree.h:298: error: ‘x’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:299: error: ‘y’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::insert(const T&, N, N)’: src/interval_tree.h:375: error: ‘y’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:376: error: ‘x’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:377: error: ‘newNode’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:379: error: expected type-specifier src/interval_tree.h:379: error: expected `;' src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::GetSuccessorOf(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*) const’: src/interval_tree.h:450: error: ‘y’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::GetPredecessorOf(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*) const’: src/interval_tree.h:483: error: ‘y’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In destructor ‘IntervalTree<T, N>::~IntervalTree()’: src/interval_tree.h:546: error: ‘x’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:547: error: type/value mismatch at argument 1 in template parameter list for ‘template<class _Tp, class _Alloc> class std::vector’ src/interval_tree.h:547: error: expected a type, got ‘(IntervalTree<T,N>::Node * <expression error>)’ src/interval_tree.h:547: error: template argument 2 is invalid src/interval_tree.h:547: error: invalid type in declaration before ‘;’ token src/interval_tree.h:551: error: request for member ‘push_back’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:554: error: request for member ‘push_back’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:557: error: request for member ‘empty’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:558: error: request for member ‘back’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:559: error: request for member ‘pop_back’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:561: error: request for member ‘push_back’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:564: error: request for member ‘push_back’ in ‘stuffToFree’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::DeleteFixUp(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*)’: src/interval_tree.h:613: error: ‘w’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:614: error: ‘rootLeft’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘T IntervalTree<T, N>::remove(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*)’: src/interval_tree.h:697: error: ‘y’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:698: error: ‘x’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘std::vector<T, std::allocator<_CharT> > IntervalTree<T, N>::fetch(N, N)’: src/interval_tree.h:819: error: ‘x’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:833: error: invalid types ‘int[size_t]’ for array subscript src/interval_tree.h:836: error: request for member ‘push_back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:837: error: request for member ‘back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:838: error: request for member ‘back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:839: error: request for member ‘back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:840: error: request for member ‘size’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:846: error: request for member ‘size’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:847: error: expected `;' before ‘back’ src/interval_tree.h:848: error: request for member ‘pop_back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:850: error: ‘back’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:853: error: invalid types ‘int[size_t]’ for array subscript IntervalTree.c: In function ‘void boot_Set__IntervalTree(PerlInterpreter*, CV*)’: IntervalTree.c:365: warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’ src/interval_tree.h: In constructor ‘IntervalTree<T, N>::IntervalTree() [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: IntervalTree.c:67: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:130: error: cannot convert ‘int*’ to ‘IntervalTree<std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, long int>::Node*’ in assignment src/interval_tree.h:135: error: cannot convert ‘int*’ to ‘IntervalTree<std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, long int>::Node*’ in assignment ...blah blah blah... ...blah blah blah... ...blah blah blah... ...blah blah blah... ...blah blah blah... ...blah blah blah... src/interval_tree.h:848: error: request for member ‘pop_back’ in ‘((IntervalTree<T, N>*)this)->IntervalTree<T, N>::recursionNodeStack’, which is of non-class type ‘int’ src/interval_tree.h:850: error: ‘back’ was not declared in this scope src/interval_tree.h:853: error: invalid types ‘int[size_t]’ for array subscript IntervalTree.c: In function ‘void boot_Set__IntervalTree(PerlInterpreter*, CV*)’: IntervalTree.c:365: warning: deprecated conversion from string constant to ‘char*’ src/interval_tree.h: In constructor ‘IntervalTree<T, N>::IntervalTree() [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: IntervalTree.c:67: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:130: error: cannot convert ‘int*’ to ‘IntervalTree<std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, long int>::Node*’ in assignment src/interval_tree.h:135: error: cannot convert ‘int*’ to ‘IntervalTree<std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, long int>::Node*’ in assignment src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::insert(const T&, N, N) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: IntervalTree.xs:57: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:375: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:375: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h:376: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:376: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h:377: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:377: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘std::vector<T, std::allocator<_CharT> > IntervalTree<T, N>::fetch(N, N) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: IntervalTree.xs:65: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:819: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:819: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant IntervalTree.xs:65: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:847: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::it_recursion_node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:847: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::it_recursion_node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h: In destructor ‘IntervalTree<T, N>::~IntervalTree() [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: IntervalTree.c:205: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:546: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:546: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::TreeInsertHelp(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: src/interval_tree.h:380: instantiated from ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::insert(const T&, N, N) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’ IntervalTree.xs:57: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:298: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:298: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h:299: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:299: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::LeftRotate(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: src/interval_tree.h:395: instantiated from ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::insert(const T&, N, N) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’ IntervalTree.xs:57: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:178: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:178: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant src/interval_tree.h: In member function ‘void IntervalTree<T, N>::RightRotate(IntervalTree<T, N>::Node*) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’: src/interval_tree.h:399: instantiated from ‘typename IntervalTree<T, N>::Node* IntervalTree<T, N>::insert(const T&, N, N) [with T = std::tr1::shared_ptr<sv>, N = long int]’ IntervalTree.xs:57: instantiated from here src/interval_tree.h:240: error: dependent-name ‘IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ is parsed as a non-type, but instantiation yields a type src/interval_tree.h:240: note: say ‘typename IntervalTree<T,N>::Node’ if a type is meant lipo: can't open input file: /var/tmp//ccLthuaw.out (No such file or directory) make: *** [IntervalTree.o] Error 1 BENBOOTH/Set-IntervalTree-0.01.tar.gz make -- NOT OK Running make test Can't test without successful make Running make install Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible Failed during this command: BENBOOTH/Set-IntervalTree-0.01.tar.gz : make NO

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• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM

  - by Eilon

  Note: ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM isn’t yet released! But this tool will help you get your ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications ready for when it is! I have updated the MVC App Converter to convert projects from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM. This should be last the last major change to the MVC App Converter that I released previews of in the past several months. Download The app is a single executable: Download MvcAppConverter-MVC2RTM.zip (255 KB). Usage The only requirement for this tool is that you have .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 on the machine. You do not need to have Visual Studio or ASP.NET MVC installed (unless you want to open your project!). Even though the tool performs an automatic backup of your solution it is recommended that you perform a manual backup of your solution as well. To convert an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project built with Visual Studio 2008 to an ASP.NET MVC 2 project in Visual Studio 2008 perform these steps: Launch the converter Select the solution Click the “Convert” button To convert an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project built with Visual Studio 2008 to an ASP.NET MVC 2 project in Visual Studio 2010: Wait until Visual Studio 2010 is released (next month!) and it will have a built-in version of this tool that will run automatically when you open an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project Perform the above steps, then open the project in Visual Studio 2010 and it will perform the remaining conversion steps What it can do Open up ASP.NET MVC 1.0 projects from Visual Studio 2008 (no other versions of ASP.NET MVC or Visual Studio are supported) Create a full backup of your solution’s folder For every VB or C# project that has a reference to System.Web.Mvc.dll it will (this includes ASP.NET MVC web application projects as well as ASP.NET MVC test projects): Update references to ASP.NET MVC 2 Add a reference to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations 3.5 (if not already present) For every VB or C# ASP.NET MVC Web Application it will: Change the project type to an ASP.NET MVC 2 project Update the root ~/web.config references to ASP.NET MVC 2 Update the root ~/web.config to have a binding redirect from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 to ASP.NET MVC 2 Update the ~/Views/web.config references to ASP.NET MVC 2 Add or update the JavaScript files (add jQuery, add jQuery.Validate, add Microsoft AJAX, add/update Microsoft MVC AJAX, add Microsoft MVC Validation adapter) Unknown project types or project types that have nothing to do with ASP.NET MVC will not be updated What it can’t do It cannot convert projects directly to Visual Studio 2010 or to .NET Framework 4. It can have issues if your solution contains projects that are not located under the solution directory. If you are using a source control system it might have problems overwriting files. It is recommended that before converting you check out all files from the source control system. It cannot change code in the application that might need to be changed due to breaking changes between ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2. Feedback, Please! If you need to convert a project to ASP.NET MVC 2 please try out this application and hopefully you’re good to go. If you spot any bugs or features that don’t work leave a comment here and I will try to address these issues in an updated release.

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• CreationName for SSIS 2008 and adding components programmatically

  If you are building SSIS 2008 packages programmatically and adding data flow components, you will probably need to know the creation name of the component to add. I can never find a handy reference when I need one, hence this rather mundane post. See also CreationName for SSS 2005. We start with a very simple snippet for adding a component: // Add the Data Flow Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:PipelineTask"); // Get the task host wrapper, and the Data Flow task TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; MainPipe dataFlowTask = (MainPipe)taskHost.InnerObject; // Add OLE-DB source component - ** This is where we need the creation name ** IDTSComponentMetaData90 componentSource = dataFlowTask.ComponentMetaDataCollection.New(); componentSource.Name = "OLEDBSource"; componentSource.ComponentClassID = "DTSAdapter.OLEDBSource.2"; So as you can see the creation name for a OLE-DB Source is DTSAdapter.OLEDBSource.2. CreationName Reference  ADO NET Destination Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.ADONETDestination, Microsoft.SqlServer.ADONETDest, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 ADO NET Source Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.DataReaderSourceAdapter, Microsoft.SqlServer.ADONETSrc, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Aggregate DTSTransform.Aggregate.2 Audit DTSTransform.Lineage.2 Cache Transform DTSTransform.Cache.1 Character Map DTSTransform.CharacterMap.2 Checksum Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.ChecksumTransform.ChecksumTransform, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.ChecksumTransform, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b Conditional Split DTSTransform.ConditionalSplit.2 Copy Column DTSTransform.CopyMap.2 Data Conversion DTSTransform.DataConvert.2 Data Mining Model Training MSMDPP.PXPipelineProcessDM.2 Data Mining Query MSMDPP.PXPipelineDMQuery.2 DataReader Destination Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.DataReaderDestinationAdapter, Microsoft.SqlServer.DataReaderDest, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Derived Column DTSTransform.DerivedColumn.2 Dimension Processing MSMDPP.PXPipelineProcessDimension.2 Excel Destination DTSAdapter.ExcelDestination.2 Excel Source DTSAdapter.ExcelSource.2 Export Column TxFileExtractor.Extractor.2 Flat File Destination DTSAdapter.FlatFileDestination.2 Flat File Source DTSAdapter.FlatFileSource.2 Fuzzy Grouping DTSTransform.GroupDups.2 Fuzzy Lookup DTSTransform.BestMatch.2 Import Column TxFileInserter.Inserter.2 Lookup DTSTransform.Lookup.2 Merge DTSTransform.Merge.2 Merge Join DTSTransform.MergeJoin.2 Multicast DTSTransform.Multicast.2 OLE DB Command DTSTransform.OLEDBCommand.2 OLE DB Destination DTSAdapter.OLEDBDestination.2 OLE DB Source DTSAdapter.OLEDBSource.2 Partition Processing MSMDPP.PXPipelineProcessPartition.2 Percentage Sampling DTSTransform.PctSampling.2 Performance Counters Source DataCollectorTransform.TxPerfCounters.1 Pivot DTSTransform.Pivot.2 Raw File Destination DTSAdapter.RawDestination.2 Raw File Source DTSAdapter.RawSource.2 Recordset Destination DTSAdapter.RecordsetDestination.2 RegexClean Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.RegexClean.RegexClean, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.RegexClean, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=d1abe77e8a21353e Row Count DTSTransform.RowCount.2 Row Count Plus Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.RowCountPlusTransform.RowCountPlusTransform, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.RowCountPlusTransform, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b Row Number Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.RowNumberTransform.RowNumberTransform, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.RowNumberTransform, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b2ab4a111192992b Row Sampling DTSTransform.RowSampling.2 Script Component Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.ScriptComponentHost, Microsoft.SqlServer.TxScript, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Slowly Changing Dimension DTSTransform.SCD.2 Sort DTSTransform.Sort.2 SQL Server Compact Destination Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.SqlCEDestinationAdapter, Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlCEDest, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 SQL Server Destination DTSAdapter.SQLServerDestination.2 Term Extraction DTSTransform.TermExtraction.2 Term Lookup DTSTransform.TermLookup.2 Trash Destination Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination.Trash, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b8351fe7752642cc TxTopQueries DataCollectorTransform.TxTopQueries.1 Union All DTSTransform.UnionAll.2 Unpivot DTSTransform.UnPivot.2 XML Source Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.XmlSourceAdapter, Microsoft.SqlServer.XmlSrc, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 Here is a simple console program that can be used to enumerate the pipeline components installed on your machine, and dumps out a list of all components like that above. You will need to add a reference to the Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS assembly. using System; using System.Diagnostics; using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime; public class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Application application = new Application(); PipelineComponentInfos componentInfos = application.PipelineComponentInfos; foreach (PipelineComponentInfo componentInfo in componentInfos) { Debug.WriteLine(componentInfo.Name + "\t" + componentInfo.CreationName); } Console.Read(); } }

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• Redaction in AutoVue

  - by [email protected]

  As the trend to digitize all paper assets continues, so does the push to digitize all the processes around these assets. One such process is redaction - removing sensitive or classified information from documents. While for some this may conjure up thoughts of old CIA documents filled with nothing but blacked out pages, there are actually many uses for redaction today beyond military and government. Many companies have a need to remove names, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, etc. from documents that are being scanned in and/or released to the public or less privileged users - insurance companies, banks and legal firms are a few examples. The process of digital redaction actually isn't that far from the old paper method: Step 1. Find a folder with a big red stamp on it labeled "TOP SECRET" Step 2. Make a copy of that document, since some folks still need to access the original contents Step 3. Black out the text or pages you want to hide Step 4. Release or distribute this new 'redacted' copy So where does a solution like AutoVue come in? Well, we've really been doing all of these things for years! 1. With AutoVue's VueLink integration and iSDK, we can integrate to virtually any content management system and view documents of almost any format with a single click. Finding the document and opening it in AutoVue: CHECK! 2. With AutoVue's markup capabilities, adding filled boxes (or other shapes) around certain text is a no-brainer. You can even leverage AutoVue's powerful APIs to automate the addition of markups over certain text or pre-defined regions using our APIs. Black out the text you want to hide: CHECK! 3. With AutoVue's conversion capabilities, you can 'burn-in' the comments into a new file, either as a TIFF, JPEG or PDF document. Burning-in the redactions avoids slip-ups like the recent (well-publicized) TSA one. Through our tight integrations, the newly created copies can be directly checked into the content management system with no manual intervention. Make a copy of that document: CHECK! 4. Again, leveraging AutoVue's integrations, we can now define rules in the system based on a user's privileges. An 'authorized' user wishing to view the document from the repository will get exactly that - no redactions. An 'unauthorized' user, when requesting to view that same document, can get redirected to open the redacted copy of the same document. Release or distribute the new 'redacted' copy: CHECK! See this movie (WMV format, 2mins, 20secs, no audio) for a quick illustration of AutoVue's redaction capabilities. It shows how redactions can be added based on text searches, manual input or pre-defined templates/regions. Let us know what you think in the comments. And remember - this is all in our flagship AutoVue product - no additional software required!

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• How To Rip an Audio CD to FLAC with Foobar2000

  - by Mysticgeek

  Foobar2000 is a great audio player that is fully customizable, is light on system resources, and contains a lot of tools and features. Today we show you how to use it to rip an audio CD to FLAC format. Note: For this tutorial we’re going to assume this is the first time you’re ripping a disc with Foobar2000. We’re running it on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Install Foobar2000 and FLAC First download and install Foobar2000 (link below). The main thing you’ll want to make sure to enable during the install process is Audio CD Support… And the freedb Tagger which are located under Optional Features, then continue through the rest of the install wizard. Next you need to install the latest version of the FLAC codec (link below) following the defaults. Rip Audio CD To rip a CD, place it in your CDROM drive, launch Foobar2000 and click File \ Open Audio CD. Select the appropriate CD drive and click the Rip button. Next you’ll want to lookup the disc information with freedb…or you can manually enter in the track data if it’s a custom disc. Select the proper tag information in the freedb tagger window, then click Update files. The data will be entered in, make sure the radio button next to Go to the Converter Setup dialog is selected, and click the Rip button. In the Converter Setup screen, here you can select the output format, where in our case we’re selecting FLAC. In this window you can choose several other options like the output path, merging the tracks into one or individual files…etc. When you have those settings completed click OK. Next you’ll need to find flac.exe which is located wherever you installed it. On our 64-bit Windows 7 system the default path is C:\Program Files (x86)\FLAC Now wait while your CD is ripped and converted to FLAC. You’ll get a Converter Status Report…after you’ve checked it over you can close out of it. If you set the option to show the output files after conversion you can take a look, make sure all tracks were converted, and play them right away if you want. You can play the tracks in Foobar2000 or any player that supports FLAC. If you want to use WMC or WMP see our article on how to play FLAC files in Windows 7 Media Center or Player. That’s all there is to it! If you’re a fan of Foobar2000 and enjoy your music converted to FLAC format, Foobar2000 does the job quite well. There are a lot of customizations and tools you can use in Foobar2000 that we’ll be taking a look at in future articles. For more information check out our look at this fully customizable music player. Foobar2000 run on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 Links Download Foobar2000 Download FLAC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Ubuntu: What Package Did This File Come From?Easily Change Audio File Formats with XRECODEFoobar2000 is a Fully Customizable Music PlayerConvert Virtually Any Audio Format with XRECODE IIExtract Audio from a Video File with Pazera Free Audio Extractor TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook

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• SharePoint OCR image files indexing

  Introduction This article describes how to setup indexing of the image files (including TIFF, PDF, JPEG, BMP...) using OCR technology. The indexing described below utilizes Microsoft IFilter technology and as such is not specific to SharePoint, but can be used with any product that uses Microsoft indexing: Microsoft Search, Desktop search, SQL Server search, and through the plug-ins with Google desktop search. I however use it with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003. For those other products, the registration may need to be slightly different. Background  One of the projects I was working on required a storage of old documents scanned into PDF files. Then there was a separate team of people responsible for providing a tags for a search engine so those image documents could be found. The whole process was clumsy, labor intensive, and error prone. That was what started me on my exploration path. OCR The first search I fired was for the Open Source OCR products. Pretty quickly, I narrowed it down to TESSERACT (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/). Tesseract is an orphaned brain child of HP that worked on it from 1985 to 1995. Then it was moved to the Open Source, and now if I understand it correctly, Google is working on it. With credentials like that, it's no wonder that Tesseract scores one of the highest marks on OCR recognition and accuracy. After downloading and struggling just a bit, I got Tesseract to work. The struggling part was that the home page claims that its base input format is a TIFF file. May be my TIFFs were bad, but I was able to get it to work only for BMP files. Image files conversion So now that I have an OCR that can convert BMP files into text, how do I get text out of the image PDF files? One more search, and I settled down on ImageMagic (http://www.imagemagick.org/). This is another wonderful Open Source utility that can convert any file into image. It did work out of the box, converting any TIFF files into bitmaps, but to get PDF files converted, it requires a GhostScript (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe). Dealing with text PDFs With that utility installed, I was cooking - I can convert any file (in particular PDF and TIFF) into bitmap, and then I can extract the text out of the bitmap. The only consideration was to somehow treat PDF files containing text differently - after all, OCR is very computation intensive and somewhat error prone even with perfect image quality and resolution. So another quick search, and I have a PDFTOTEXT (ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip) - thank God for Open Source! With these guys, I can pull text out of PDF in an eye blink. However, I would get nothing for pure image PDFs, but I already have a solution for that! Batch process It took another 15 minutes to setup a batch script to automate the process: Check the file extension If file is a PDF file try to extract text out of it if there is more than certain amount of text in the file - done! if there is no text, convert first page into bitmap run OCR on the bitmap For any other file type, convert file into bitmap Run OCR on the bitmap Once you unzip the attached project, check out the bin\OCR.BAT file. It will create a temporary file in the directory where your source file is with the same name + the '.txt' extension.Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• More SQL Smells

  - by Nick Harrison

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

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• OSI Model

  - by kaleidoscope

  The Open System Interconnection Reference Model (OSI Reference Model or OSI Model) is an abstract description for layered communications and computer network protocol design. In its most basic form, it divides network architecture into seven layers which, from top to bottom, are the Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data Link, and Physical Layers. It is therefore often referred to as the OSI Seven Layer Model. A layer is a collection of conceptually similar functions that provide services to the layer above it and receives service from the layer below it. Description of OSI layers: Layer 1: Physical Layer ·         Defines the electrical and physical specifications for devices. In particular, it defines the relationship between a device and a physical medium. ·         Establishment and termination of a connection to a communications medium. ·         Participation in the process whereby the communication resources are effectively shared among multiple users. ·         Modulation or conversion between the representation of digital data in user equipment and the corresponding signals transmitted over a communications channel. Layer 2: Data Link Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means to transfer data between network entities. ·         Detect and possibly correct errors that may occur in the Physical Layer. The error check is performed using Frame Check Sequence (FCS). ·         Addresses is then sought to see if it needs to process the rest of the frame itself or whether to pass it on to another host. ·         The Layer is divided into two sub layers: The Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Logical Link Control (LLC) layer. ·         MAC sub layer controls how a computer on the network gains access to the data and permission to transmit it. ·         LLC layer controls frame synchronization, flow control and error checking.   Layer 3: Network Layer ·         Provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length data sequences from a source to a destination via one or more networks. ·         Performs network routing functions, and might also perform fragmentation and reassembly, and report delivery errors. ·         Network Layer Routers operate at this layer—sending data throughout the extended network and making the Internet possible.   Layer 4: Transport Layer ·         Provides transparent transfer of data between end users, providing reliable data transfer services to the upper layers. ·         Controls the reliability of a given link through flow control, segmentation/de-segmentation, and error control. ·         Transport Layer can keep track of the segments and retransmit those that fail. Layer 5: Session Layer ·         Controls the dialogues (connections) between computers. ·         Establishes, manages and terminates the connections between the local and remote application. ·         Provides for full-duplex, half-duplex, or simplex operation, and establishes checkpointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures. ·         Implemented explicitly in application environments that use remote procedure calls. Layer 6: Presentation Layer ·         Establishes a context between Application Layer entities, in which the higher-layer entities can use different syntax and semantics, as long as the presentation service understands both and the mapping between them. The presentation service data units are then encapsulated into Session Protocol data units, and moved down the stack. ·         Provides independence from differences in data representation (e.g., encryption) by translating from application to network format, and vice versa. The presentation layer works to transform data into the form that the application layer can accept. This layer formats and encrypts data to be sent across a network, providing freedom from compatibility problems. It is sometimes called the syntax layer. Layer 7: Application Layer ·         This layer interacts with software applications that implement a communicating component. ·         Identifies communication partners, determines resource availability, and synchronizes communication. o       When identifying communication partners, the application layer determines the identity and availability of communication partners for an application with data to transmit. o       When determining resource availability, the application layer must decide whether sufficient network or the requested communication exists. o       In synchronizing communication, all communication between applications requires cooperation that is managed by the application layer. Technorati Tags: Kunal,OSI,Networking

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• Launch Webcast Q&A: Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g - The Platform for the Modern User Experience

  - by howard.beader(at)oracle.com

  Did you have a chance to watch the Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Launch Webcast yet? Andy MacMillan presented some great information on the webcast and answered quite a few of your questions in the Q&A session as well. For your reading pleasure we have captured a number of the questions and answers and they are summarized below: Question: Can you tell me what should our Portal strategy be for integrating and extending our Oracle enterprise applications? Answer: We recommend that you look at this in two steps, the first would be to ensure that you have a good understanding of our common user experience architecture. Internally our product teams at Oracle are already investing in this quite heavily today for Fusion Applications and this is driving natural convergence from a UX strategy standpoint. The second step would be to look at how best to componentize the back office applications so that the business users across your organization can take advantage of these -- don't make it just about putting a new skin on top of what you already have from an application standpoint, instead look at how best to embed the social computing capabilities as part of the solution for your business users. Question: We are currently using the BEA WebLogic Portal now, should we stay on WLP or should we be looking at moving to WebCenter or when should we move to WebCenter? Answer: Our strategy has been called "Continue & Converge", this theme means that you can continue to use WebLogic or Plumtree portals until your organization is ready to move to WebCenter and in the mean time you can continue to deploy what you need to in your organization of WLP or WCI Portals with the full support of Oracle. In addition WebCenter Services can be leveraged for social computing to complement what you are already doing today and enable your organization to take advantage of some of the latest and greatest social computing capabilities. We have migration scripts and conversion capabilities available as well as programs where Oracle can help you evaluate your options to decide how best to move forward. WebCenter provides the best of the best capabilities and will enable you to take advantage of new capabilities that may not exist in your current portal today. In the end though it's up to you as a customer as to when you want to make the transition to Oracle WebCenter Suite. Question: Can you tell me how is Oracle leveraging WebCenter internally and for its Application and Middleware product UX strategies? Answer: Internally, Oracle is leveraging WebCenter for our employees and thus far we are seeing significant updates with our users taking advantage of the business activity streams, team spaces and collaboration capabilities. From a product strategy standpoint, our product teams are taking advantage of the common user experience architecture and leveraging WebCenter to provide social and collaborative capabilities to the Oracle Applications and providing new types of composite applications with what is coming with Fusion Applications. WebCenter also provides a common user experience across all the products in the Oracle Fusion Middleware family as well. Question: Our organization is currently using SharePoint, but we are also an Oracle Applications customer, how should we be thinking about WebCenter as we move forward? Answer: Great question. Typically, we are seeing organizations using SharePoint for its core use cases of small team collaboration and file server replacement. WebCenter can connect to SharePoint as a content source to feed into WebCenter quite easily and it leverages the robust Oracle ECM product under WebCenter as well. In addition, SharePoint team sites can be connected to WebCenter utilizing our SharePoint connector. With Oracle WebCenter though, we are really targeting business users and enterprise applications, thus affecting positive change on the processes that drive the business to improve productivity across your organization. Question: Are organizations today using WebCenter as a Web platform for externally facing public websites? Answer: Yes, we are seeing a convergence around web content management and portal types of websites with customers converting them from just broadcasting content to making it a much richer personalized experience and also exposing back-office applications as well. Web Content Management capabilities are already embedded in WebCenter so that organizations can take advantage now of the benefits a personalized web experience provides for your customers. This is simply a short summary of a few of the questions addressed on the webcast, please tune in now to learn more about Oracle WebCenter, the user experience platform for the enterprise and the web! The Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Launch Webcast can be found here

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• When to implement: Together with or after the source product?

  - by Jeremy Oosthuizen

  Somebody recently relayed a prospect's question to me: How hard would it be to implement OUBI after the source product (CC&B, WAM or NMS) has already been implemented? Fact is that MOST non-OUBI Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence implementations take place after the source application(s) are in place and hopefully stable. If an organization decides that they need better reporting and management information, then the logical path (see The Data Warehouse Institute's Data Warehouse Maturity Model) is to a Data Warehouse -- no matter when their last applications were implemented. If there is a pre-built Data Warehouse for their specific application, or even for the desired business process in their industry, they're in luck. Else they have to design and build from scratch, using a toolset. The implementation of a toolset is unlike the implementation of OUBI which, like OBI Apps, contain pre-built ETL routines and user content. Much has been written before about the advantages of that. So, because OUBI is designed specifically for Oracle Utilities transactional products, we often implement them in parallel -- with OUBI lagging a little behind by necessity, like Reporting. Customers know from the start they're going to need the solution, and therefore purchase the products at the same time. My biggest argument FOR a parallel installation/implementation of OUBI with the source product is two-fold: - There could be things (which is the technical term for data elements) that customers figure out they need when implementing OUBI, which are often easier added to the source product's implementation project, than to add later; - OUBI's ETL often points out errors (severe or not) with converted data, which are easier to fix during the source product's implementation project, or it may even be impossible to fix afterwards. The Conversion routines sometimes miss these errors, because the source system can live with the not-quite-perfect converted data. If the data can't be properly extracted, i.e. the proper Dimensions linked to the Facts, then it can't get into OUBI. That means it can't be analyzed effectively along with the rest of the organization's data. Then there is also the throw-away-work argument, which may be significant. The operational / transactional system cannot go live without reports on Day 1. A lot of those reports would be taken care of by the implementation of OUBI. If OUBI is implemented after go-live, those reports STILL have to be built during the source product's implementation project, but they become throw-away after the OUBI implementation. I have sometimes been told that it is better to implement OUBI after the source product, because it cuts down on scope and risk for the source product's implementation project. All I can say to that, is bah humbug. No, seriously, given the arguments above, planning has to include the OUBI implementation and it has to be managed properly -- just like any other implementation. If so, it should not add any risk and it should be included in the scope from the start. The answer to the prospect's question is therefore that it is not that much more difficult; after all, most DW/BI implemenations are done like that. They just have to consider the points above.

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• FFmpeg Video Hosting for Linux and Windows Server

  - by Aditi

  FFmpeg hosting is a special type of web hosting where the host servers have video transcoding software loaded on them, which allows the automatic conversion of videos from one format to another. FFmpeg is a cross-platform solution for recording, converting, transcoding and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg hosting gets its name from a set of server side programs (modules) called FFmpeg. There are a number of applications or web scripts available, which allow webmasters to create their own video sharing websites. Video hosting typically requires: PHP 4.3 and above (including support of CLI) Mencoder and also Mplayer FFMpeg-PHP MySQL database server LAME MP3 Encoder Libogg + Libvorbis GD Library 2 or higher CGI-BIN There are number of web service providers who provide FFmpeg hosting service. Following is a list of some of the Best FFmpeg hosting providers for both Linux and Windows Server below. Dream Host Dreamhost provides for web based email access, mail filtering, spam filtering, unlimited email ids, vacation autoresponder, python support, full CGI access and many more services. Price: $7.95 View Details Micfo It offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Other services include free domain for life and free Website Transfer with many more services. All in all one of the best option to consider. Price: $5 View Details Host Upon HostUpon offers FFMpeg Hosting on all their hosting packages, with readily installed modules to start a Video website or Social Network with Video uploading. These scripts such as Boonex Dolphin / PHPMotion / Social Engine / ABKsoft Scripts / Joomla Video Plugin / Clipshare / ClipBucket / Social Media / Rayzz / Vidi Script work with their ffmpeg. Their FFMPEG hosting plan offers 24/7/365 support with typical response time of 15min or less. Price: $5.95 View Details DownTown Host DownTown Host provides full and exceptional support by live chat and telephone. It has high-power, modern servers and the finest web server technology. It offers free search engine Submission and continuous data backup protection with free email forwarding and site move. There are many more services too. Site5 This ffmpeg service provider offers uptime guarantee, a real time stats on each server and many more attractive services. Price: $4.95 View Details Cirtex Hosting Cirtex Hosting allows to host 7 websites & domains and provides for unlimited storage space and monthly bandwidth. It also offers FTP and email accounts and many more services. Price: $2.49 View Details FLV Hosting FLV hosting supplies RTMP SERVER STREAMING for large size video streaming and server side recording. It is flexible and costs less. They customize to the clients requirements. Price: $9.95 View Details AptHost This hosting service provides for 24x7x365 Premium Support and fully ffmpeg enabled services. Price: $4.95 View Details HostMDS Great Support, Priced Low. It provides for SSH access, CGI, Ruby on Rails, Perl, PHP, MySQL, front page extentions, 24/7 Support, FREE Domain transfer and spam filtering. It offers instant account setup, low latency fast bandwidth & much more! They were formerly known as Vistapages. Price: $4.95 View Details Related posts:Best WordPress Video Themes for a Video Blog Free Web Based Applications 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

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• Meet Thomas, the Most Innovational person in Oracle Direct EMEA of Q1

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Thomas was voted, by his peers,  the most Innovational person in Oracle Direct EMEA of Q1, the first quarter of this fiscal! Thomas, a Business Development Consultant at Oracle Direct’s Applications Team, taught himself how to use and leverage the power of social engagement consistent with Oracle’s Social Media Policy.  From these learning's he provided both his and other applications teams in Dublin with huge amounts of training and has presented his findings to the teams on more than one occasion. It is important to recognise that this isn't just a great idea....it actually works! The results speak for themselves. Thomas is engaging with customers and prospects via their preferred channel of communication and creating a strong personal social brand. We congratulate Thomas for his efforts of raising Social Media to the next level within Business Development Group. He put a lot of work into Social Selling, as one of the first within the BDG and set the example for a new innovative approach on how to sell anno 2013. He deserves to be recognized for this. His contribution to social media has been a great inspiration for all Business Development Consultants or Business Relationship Consultants. He knows what he talks about and has great conversion rates out of his social media campaigns. And he doesn't mind sharing his knowledge with everybody. Great effort in searching for new ways of communication and social selling. Thomas has shown great initiative towards leveraging the social media and networks (twitter, linkedin) to find new business opportunities in a previously way. He has shown great out-of-the-box thinking while addressing new companies and prospects and has shared those experiences and ideas to help his colleagues use the same approach. This included a presentation, informational emails and a general helpful attitude from him. He also shared his success stories from his innovational approach.  Thomas is showing initiative with an innovative and fresh character, truly helping people to try something new  with a focus on selling across channels and working for the CRM team which is focused on selling social. We think the way Thomas positions social, by using social is innovative and inspirational. What better way to tell your clients do social, by engaging with them on a social platform? Going always the extra mile, we believe, that Thomas Brits, is an innovator from the day he walked into Oracle Direct. The way Thomas operates on the work floor by introducing new ideas to find the best opportunities as possible shows he runs the extra mile for coming up with new ideas around how to engage with customers more efficiently for instance via Social Media. Thomas also organises power hours/days for the team. He is the best! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Oracle Products Reflect Key Trends Shaping Enterprise 2.0

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Following up on his predictions for 2011, we asked Enterprise 2.0 veteran Andy MacMillan to map out the ways Oracle solutions are at the forefront of industry trends--and how Oracle customers can benefit in the coming year. 1. Increase organizational awareness | Oracle WebCenter Suite Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a unique set of capabilities to drive organizational awareness. In particular, the expansive activity graph connects users directly to key enterprise applications, activities, and interests. In this way, applicable and critical business information is automatically and immediately visible--in the context of key tasks--via real-time dashboards and comprehensive reporting. Oracle WebCenter Suite also integrates key E2.0 services, such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, into critical business processes, including back-office systems of records such as ERP and CRM systems. 2. Drive online customer engagement | Oracle Real-Time Decisions With more and more business being conducted on the Web, driving increased online customer engagement becomes a critical key to success. This effort is usually spearheaded by an increasingly important executive role, the Head of Online, who usually reports directly to the CMO. To help manage the Web experience online, Oracle solutions are driving a new kind of intelligent social commerce by combining Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions with leading e-commerce and product recommendations. Oracle Real-Time Decisions provides multichannel recommendations for content, products, and services--including seamless integration across Web, mobile, and social channels. The result: happier customers, increased customer acquisition and retention, and improved critical success metrics such as shopping cart abandonment. 3. Easily build composite applications | Oracle Application Development Framework Thanks to the shared user experience strategy across Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Fusion Applications and many other Oracle Applications, customers can easily create real, customer-specific composite applications using Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle Application Development Framework. Oracle Application Development Framework components provide modular user interface components that can build rich, social composite applications. In addition, a broad set of components spanning BPM, SOA, ECM, and beyond can be quickly and easily incorporated into composite applications. 4. Integrate records management into a global content platform | Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g provides leading records management capabilities as part of a unified ECM platform for managing records, documents, Web content, digital assets, enterprise imaging, and application imaging. This unique strategy provides comprehensive records management in a consistent, cost-effective way, and enables organizations to consolidate ECM repositories and connect ECM to critical business applications. 5. Achieve ECM at extreme scale | Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Exadata To support the high-performance demands of a unified and rationalized content platform, Oracle has pioneered highly scalable and high-performing ECM infrastructures. Two innovations in particular helped make this happen. The core ECM platform itself moved to an Enterprise Java architecture, so organizations can now use Oracle WebLogic Server for enhanced scalability and manageability. Oracle Enterprise Content Management 11g can leverage Oracle Exadata for extreme performance and scale. Likewise, Oracle Exalogic--Oracle's foundation for cloud computing--enables extreme performance for processor-intensive capabilities such as content conversion or dynamic Web page delivery. Learn more about Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

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• Rules and advice for logging?

  - by Nick Rosencrantz

  In my organization we've put together some rules / guildelines about logging that I would like to know if you can add to or comment. We use Java but you may comment in general about loggin - rules and advice Use the correct logging level ERROR: Something has gone very wrong and need fixing immediately WARNING: The process can continue without fixing. The application should tolerate this level but the warning should always get investigated. INFO: Information that an important process is finished DEBUG. Is only used during development Make sure that you know what you're logging. Avoid that the logging influences the behavior of the application The function of the logging should be to write messages in the log. Log messages should be descriptive, clear, short and concise. There is not much use of a nonsense message when troubleshooting. Put the right properties in log4j Put in that the right method and class is written automatically. Example: Datedfile -web log4j.rootLogger=ERROR, DATEDFILE log4j.logger.org.springframework=INFO log4j.logger.waffle=ERROR log4j.logger.se.prv=INFO log4j.logger.se.prv.common.mvc=INFO log4j.logger.se.prv.omklassning=DEBUG log4j.appender.DATEDFILE=biz.minaret.log4j.DatedFileAppender log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{HH:mm:ss,SSS} %-5p [%C{1}.%M] - %m%n log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Prefix=omklassning. log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Suffix=.log log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Directory=//localhost/WebSphereLog/omklassning/ Log value. Please log values from the application. Log prefix. State which part of the application it is that the logging is written from, preferably with something for the project agreed prefix e.g. PANDORA_DB The amount of text. Be careful so that there is not too much logging text. It can influence the performance of the app. Loggning format: -There are several variants and methods to use with log4j but we would like a uniform use of the following format, when we log at exceptions: logger.error("PANDORA_DB2: Fel vid hämtning av frist i TP210_RAPPORTFRIST", e); In the example above it is assumed that we have set log4j properties so that it automatically write the class and the method. Always use logger and not the following: System.out.println(), System.err.println(), e.printStackTrace() If the web app uses our framework you can get very detailed error information from EJB, if using try-catch in the handler and logging according to the model above: In our project we use this conversion pattern with which method and class names are written out automatically . Here we use two different pattents for console and for datedfileappender: log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n In both the examples above method and class wioll be written out. In the console row number will also be written our. toString() Please have a toString() for every object. EX: @Override public String toString() { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.append(" DwfInformation [ "); sb.append("cc: ").append(cc); sb.append("pn: ").append(pn); sb.append("kc: ").append(kc); sb.append("numberOfPages: ").append(numberOfPages); sb.append("publicationDate: ").append(publicationDate); sb.append("version: ").append(version); sb.append(" ]"); return sb.toString(); } instead of special method which make these outputs public void printAll() { logger.info("inbet: " + getInbetInput()); logger.info("betdat: " + betdat); logger.info("betid: " + betid); logger.info("send: " + send); logger.info("appr: " + appr); logger.info("rereg: " + rereg); logger.info("NY: " + ny); logger.info("CNT: " + cnt); } So is there anything you can add, comment or find questionable with these ways of using the logging? Feel free to answer or comment even if it is not related to Java, Java and log4j is just an implementation of how this is reasoned.

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• Bad Spot to Be In: Playing Catch-up with Mobile Advertising

  - by Mike Stiles

  You probably noticed, there’s a mass migration going on from online desktop/laptop usage to smartphone/tablet usage.  It’s an indicator of how we live our lives in the modern world: always on the go, with no intention of being disconnected while out there. Consequently, paid as it relates to mobile advertising is taking the social spotlight. eMarketer estimated that in 2013, US adults would spend about 2 hours, 21 minutes a day on mobile, not counting talking time. More people in the world own smartphones than own toothbrushes (bad news I suppose if you’re marketing toothpaste). They’re using those mobile devices to access social networks, consuming at least 17% of their mobile time on them. Frankly, you don’t need a deep dive into mobile usage stats to know what’s going on. Just look around you in any store, venue or coffee shop. It’s really obvious…our mobile devices are now where we “are,” so that’s where marketers can increasingly reach us. And it’s a smart place for them to do just that. Mobile devices can be viewed more and more as shopping facilitators. Usually when someone is on mobile, they are not in passive research mode. They are likely standing near a store or in front of a product, using their mobile to seek reassurance that buying that product is the right move. They are the hottest of hot prospects. Consider that 4 out of 5 consumers use smartphones to shop, 52% of Americans use mobile devices for in-store for research, 70% of mobile searches lead to online action inside of an hour, and people that find you on mobile convert at almost 3x the rate as those that find you on desktop or laptop. But what are marketers doing? Enter statistics from Mary Meeker’s latest State of the Internet report. Common sense says you buy advertising where people are spending their eyeball time, right? But while mobile is 20% of media use and rising, the ad spend there is 4%. Conversely, while print usage is at 5% and falling, ad spend there is 19%. We all love nostalgia, but come on. There are reasons marketing dollar migration to mobile has not matched user migration, including the availability of mobile ad products and the ability to measure user response to mobile ads. But interesting things are happening now. First came Facebook’s mobile ad, which let app developers pay to get potential downloads. Then their mobile ad network was announced at F8, allowing marketers to target users across non-Facebook apps while leveraging the wealth of diverse data Facebook has on those users, a big deal since Nielsen has pointed out mobile apps make up 89% of the media time spent on mobile. Twitter has a similar play in motion with their MoPub acquisition. And now mobile deeplinks have arrived, which can take users straight to sub-pages of mobile apps for a faster, more direct shopper/researcher user experience. The sooner the gratification, the smoother and faster the conversion. To be clear, growth in mobile ad spending is well underway. After posting $13.1 billion in 2013, Gartner expects global mobile ad spending to reach $18 billion this year, then go to $41.9 billion by 2017. Cheap smartphones and data plans are spreading worldwide, further fueling the shift to mobile. Mobile usage in India alone should grow 400% by 2018. And, of course, there’s the famous statistic that mobile should overtake desktop Internet usage this year. How can we as marketers mess up this opportunity? Two ways. We could position ourselves in perpetual “catch-up” mode and keep spending ad dollars where the public used to be. And we could annoy mobile users with horrid old-school marketing practices. Two-thirds of users told Forrester they think interruptive in-app ads are more annoying than TV ads. Make sure your brand’s social marketing technology platform is delivering a crystal clear picture of your social connections so the mobile touch point is highly relevant, mobile optimized, and delivering real value and satisfying experiences. Otherwise, all we’ve done is find a new way to be unwanted. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Kate Mallatratt, freeimages.com

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