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• Links from UK TechDays 2010 sessions on Entity Framework, Parallel Programming and Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  [I will do some longer posts around my sessions when I get back from holiday next week] Big thanks to all those who attended my 3 sessions at TechDays this week (April 13th and 14th, 2010). I really enjoyed both days and watched some great session – my personal fave being the Silverlight/Expression session by my friend and colleague Mike Taulty. The following links should help get you up and running on each of the technologies. Entity Framework 4 Entity Framework 4 Resources http://bit.ly/ef4resources Entity Framework Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet Entity Framework Design Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/ Parallel Programming Parallel Computing Developer Center http://msdn.com/concurrency Code samples http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ParExtSamples Managed Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam Tools Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel My code samples http://gist.github.com/364522  And PDC 2009 session recordings to watch: Windows Azure Platform UK Site http://bit.ly/landazure UK Community http://bit.ly/ukazure (http://ukazure.ning.com ) Feedback www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com Azure Diagnostics Manager - A client for Windows Azure Diagnostics Cloud Storage Studio - A client for Windows Azure Storage SQL Azure Migration Wizard http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com

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• Is there a viable alternative to the agile development methodology? [closed]

  - by Eric Wilson

  The two predominant software-development methodologies are waterfall and agile. When discussing these two, there is often much focus on the particular practices that distinguish them (pair programming, TDD, etc. vs. functional spec, big up-front design, etc.) But the real differences are far deeper, in that these practices come from a philosophy. Waterfall says: Change is costly, so it should be minimized. Agile says: Change is inevitable, so make change cheap. My question is, regardless of what you think of TDD or functional specs, is the waterfall development methodology really viable? Does anyone really think that minimizing change in software is a viable option for those that desire to deliver valuable software? Or is the question really about what sort of practices work best in our situations to manage the inevitable change?

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• How to go about unused CSS issues

  - by Saif Bechan

  I am running some speedtests on a blog, and I always get complaints about unused CSS. But this is not CSS that I never use, it is just not used on that particular page. Now I work in a structured way, but there still has to be some CSS in the file that will not be used, because you need it on another page. I do not think that using different CSS files on different pages is the way to go, I think you are much better off just creating one big file that can be cached. Now is there an elegant way of dealing with this, or do you just stick with it.

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• IBM "per core" comparisons for SPECjEnterprise2010

  - by jhenning

  I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from Roman Kharkovski (an IBM employee) comparing some SPECjEnterprise2010 results for IBM vs. Oracle. Mr. Kharkovski's blog claims that SPARC delivers half the transactions per core vs. POWER7. Prior to any argument, I should say that my predisposition is to like Mr. Kharkovski, because he says that his blog is intended to be factual; that the intent is to try to avoid marketing hype and FUD tactic; and mostly because he features a picture of himself wearing a bike helmet (me too). Therefore, in a spirit of technical argument, rather than FUD fight, there are a few areas in his comparison that should be discussed. Scaling is not free For any benchmark, if a small system scores 13k using quantity R1 of some resource, and a big system scores 57k using quantity R2 of that resource, then, sure, it's tempting to divide: is  13k/R1 > 57k/R2 ? It is tempting, but not necessarily educational. The problem is that scaling is not free. Building big systems is harder than building small systems. Scoring  13k/R1  on a little system provides no guarantee whatsoever that one can sustain that ratio when attempting to handle more than 4 times as many users. Choosing the denominator radically changes the picture When ratios are used, one can vastly manipulate appearances by the choice of denominator. In this case, lots of choices are available for the resource to be compared (R1 and R2 above). IBM chooses to put cores in the denominator. Mr. Kharkovski provides some reasons for that choice in his blog entry. And yet, it should be noted that the very concept of a core is: arbitrary: not necessarily comparable across vendors; fluid: modern chips shift chip resources in response to load; and invisible: unless you have a microscope, you can't see it. By contrast, one can actually see processor chips with the naked eye, and they are a bit easier to count. If we put chips in the denominator instead of cores, we get: 13161.07 EjOPS / 4 chips = 3290 EjOPS per chip for IBM vs 57422.17 EjOPS / 16 chips = 3588 EjOPS per chip for Oracle The choice of denominator makes all the difference in the appearance. Speaking for myself, dividing by chips just seems to make more sense, because: I can see chips and count them; and I can accurately compare the number of chips in my system to the count in some other vendor's system; and Tthe probability of being able to continue to accurately count them over the next 10 years of microprocessor development seems higher than the probability of being able to accurately and comparably count "cores". SPEC Fair use requirements Speaking as an individual, not speaking for SPEC and not speaking for my employer, I wonder whether Mr. Kharkovski's blog article, taken as a whole, meets the requirements of the SPEC Fair Use rule www.spec.org/fairuse.html section I.D.2. For example, Mr. Kharkovski's footnote (1) begins Results from http://www.spec.org as of 04/04/2013 Oracle SUN SPARC T5-8 449 EjOPS/core SPECjEnterprise2010 (Oracle's WLS best SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS/core result on SPARC). IBM Power730 823 EjOPS/core (World Record SPECjEnterprise2010 EJOPS/core result) The questionable tactic, from a Fair Use point of view, is that there is no such metric at the designated location. At www.spec.org, You can find the SPEC metric 57422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for Oracle and You can also find the SPEC metric 13161.07 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS for IBM. Despite the implication of the footnote, you will not find any mention of 449 nor anything that says 823. SPEC says that you can, under its fair use rule, derive your own values; but it emphasizes: "The context must not give the appearance that SPEC has created or endorsed the derived value." Substantiation and transparency Although SPEC disclaims responsibility for non-SPEC information (section I.E), it says that non-SPEC data and methods should be accurate, should be explained, should be substantiated. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible for the reader to independently verify the pricing: Were like units compared to like (e.g. list price to list price)? Were all components (hw, sw, support) included? Were all fees included? Note that when tpc.org shows IBM pricing, there are often items such as "PROCESSOR ACTIVATION" and "MEMORY ACTIVATION". Without the transparency of a detailed breakdown, the pricing claims are questionable. T5 claim for "Fastest Processor" Mr. Kharkovski several times questions Oracle's claim for fastest processor, writing You see, when you publish industry benchmarks, people may actually compare your results to other vendor's results. Well, as we performance people always say, "it depends". If you believe in performance-per-core as the primary way of looking at the world, then yes, the POWER7+ is impressive, spending its chip resources to support up to 32 threads (8 cores x 4 threads). Or, it just might be useful to consider performance-per-chip. Each SPARC T5 chip allows 128 hardware threads to be simultaneously executing (16 cores x 8 threads). The Industry Standard Benchmark that focuses specifically on processor chip performance is SPEC CPU2006. For this very well known and popular benchmark, SPARC T5: provides better performance than both POWER7 and POWER7+, for 1 chip vs. 1 chip, for 8 chip vs. 8 chip, for integer (SPECint_rate2006) and floating point (SPECfp_rate2006), for Peak tuning and for Base tuning. For example, at the 8-chip level, integer throughput (SPECint_rate2006) is: 3750 for SPARC 2170 for POWER7+. You can find the details at the March 2013 BestPerf CPU2006 page SPEC is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, www.spec.org. The two specific results quoted for SPECjEnterprise2010 are posted at the URLs linked from the discussion. Results for SPEC CPU2006 were verified at spec.org 1 July 2013, and can be rechecked here.

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• Installed Ubuntu in VMware Player, Black side bars / broken GUI

  - by Eric

  I recently installed Ubuntu 12.10 in VMware Player and have came up with a black sidebar, missing icons, a pretty broken GUI. Everything works just fine though. I am able to run Firefox and open termainal and all that good stuff just fine, it's just that I can SEE them on the sidebar. I have to open up a seperate window on Windows with a picture of the Ubuntu 12.10 desktop in order for me to know what to click on, but once I do click on it, it's pretty much smooth sailing from there(not counting closing Firefox and several other things). Again, everything works just fine, but when it comes to the sidebar, the GUI, the dashboard (get a completely black screen for when I open dash board), they come up as completely black, broken (visual tears and what not), and hoving over them just brings up a big black bar (assuming it's the "zooming" in of the icon, but it just shows a black bar of where the icon should be). I'm not exactly sure what so do to get this to work (to fix the GUI), any ideas as to what I may do to fix this?

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• Legal Precautions of Customizing Ubuntu LiveCD

  - by Voulnet

  Hello everyone, the organization I work at wants to create a custom Ubuntu LiveCD, the customizations are: Pre-installed programs, plugins, some device drivers, and aesthetics such as icons and backgrounds, as well as changing Firefox's homepage and removing unneeded packages. Not big changes, obviously, and we wish to distribute this custom image for clients to use as a bootable CD or USB stick in order to have a quick environment where all our tools are available instantly. What are the licensing and legal consequences of this? What if some of the programs or plugins that are to be pre-packaged are not GPL'd? I should finally note that we are not changing any code in the kernel or any other distro component. Thank you for your time!

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• SQLAuthority News – 7th Anniversary of Blog – A Personal Note

  - by Pinal Dave

  Special Day Today is a very special day – seven years ago I blogged for the very first time.  Seven years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to blog, or even what a blog was or what to write.  I was working as a DBA, and I was trying to solve a problem – at my job, there were a few issues I had to fix again and again and again.  There were days when I was rewriting the same solution over and over, and there were times when I would get very frustrated because I could not write the same elegant solution that I had written before.  I came up with a solution to this problem – posting these solutions online, where I could access them whenever I needed them.  At that point, I had no idea what a blog was, or even how the internet worked, I had no idea that a blog would be visible to others.  Can you believe it? Google it on Yahoo! After a few posts on this “blog,” there was a surprise for me – an e-mail saying that someone had left me a comment.  I was surprised, because I didn’t even know you could comment on a blog!  I logged on and read my comment.  It said: “I like your script,but there is a small bug.  If you could fix it, it will run on multiple other versions of SQL Server.”  I was like, “wow, someone figured out how to find my blog, and they figured out how to fix my script!”  I found the bug, I fixed the script, and a wrote a thank you note to the guy.  My first question for him was: how did you figure it out – not the script, but how to find my blog?  He said he found it from Yahoo Search (this was in the time before Google, believe it or not). From that day, my life changed.  I wrote a few more posts, I got a few more comments, and I started to watch my traffic.  People were reading, commenting, and giving feedback.  At the end of the day, people enjoyed what I was writing.  This was a fantastic feeling!  I never thought I would be writing for others.  Even today, I don’t feel like I am writing for others, but that I am simply posting what I am learning every day.  From that very first day, I decided that I would not change my intent or my blog’s purpose. 72 Million Views – 2600 Posts – 57000 comments – 10 books – 9 courses Today, this blog is my habit, my addiction, my baby.  Every day I try to learn something new, and that lesson gets posted on the blog.  Lately there have been days where I am traveling for a full 24 hours, but even on those days I try to learn something new, and later when I have free time, I will still post it to the blog.  Because of this habit, this blog has over 72 millions views, I have written more than 2600 posts, and there are 57,000 comments and counting.  I have also written 10 books, 9 courses, and learned so many things.  This blog has given me back so much more than I ever put it into it.  It gave me an education, a reason to learn something new every day, and a way to connect to people.  I like to think of it as a learning chain, a relay where we all pass knowledge from one to another. Never Ending Journey When I started the blog, I thought I would write for a few days and stop, but now after seven years I haven’t stopped and I have no intention of stopping!  However, change happens, and for this blog it will start today.  This blog started as a single resource for SQL Server, but now it has grown beyond, to Sharepoint, Personal Development, Developer Training, MySQL, Big Data, and lots of other things.  Truly speaking, this blog is more than just SQL Server, and that was always my intention.  I named it “SQL Authority,” not “SQL Server Authority”!  Loudly and clearly, I would like to announce that I am going to go back to my roots and start writing more about SQL, more about big data, and more about the other technology like relational databases, MySQL, Oracle, and others.  My goal is not to become a comprehensive resource for every technology, my goal is to learn something new every day – and now it can be so much more than just SQL Server.  I will learn it, and post it here for you. I have written a very long post on this anniversary, but here is the summary: Thank You.  You all have been wonderful.  Seven years is a long journey, and it makes me emotional.  I have been “with” this blog before I met my wife, before we had our daughter.  This blog is like a fourth member of the family.  Keep reading, keep commenting, keep supporting.  Thank you all. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: About Me, MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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• Caching large amount of ajax returned objects

  - by ofcapl

  I'm building an application which fetches large amount of items with ajax requests via other application API. It returns me 6k - 30k js objects which are used multiple times across various application views (sorting, filtering etc.). I would like to avoid querying API every time for such big list so I decided to cache this data somehow. I was thinking about various solutions: saving it to localstorage, using some caching library (e.g. locachejs), storing in js var. I'm not an expert so I would like to hear Your suggestions about each (or one of these) solution, about its pros and cons. Every help will be very appreciated.

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• Security issue about making my code public in GitHub

  - by John Doe

  I'm developing a big community/forum website and I'd like to upload my code to GitHub to have at least some sort of version control over it (because I have nothing other than a .rar file as a backup, not even SVN), to let others contribute to the project, and also perhaps using it to let my potential future employers see some of my code as some sort of curriculum. But what I'm wondering now, and I'm suprised I haven't seen anyone mention it before is the security aspect of it. Isn't publishing the code of a website a HUGE security hole? Is like giving a potential hacker or anyone who would like to find any potential exploit possible, even considering that the critical files aren't uploaded (database passwords, authentication scripts, etc.). Of course that there are millions of projects uploaded to GitHub and no one will find mine just 'by chance'. But if they look for it, it would indeed be there. Bottomline: my problem is not about copyright or licenses, but others finding exploits in my website. I'm I missing something here?

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• Mixed Emotions: Humans React to Natural Language Computer

  - by Applications User Experience

  There was a big event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, November 15. Watson, the natural language computer developed at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and its inventor and principal research investigator, David Ferrucci, were guests at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for another round of the television game Jeopardy. You may have read about or watched on YouTube how Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two top Jeopardy competitors, last February. This time, Watson swept the floor with two Silicon Valley high-achievers, one a venture capitalist with a background  in math, computer engineering, and physics, and the other a technology and finance writer well-versed in all aspects of culture and humanities. Watson is the product of the DeepQA research project, which attempts to create an artificially intelligent computing system through advances in natural language processing (NLP), among other technologies. NLP is a computing strategy that seeks to provide answers by processing large amounts of unstructured data contained in multiple large domains of human knowledge. There are several ways to perform NLP, but one way to start is by recognizing key words, then processing  contextual  cues associated with the keyword concepts so that you get many more “smart” (that is, human-like) deductions,  rather than a series of “dumb” matches.  Jeopardy questions often require more than key word matching to get the correct answer; typically several pieces of information put together, often from vastly different categories, to come up with a satisfactory word string solution that can be rephrased as a question.  Smarter than your average search engine, but is it as smart as a human? Watson was especially fast at descrambling mixed-up state capital names, and recalling and pairing movie titles where one started and the other ended in the same word (e.g., Billion Dollar Baby Boom, where both titles used the word Baby). David said they had basically removed the variable of how fast Watson hit the buzzer compared to human contestants, but frustration frequently appeared on the faces of the contestants beaten to the punch by Watson. David explained that top Jeopardy winners like Jennings achieved their success with a similar strategy, timing their buzz to the end of the reading of the clue,  and “running the board”, being first to respond on about 60% of the clues.  Similar results for Watson. It made sense that Watson would be good at the technical and scientific stuff, so I figured the venture capitalist was toast. But I thought for sure Watson would lose to the writer in categories such as pop culture, wines and foods, and other humanities. Surprisingly, it held its own. I was amazed it could recognize a word definition of a syllogism in the category of philosophy. So what was the audience reaction to all of this? We started out expecting our formidable human contestants to easily run some of their categories; however, they started off on the wrong foot with the state capitals which Watson could unscramble so efficiently. By the end of the first round, contestants and the audience were feeling a little bit, well, …. deflated. Watson was winning by about $13,000, and the humans had gone into negative dollars. The IBM host said he was going to “slow Watson down a bit,” and the humans came back with respectable scores in Double Jeopardy. This was partially thanks to a very sympathetic audience (and host, also a human) providing “group-think” on many questions, especially baseball ‘s most valuable players, which by the way, couldn’t have been hard because even I knew them.  Yes, that’s right, the humans cheated. Since Watson could speak but not hear us (it didn’t have speech recognition capability), it was probably unaware of this. In Final Jeopardy, the single question had to do with law. I was sure Watson would blow this one, but all contestants were able to answer correctly about a copyright law. In a career devoted to making computers more helpful to people, I think I may have seen how a computer can do too much. I’m not sure I’d want to work side-by-side with a Watson doing my job. Certainly listening and empathy are important traits we humans still have over Watson.  While there was great enthusiasm in the packed room of computer scientists and their friends for this standing-room-only show, I think it made several of us uneasy (especially the poor human contestants whose egos were soundly bashed in the first round). This computer system, by the way , only took 4 years to program. David Ferrucci mentioned several practical uses for Watson, including medical diagnoses and legal strategies. Are you “the expert” in your job? Imagine NLP computing on an Oracle database.   This may be the user interface of the future to enable users to better process big data. How do you think you’d like it? Postscript: There were three little boys sitting in front of me in the very first row. They looked, how shall I say it, … unimpressed!

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• Interesting/Innovative Open Source tools for indie games

  - by Gastón

  Just out of curiosity, I want to know opensource tools or projects that can add some interesting features to indie games, preferably those that could only be found on big-budget games. EDIT: As suggested by The Communist Duck and Joe Wreschnig, I'm putting the examples as answers. EDIT 2: Please do not post tools like PyGame, Inkscape, Gimp, Audacity, Slick2D, Phys2D, Blender (except for interesting plugins) and the like. I know they are great tools/libraries and some would argue essential to develop good games, but I'm looking for more rare projects. Could be something really specific or niche, like generating realistic trees and plants, or realistic AI for animals.

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• TechEd Israel 2010 may only accept speakers from sponsors

  A month or so ago, Microsoft Israel started sending out emails to its partners and registered event users to Save the date! Micraoft Teched Israel is coming, and its going to be this november! Great news I thought to myself. Id been to a couple of the MS teched events, as a speaker and as an attendee, and it was lovely and professionally done. Israel is an amazing place for technology and development and TechEd hosted some big names in the world of MS software. A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• TechEd Israel 2010 may only accept speakers from sponsors

  A month or so ago, Microsoft Israel started sending out emails to its partners and registered event users to Save the date! Micraoft Teched Israel is coming, and its going to be this november! Great news I thought to myself. Id been to a couple of the MS teched events, as a speaker and as an attendee, and it was lovely and professionally done. Israel is an amazing place for technology and development and TechEd hosted some big names in the world of MS software. A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Looking Back at PASS Summit 2013 - Location

  - by RickHeiges

  Now that it has been a few weeks since the Summit, I wanted to look back at the location "experiment". Convention Center - It seemed to work well for the conference. There were quite a few areas in the area where you could sit down and get some work down or have a discussion. For the larger welcome reception the first night, I really liked the different areas. If you wanted to enjoy the Quiz Bowl, the ballroom area was set up nicely with big screens so that everyone could see and hear. The area right...(read more)

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• X technology is dead

  - by Daniel Moth

  Every so often, technology pundits (i.e. people not involved in the game, but who like commenting about it) throw out big controversial statements (typically to increase their readership), with a common one being that "Technology/platform X is dead". My former colleague (who I guess is now my distant colleague) uses the same trick with his blog post: "iPhone 4 is dead". But, his motivation is to set the record straight (and I believe him) by sharing his opinion on recent commentary around Silverlight, WPF etc. I enjoyed his post and the comments, so I hope you do too :-) Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Even EA's Have Bad Days - it's Time to Reset

  - by Pat Shepherd

  I saw this article and thought I'd share it because, even we EA's have bad days and the 7 points listed are a great way for you to hit the "reset" button. From Geoffrey James on INC.COM, here are 7 ways to change your view of things when, say, you are hitting a frustration point coordinating stakeholders to agree on an approach (never happens, right?) Positive Thinking: 7 Easy Ways to Improve a Bad Day http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/positive-thinking-7-easy-ways-to-improve-a-bad-day.html To paraphrase:          You can decide (in an instant) to change patterns of the past          Believe in (or even visualize) good things happening, and they will          Keep a healthy perspective on the work-life / life-life continuum (what things REALLY matter in the big scheme of things)                  Focus on the good (the laws of positive-attraction apply)

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• genetic algorithm for leveling/build test

  - by Renan Malke Stigliani

  I'm starting o build a online PVP (duel like, one-to-one) game, where there is leveling, skill points, special attacks and all the common stuff. Since I never did anything like that, I'm still thinking about the maths behind the level/skill/special balances. So I thought good way of testing the best/combo builds would implement a Genetic Algorith. It'd be like that: Generate a big portion of random characters Make them fight, level them up accordingly to the victories(more XP)/losses(less XP) Mate the winners, crossing their builds, to try to make even best characters Add some more random chars, emulating new players Repeat the process for some time, or util find some chars who can beat everyone butts So I could play with the math and try to find the balance where the top x% chars would be a mix of various build types. So, is it a good idea, or there are some other easier method to do the balance? PS: I like this also, because it sounds funny

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• SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

  Since a while I'm considering to pick up my activities as a student and I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science. Personal motivation I mean after all this years as a professional software (and database) developer I have the personal urge to complete this part of my education. Having various certifications by Microsoft and being awarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) twice looks pretty awesome on a resume but having a "proper" degree would just complete my package. During the last couple of years I already got in touch with C-SAC (local business school with degree courses), the University of Mauritius and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT to check the options to enroll as an experienced software developer. Quite frankly, it was kind of alienating to receive that feedback: Start from scratch! No seriously? Spending x amount of years to sit for courses that might be outdated and form part of your daily routine? Probably being in an awkward situation in which your professional expertise might exceed the lecturers knowledge? I don't know... but if that's path to walk... Well, then I might have to go for it. SUPINFO International University Some weeks ago I was contacted by the General Manager, Education Recruitment and Development of Medine Education Village, Yamal Matabudul, to have a chat on how the local IT scene, namely the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC), could assist in their plans to promote their upcoming campus. Medine went into partnership with the French-based SUPINFO International University and Mauritius will be the 36th location world-wide for SUPINFO. Actually, the concept of SUPINFO is very likely to the common understanding of an apprenticeship in Germany. Not only does a student enroll into the programme but will also be placed into various internships as part of the curriculum. It's a big advantage in my opinion as the person stays in touch with the daily procedures and workflows in the real world of IT. Statements like "We just received a 'crash course' of information and learned new technology which is equivalent to 1.5 months of lectures at the university" wouldn't form part of the experience of such an education. Open Day at the Medine Education Village Last Saturday, Medine organised their Open Day and it was the official inauguration of the SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. It's now listed on their website, too - but be warned, the site is mainly in French language although the courses are all done in English. Not only was it a big opportunity to "hang out" on the campus of Medine but it was great to see the first professional partners for their internship programme, too. Oh, just for the records, IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. will also be among the future employers for SUPINFO students. More about that in an upcoming blog entry. Open Day at Medine Education Village - SUPINFO International University in Mauritius Mr Alick Mouriesse, President of SUPINFO, arrived the previous day and he gave all attendees a great overview of the roots of SUPINFO, the general development of the educational syllabus and their high emphasis on their partnerships with local IT companies in order to assist their students to get future jobs but also feel the heartbeat of technology live. Something which is completely missing in classic institutions of tertiary education in Computer Science. And since I was on tour with my children, as usual during weekends, he also talked about the outlook of having a SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. Apart from the close connection to IT companies and providing internships to students, SUPINFO clearly works on an international level. Meaning students of SUPINFO can move around the globe and can continue their studies seamlessly. For example, you might enroll for your first year in France, then continue to do 2nd and 3rd year in Canada or any other country with a SUPINFO campus to earn your bachelor degree, and then live and study in Mauritius for the next 2 years to achieve a Master degree. Having a chat with Dale Smith, Expand Technologies, after his interesting session on Technological Entrepreneurship - TechPreneur More questions by other craftsmen of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community And of course, this concept works in any direction, giving Mauritian students a huge (!) opportunity to live, study and work abroad. And thanks to this, Medine already announced that there will be new facilities near Cascavelle to provide dormitories and other facilities to international students coming to our island. Awesome! Okay, but why SUPINFO? Well, coming back to my original statement - I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science - SUPINFO has a process called Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) which is tailor-made for employees in the field of IT, and allows you to enroll in their course programme. I already got in touch with their online support chat but was only redirected to some FAQs on their website, unfortunately. So, during the Open Day I seized the opportunity to have an one-on-one conversation with Alick Mouriesse, and he clearly encouraged me to gather my certifications and working experience. SUPINFO does an individual evaluation prior to their assignment regarding course level, and hopefully my chances of getting some modules ahead of studies are looking better than compared to the other institutes. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go down the easy route but why should someone sit for "Database 101" or "Principles of OOP" when applying and preaching database normalisation and practicing Clean Code Developer are like flesh and blood? Anyway, I'll be off to get my transcripts of certificates together with my course assignments from the old days at the university. Yes, I studied Applied Chemistry for a couple of years before intersecting into IT and software development particularly... ;-)

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• Recommend good shared hosting [closed]

  - by Django Reinhardt

  It seems that everyone has something bad to say about the "big" shared hosting sites like 1and1, HostGator, GoDaddy, etc. but what are the ones you've had GOOD experiences with? I'm going to focus this question on LAMP stacks, given that they're the most popular option for shared hosting, but if you have an especially good experience with a different stack. Good shared hosting should be: Competitively priced - But not at the expense of... Fully featured - Email, PHP, MySQL, but what else? Highly customizable - Do you have access to advanced features like being able to deliver static content? Up to date - Do they run PHP4 as standard, or do they run the latest version? Customer service - When you have a problem are they rude and unhelpful? Do they take ages to reply? So how about it? Who have YOU have a good experience with?

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• How to document/verify consistent layering?

  - by Morten

  I have recently moved to the dark side: I am now a CUSTOMER of software development -- mainly websites. With this new role comes new concerns. As a programmer i know how solid an application becomes when it is properly layered, and I want to use this knowledge in my new job. I don't want business logic in my presentation layer, and certainly not presentation stuff in my data layer. Thus, I want to be able to demand from my supllier that they document the level of layering, and how neat and consistent the layering is. The big question is: How is the level of layering documented to me as a customer, and is that a reasonable demmand for me to have, so I don't have to look in the code (I'm not supposed to do that anymore)?

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• Learning C# quickly

  - by Niklas H

  I just got a position at a big, well-known C#/.NET company. The thing is that I don't know any C# or .NET at all (they know that) and I want to learn as much as I can before I start, to not waste time (and money). How do I learn C#/.NET quickly and efficiently? Resources? Great tutorials? Videos? EDIT: I forgot to mention that I have a couple of years experience with Java. So I am not new to programming - just new to .NET.

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• Technologie Roadmap: Portlet JSR286 vs Widget/Gadget

  - by Aerosteak

  Hello IBM got me confused (again). For many years IBM have been pushing for Portlet Containers with the JSR 168 and later the JSR 286 Specification. 2008-2009, IBM the Lotus division introduced the iWidget Specification. Based on my reading, it is a more dynamic and lightweight version of the Portlets, close to Google Gadget. It uses a different paradigm than Porlet while providing the same features. A major differentiator with this kind of client side technologies is that you don’t need a big and costly Portal infrastructure. To not fall in the ‘It depends on needs’ discussions, let consider the following: * New company, no legacy portlet, no portal in place. What are your thoughts on this?

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• How could this diagram of the current most lucrative technologies be improved?

  - by Edward Tanguay

  I'm giving a talk in April 2011 on the "Developer English" and showing my non-developer audience, mostly English teachers, various diagrams to explain how developers see their industry etc. One of these diagrams is "Hot Technologies", basically, if you want to become a developer, what technologies should you learn to have the highest chance of (1) getting a job (2) making a good salary, and (3) work with the most exciting technology. This is a draft I made just to get some ideas out, basically C#, PHP, Java are where the bulk of the jobs are. Mobile development has a big future. JavaScript is becoming more and more important, and I want to list "minor technologies" such a Python, Ruby on Rails to the side, I assume e.g. that in general, there are a much smaller percentage of jobs in these technologies as in C#, PHP, Java. How could this diagram be improved?

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• Highly recommended: "5 Things SQL Server does different from what many developers expect" by Nico Ja

  A couple of weeks ago, the Belgian Techdays were held in Antwerp. Together with Scott Hillier I presented the SharePoint pre-conference sessions (watch them online over here, search for pre-conference or SharePoint). Even though Belgium is not a very big country, the Microsoft team managed to get some high profile speakers like Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Hanselman. But if you have like 60 minutes to spare there is one session that I'd really recommend to check out, not related to SharePoint, but...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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