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• Assigning jQuery ajax response text to variable constanty returns null

  - by Dan Twining

  Hi all, hopefully one of you on this great site can help. I'm having issues with assigning a variable to a jQuery ajax call response text. I have a form which when submited runs my "checkemail" function to varify the email address can be found in a database. If it's found, the responseText == "true", else "false". This works fine, and can be seen ok using Firebug....but the actual variable the response text should be assigned to is constantly showing "", and therefore causing the function to return false all the time. function checkemail(){ var EmailFromForm = $("#lostemail").val(); var EmailCheckRes = $.ajax({ type : "POST", cache : false, url : "./scripts/passreset/emailcheck.php", data : "Email="+EmailFromForm, dataType : "text", }).responseText; if (EmailCheckRes == "true") { alert("Should say true: " + EmailCheckRes); return true; } else { $("#ErrorMsg").html("Your email address is either invalid or not found."); alert("Should say false: " + EmailCheckRes); return false; } } If anyone has any pointers as to what i'm doing wrong it'd be greatly appreciated.

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• yet another logic.

  - by Sunil

  I'm working on a research problem out of curiosity and I don't know how to program the logic that I've in mind. Let me explain it to you : I've 4 vectors say for example, v1 = 1 1 1 1 v2 = 2 2 2 2 v3 = 3 3 3 3 v4 = 4 4 4 4 Now what I want to do is to add them combination-wise. i.e v12 = v1+v2 v13 = v1+v3 v14 = v1+v4 v23 = v2+v3 v24 = v2+v4 v34 = v3+v4 Till this step it is just fine. The problem/trick is now, at the end of each iteration I give the obtained vectors into a black box function and it returns only few of the vectors say v12, v13 and v34. Now, I want to add each of these vectors one vector from v1,v2,v3,v4 which it hasn't added before. For example v3 and v4 hasn't been added to v12 so I want to create v123 and v124. similarly for all the vectors like, v12 should become : v123 = v12+v3 v124 = v12+v4 v13 should become : v132 // this should not occur because I already have v123 v134 = v13+v4; v14,v23 and v24 cannot be considered because it was deleted in the black box function so all we have in our hands to work with is v12,v13 and v34. v34 should become : v341 // cannot occur because we have 134 v342 = v34+v2 It is important that I do not do all at one step at the start like for example I can do (4 choose 3) 4C3 and finish it off but I want to do it step by step at each iteration. I've asked a modified version of this question before (without including the black box function) and got answers here. Can anybody tell me how to do it when the black box function is included ? A modification of the previous answer would also be great. Thanks in advance.

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• Set tier price on different products (special conditions) in Magento?

  - by user1547625

  Let’s say I sell mobile phones. I might sell phones with the following tiered pricing iPhone4 (1x$200ea. 3x$150ea. 10x$100ea.) iPhone4s (1x$300ea. 3x$250ea. 10x$200ea.) iPhone5 (1x$500ea. 3x$400ea. 10x$1300ea.) Plus maybe I sell Samsungs, Nokias, accessories, etc. So let’s say a customer wants to buy 3 iphones, but they want 1x iPhone 4, 1x iPhone 4s and 1x iPhone 5. Instead of getting the single unit price for each, we would want to group iphones, so that they would get the 3x price for each unit. So they would spend $150 on the iPhone 4, $250 on the iPhone 4s and $400 on the iPhone 5.... We’d have several categories and could create some type of spreadsheet for you, but would want to also have the ability to set up this categorization in the future. So please tell me how to get this done from magento admin or any other way?

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• Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

  - by Matthew Guay

  Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools.  Here we’ll look at a unique way to use them to edit the text on any webpage. How to edit text in a webpage IE8’s developer tools make it easy to make changes to a webpage and view them directly.  Simply browse to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard.  Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list. This opens the developer tools.  To do our editing, we want to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool. Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want to edit.  Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com.  Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over to make it easy to choose exactly what you want to edit. In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted.  Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want to edit is not visible.   Now, click the text you wish to change, and enter what you wish in the box.  For fun, we changed the copyright to say “©2010 Microsoft”. Go back to IE to see the changes on the page! You can also change a link on a page this way: Or you can even change the text on a button: Here’s our edited Google.com: This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too.  You could test how changes in fontsize would change how a website looks, or see how a button would look with a different label.  It can also be useful when taking screenshots.  For instance, if I want to show a friend how to do something in Gmail but don’t want to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot.  Here I changed my Gmail address to [email protected]. Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page.  You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish. We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too!  Enjoy it, and let us know how you used it to help you! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Webpage Text Areas in Your Favorite Text EditorRemove Webpage Formatting or View the HTML Code When Copying in FirefoxChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEditPad Lite – All Purpose Tabbed Text Editor 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

  - by Matthew Guay

  Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools.  Here we’ll look at a unique way to use them to edit the text on any webpage. How to edit text in a webpage IE8’s developer tools make it easy to make changes to a webpage and view them directly.  Simply browse to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard.  Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list. This opens the developer tools.  To do our editing, we want to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool. Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want to edit.  Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com.  Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over to make it easy to choose exactly what you want to edit. In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted.  Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want to edit is not visible.   Now, click the text you wish to change, and enter what you wish in the box.  For fun, we changed the copyright to say “©2010 Microsoft”. Go back to IE to see the changes on the page! You can also change a link on a page this way: Or you can even change the text on a button: Here’s our edited Google.com: This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too.  You could test how changes in fontsize would change how a website looks, or see how a button would look with a different label.  It can also be useful when taking screenshots.  For instance, if I want to show a friend how to do something in Gmail but don’t want to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot.  Here I changed my Gmail address to [email protected]. Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page.  You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish. We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too!  Enjoy it, and let us know how you used it to help you! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Webpage Text Areas in Your Favorite Text EditorRemove Webpage Formatting or View the HTML Code When Copying in FirefoxChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEditPad Lite – All Purpose Tabbed Text Editor 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Blogging: MacJournal & Windows Live Writer

  - by Jeff Julian

  One thing I have learned about using a Mac is that Apple does not produce very many free applications. The ones they do are typically not full featured and to get the full feature you need to buy their upgraded version. For example, when it comes to Photo editing and cataloging, iPhoto is not a solution for large files or RAW processing, you need Aperture which is a couple hundred dollars. I am not complaining because I like it when an application has a product team who generates revenue with it, because the chance of them being around longer seems to be higher. What is my point in all of this? Apple does not produce a product for blogging/journaling like Microsoft does with Windows Live Writer. I love Windows Live Writer. If you are on a Windows box, it is a required tool in your toolbox if you publish to a blog. The cleanness of the interface, integration with most blog APIs and ability to Save Local or Publish as a Draft make capturing your thoughts for publishing now or later a very easy task. My hope is that Microsoft will port it to the Mac, but I don’t believe that will ever happen as it is not a revenue generating product and Microsoft doesn’t often port to a Mac besides Remote Desktop Connection and MSN Messenger. For my configuration I used to use only Boot Camp on my two MacBook Pros I have owned in the past three years because I’m a PC, but after four different rebuilds (not typically due to Windows, but Boot Camp or Parallels) I decided to move off the Boot Camp platform and to VMWare Fusion. This is a complete separate blog post that I should spec out in MacJournal, but I now always boot into the Mac OS and use Fusion for my AJI Software VM or my client’s VMs. It just seems to work better for me and I have a very nice way to backup my Windows environments with VMWare.Needless to say, there was need in my new laptop configuration for a blogging tool that worked natively on a Mac. I don’t like to power up my machine for writing a document or working on an image and need to boot up a VM just so I can use Windows. Some would say why not just use a Windows laptop and put the MBP on eBay? It is just a preference and right now, I like the Mac OS for day to day work. So in comes MacJournal, part of the current MacHeist package for $19.95 (MacJournal is normally $39.95). This product is definitely not WLW, but WLW is missing some features I like in MacJournal. I hope the price point comes down on MacJournal cause I could see paying $19.95 for it, but it is always hard for me to buy a piece of software for $39.95 when I can use something else. But I am a cheapskate when it comes to software packages. I suggest if you are using a Mac to drop what you are doing pick up the MacHeist bundle today before it is over, but if you are reading this later, than download the trial and see if MacJournal is a solution for you. If you have any other suggestions that are as nice or cheaper, please comment.Product LinksMacJournal by Mariners Software $39.95 (part of MacHeist bundle for $19.95 with only one day left)Windows Live Writer by MicrosoftThis post was created using MacJournal.[Update: The joys of formatting. Make sure if you are a Geekswithblogs.net member that you use this configuration to setup the Metablog formatting of paragraphs correctly]

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• The Mysterious ARR Server Farm to URL Rewrite link

  - by OWScott

  Application Request Routing (ARR) is a reverse proxy plug-in for IIS7+ that does many things, including functioning as a load balancer.  For this post, I’m assuming that you already have an understanding of ARR.  Today I wanted to find out how the mysterious link between ARR and URL Rewrite is maintained.  Let me explain… ARR is unique in that it doesn’t work by itself.  It sits on top of IIS7 and uses URL Rewrite.  As a result, ARR depends on URL Rewrite to ‘catch’ the traffic and redirect it to an ARR Server Farm. As the last step of creating a new Server Farm, ARR will prompt you with the following: If you accept the prompt, it will create a URL Rewrite rule for you.  If you say ‘No’, then you’re on your own to create a URL Rewrite rule. When you say ‘Yes’, the Server Farm’s checkbox for “Use URL Rewrite to inspect incoming requests” will be checked.  See the following screenshot. However, I’m not a fan of this auto-rule.  The problem is that if I make any changes to the URL Rewrite rule, which I always do, and then make the wrong change in ARR, it will blow away my settings.  So, I prefer to create my own rule and manage it myself. Since I had some old rules that were managed by ARR, I wanted to update them so that they were no longer managed that way.  I took a look at a config in applicationHost.config to try to find out what property would bind the two together.  I assumed that there would be a property on the ServerFarm called something like urlRewriteRuleName that would serve as the link between ARR and URL Rewrite.  I found no such property.  After a bit of testing, I found that the name of the URL Rewrite rule is the only link between ARR and URL Rewrite.  I wouldn’t have guessed.  The URL Rewrite rule needs to be exactly ARR_{ServerFarm Name}_loadBalance, although it’s not case sensitive. Consider the following auto-created URL Rewrite rule: And, the link between ARR and URL Rewrite exists: Now, as soon as I rename that to anything else, for example, site.com ARR Binding, the link between ARR and URL Rewrite is broken. To be certain of the relationship, I renamed it back again and sure enough, the relationship was reestablished. Why is this important?  It’s only important if you want to decouple the relationship between ARR the URL Rewrite rule, but if you want to do so, the best way to do that is to rename the URL Rewrite rule.  If you uncheck the “Use URL Rewrite to inspect incoming requests” checkbox, it will delete your rule for you without prompting.  Conclusion The mysterious link between ARR and URL Rewrite only exists through the ARR Rule name.  If you want to break the link, simply rename the URL Rewrite rule.  It’s completely safe to do so, and, in my opinion, this is a rule that you should manage yourself anyway. 

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• Windows Phone–A beautiful phone which I admire but I don’t recommend to friends and family

  - by Gopinath

  Microsoft’s Windows Phones are the most beautiful phones I’ve seen. Look at the photo which Microsoft shared on their Facebook page today. It’s gorgeous. Windows Phones come in vibrant colors and the user interface is very lively. When you keep an iPhone, Android Phone & a Windows Phone on a table, Windows Phone definitely stands out. Android and iOS interfaces are routine – a bunch of apps icons arranged in rows and multiple screens. Windows Phone is very different, the live tiles concept mesmerizes us. I love Windows Phone, but neither I buy one nor I recommend to family/friends! Why? Because it does not have all the Apps I need. Microsoft advertises that Windows Phone has 100K apps on its Windows Market Place. It’s true, there are 100K+ apps available for Windows Phone but not many of them are really useful and most of the popular Apps I use on Android are not available. When I say this to my friends at Microsoft, they don’t agree and one of them asked me list the apps that are not available. For him today I spent an hour quickly scanning through the apps installed on my Google Nexus and searched for same apps on Windows Market Place. As expected many of them are not available. Here is the list of my favorite Android apps that are not available for Windows Phone Mint – I use this app more than any of the Banking Apps I’ve installed on my mobile. It’s one app to keep a tab on all the expenses and income, the best money management and tracking app. Google Chrome – Web without Google Chrome is too boring, either on Desktop or on mobile. IE is too heavy and Firefox is loosing its grip. Chrome is the new darling of web. Pulse, Flipboard – Flipboard and Pulse are one of the best apps for reading news and following content of favorite blogs. Dropbox – Sync content across devices and provides access to your content on any device.It really does not matter what is your gadget – mobile, tablet or computer; Dropbox lets you access your content. GMail, Google Maps – Should I say how important are these two apps in our day to day life!! Vonage Extension – For around 30 bucks a month, Vonage provide landline service in USA + unlimited calls to India and many other countries + Vonage Extension App that lets Android/iOS mobile to make unlimited international calls for free. Without Vonage Extension app, I’m almost cutoff from my family and friends back home in India. Instagram – The most popular camera app used from a common man to celebrities. Raaga, Dhingana  – Music is part and parcel of life and these two apps are the most like popular apps to listen to Indian music. Quora – Quora is the place where most of the sensible discussions happen on web. Google Analytics, Google Adsense – I’m a blogger and these two apps mean a lot to me The list goes on and on! There are many useful apps that are not available on Windows Phone – TuneIn, MyTWC, Chrome To Phone, Google Voice, etc. Without all these apps, Windows Phone is just another old Nokia phone. Even though Windows Phone is the most beautiful phone, it needs Apps to attract customers. Without apps a smartphone is more or less a dumb feature phone which we loved to use before release of iPhone. Wish in an year or two the beautiful Windows Phone may have all the missing Apps. When it happens I’ll buy a phone for myself and recommend it to my family & friends. But till then I prefer to stay away.

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• SQL SERVER – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – A Collection of Inspiring and Funny Posts by Vinod Kumar

  - by pinaldave

  One of the most popular quotes is: A picture is worth a thousand words. Working on this concept I started a series over my blog called the “Picture Post”. Rather than rambling over tons of material over text, we are trying to give you a capsule mode of the blog in a quick glance. Some of the picture posts already available over my blog are: Correlation of Ego and Work: Ego and Pride most of the times become a hindrance when we work inside a team. Take this cue, the first ever Picture post was published. Simple and easy to understand concept. Would want to say, Ego is the biggest enemy to humans. Read Original Post. Success (Perception Vs Reality): Personally, have always thought success is not something the talented achieve with the opportunity presented to them, but success is developed using the opportunity in hand now. In this fast paced world where success is pre-defined and convoluted by metrics it is hard to understand how complex it can sometimes be. So I took a stab at this concept in a simple way. Read Original Post. Doing Vs Saying: As Einstein would describe, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Given the amount of information we get, it is difficult to keep track, learn and implement the same. If you were ever reminded of your college days, there will always be 5-6 people doing different things and we naturally try to emulate what they are doing. This could be from competitive exams GMAT, GRE, CAT, Higher-Ed, B-School hunting etc. Rather than saying you are going to do, it is best to do and then say!!! Read Original Picture Post. Your View Vs Management View: Being in the corporate world can be really demanding and we keep asking this question – “Why me?” when the performance appraisal process ends. In this post I just want to ask you one frank opinion – “Are you really self-critical in your assessments?”. If that is the case there shouldn’t be any heartburns or surprises. If you had just one thing to take back, well forget what others are getting but invest time in making yourself better because that is going to take you longer and further in your career. Read Picture Post. Blogging lifecycle for majority: I am happy and fortunate to be in this blog post because this picture post surely doesn’t apply to SQLAuthority where consistency and persistence have been the hallmark of the blog. For the majority others, who have a tendency to start a blog, get into slumber for a while and write saying they want to get back to blogging, the picture post was specifically done for them. Paradox of being someone else: It is always a dream that we want to become somebody and in this process of doing so, we become nobody. In this constant tussle of lost identity we forget to enjoy the moment that is in front of us. I just depicted this using a simple analogy of our constant struggle to get to the other side, just to realize we missed the wonderful moments. Grass is not greener on the other side, but grass is greener where we water the surface. Read Picture Post. And on the lighter side… Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• gnome3 and unity bug in 11.10

  - by LinuxNoob

  Yes I am new to Linux but am learning stuff daily as I finally migrated my work systems to Ubuntu 11.10 and they works pretty decent given the fact that some of the application I have to use to do my job are not supported by Linux ... yet. Anyways, I was working with Unity, not even knowing there was a Gnome3 environment until I ran across a post while searching for a fix on another unrelated issue. Lo and behold, I was able after much searching to log in Gnome 3 after installing the required packages. I don't know how many articles I had to read for someone to tell me how to log into Gnome3 or into Unity by selecting the little wheel on the login screen to get the drop down for the different environments ...(I know... I'm such a Noob but I'm sure we all were at one time or another). Again, after using Unity, I was hooked on Linux and decided if I can get it to work with all the Apps I need at work and play a little WOW every now and again, I'm good to go. But again to the point. I logged into Gnome3. No icons but just a cool experience to see what the heck this thing does. I eventually figured out how to use it and I love Gnome 3 but it is as buggy as the C++ programs I first learned to write in college. I don't know if it's because i installed the packages after I was up and running in Unity or what. The issues I have are that it locks the desktop up randomly..just locks it up. Usually when i have a lot of screens opened. Never fails that it does it when i put the mouse up in the top/left corner to swap Apps. Then I can't get to the windows in the back to shut them down. A few times i just have to turn the power off on my PC ( sigh, what a POS I say to myself every time I decide "oh it was an isolated incidence"...try it again..it's so cool and designed the way I would design a desktop .. intuitive...just cool man cool) but it fails me again and again. If I had to guess I would say it's a memory problem..i do have 2gigs but nevertheless it just stops working. The mouse doesn't respond ...eventually the keyboard doesn't respond. Just the Power Off button is the only way out. Never had an issue like this in Unity. Using the same Apps in the same way and I bet the system will crash in 45 minutes to an hour. Usually, I have 7-10 windows opened. I wish I knew enough to get the correct logs, I'm sure it's a bug. I'm not doing anything fancy..just running email, word docs, jave apps, vpn, pidgin, maybe some SQL stuff or communication Apps, etc. Anyways I've decided to wait for another major release to try it again... until then I'm sticking with Unity which is also very cool.

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• Where Next for Google Translate? And What of Information Quality?

  - by ultan o'broin

  Fascinating article in the UK Guardian newspaper called Can Google break the computer language barrier? In it, Andreas Zollman, who works on Google Translate, comments that the quality of Google Translate's output relative to the amount of data required to create that output is clearly now falling foul of the law of diminishing returns. He says: "Each doubling of the amount of translated data input led to about a 0.5% improvement in the quality of the output," he suggests, but the doublings are not infinite. "We are now at this limit where there isn't that much more data in the world that we can use," he admits. "So now it is much more important again to add on different approaches and rules-based models." The Translation Guy has a further discussion on this, called Google Translate is Finished. He says: "And there aren't that many doublings left, if any. I can't say how much text Google has assimilated into their machine translation databases, but it's been reported that they have scanned about 11% of all printed content ever published. So double that, and double it again, and once more, shoveling all that into the translation hopper, and pretty soon you get the sum of all human knowledge, which means a whopping 1.5% improvement in the quality of the engines when everything has been analyzed. That's what we've got to look forward to, at best, since Google spiders regularly surf the Web, which in its vastness dwarfs all previously published content. So to all intents and purposes, the statistical machine translation tools of Google are done. Outstanding job, Googlers. Thanks." Surprisingly, all this analysis hasn't raised that much comment from the fans of machine translation, or its detractors either for that matter. Perhaps, it's the season of goodwill? What is clear to me, however, of course is that Google Translate isn't really finished (in any sense of the word). I am sure Google will investigate and come up with new rule-based translation models to enhance what they have already and that will also scale effectively where others didn't. So too, will they harness human input, which really is the way to go to train MT in the quality direction. But that aside, what does it say about the quality of the data that is being used for statistical machine translation in the first place? From the Guardian article it's clear that a huge humanly translated corpus drove the gains for Google Translate and now what's left is the dregs of badly translated and poorly created source materials that just can't deliver quality translations. There's a message about information quality there, surely. In the enterprise applications space, where we have some control over content this whole debate reinforces the relationship between information quality at source and translation efficiency, regardless of the technology used to do the translation. But as more automation comes to the fore, that information quality is even more critical if you want anything approaching a scalable solution. This is important for user experience professionals. Issues like user generated content translation, multilingual personalization, and scalable language quality are central to a superior global UX; it's a competitive issue we cannot ignore.

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• List of Upcoming Appearances

  - by Chris Gardner

  Greetings. I know I have been in work sponsored hiding lately. We are working furiously on a beta project to secure a contract, and I can't really talk about it yet. Hopefully, the contracts will be soon signed. Not only will we then have money, but I can talk about all this really cool tech with which I have been playing. However, since the contract is not signed, I need to bring you people up to date with where I will be during the summer. Let's face it, you can't be a speaker / blogger without pandering to shameless self-promotion. First, I will, once again, be staffing the Hands-on-Labs at TechEd North America. Unfortunately, TechEd North America is already sold out for this year. However, if you're already going, drop by the labs and say Hi. Also, keep an eye on Twitter to track me throughout the event. Also, look for a post in a few hours with my specific picks for what content I'm looking forward to seeing this year. Immediately following TechEd North America, I will be flying into Knoxville to speak at CodeStock. I will be presenting my introduction and intermediate Xbox 360 development talks. There are a TON of great content at CodeStock this year, but there are only about 50 tickets left. After that whirlwind of work, things settle for awhile. That means I'm available to speak at your User Group, luncheon, bowling league, birthday party, anniversary, or bat mitzvah. Mid August brings us to That Conference. This one is going to be a blast. If you haven't heard of That Conference yet, you should really check it out. This will also be my introduction and intermediate Xbox 360 development talks. This is a new conference, and it looks like it will be a great one. Finally, we will turn our attention to DevLink. DevLink has the distinction of picking up my newest talk, Creating Stereoscopic 3D Graphics in XNA. On top of that, I'm giving an general Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 talk. DevLink has added an new "XNA and Kinect" track, so there will me a ton of great game content. That should bring us through the summer. As I solidify the Stereoscopic talk, look for some content on that to creep up on here. I will say it's the first topic I've played around with that is easier in 3D than 2D. Also, the organizers of Alabama Code Camp are still trying to reschedule the event. When that happens, I'll get that information out. Also, we are looking to expand our development team. If you are interested in working for / with me, keep an eye on the T & W Operations website. I know we're immediately looking for a junior level developer, but I think a few higher level position may come up soon. You MUST apply through the website, but drop me a personal line if you do apply. I'll keep an eye out for the application.

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• Innovative SPARC: Lighting a Fire Under Oracle's New Hardware Business

  - by Paulo Folgado

  "There's a certain level of things you can do with commercially available parts," says Oracle Executive Vice President Mike Splain. But, he notes, you can do so much more if you design the parts yourself. Mike Splain,EVP, OracleYou can, for example, design cryptographic accelerators into your microprocessors so customers can run their networks fully encrypted if they choose.Of course, it helps if you've already built multiple processing "cores" into those chips so they can handle all that encrypting and decrypting while still getting their other work done.System on a ChipAs the leader of Oracle Microelectronics, Mike knows how implementing clever innovations in silicon can give systems a real competitive advantage.The SPARC microprocessors that his team designed at Sun pioneered the concept of multiple cores several years ago, and the UltraSPARC T2 processor--the industry's first "system on a chip"--packs up to eight cores per chip, each running as many as eight threads at once. That's the most cores and threads of any general-purpose processor. Looking back, Mike points out that the real value of large enterprise-class servers was their ability to run a lot of very large applications in parallel."The beauty of our CMT [chip multi-threading] machines is you can get that same kind of parallel-processing capability at a much lower cost and in a much smaller footprint," he says.The Whole StackWhat has Mike excited these days is that suddenly the opportunity to innovate is much bigger as part of Oracle."In my group, we used to look up the software stack and say, 'We can do any innovation we want, provided the only thing we have to change is what's in the Solaris operating system'--or maybe Java," he says. "If we wanted to change things beyond that, we'd have to go outside the walls of Sun and we'd have to convince the vendors: 'You have to align with us, you have to test with us, you have to build for us, and then you'll reap the benefits.' Now we get access to the entire stack. We can look all the way through the stack and say, 'Okay, what would make the database go faster? What would make the middleware go faster?'"Changing the WorldMike and his microelectronics team also like the fact that Oracle is not just any software company. We're #1 in database, middleware, business intelligence, and more."We're like all the other engineers from Sun; we believe we can change the world, if we can just figure out how to get people to pay attention to us," he says. "Now there's a mechanism at Oracle--much more so than we ever had at Sun."He notes, too, that every innovation in SPARC has involved some combination of hardware and softwareoptimization."Take our cryptography framework, for example. Sure, we can accelerate rapidly, but the Solaris OS has to provide the right set of interfaces that applications can tap into," Mike says. "Same thing with our multicore architecture. We have to have software that can utilize all those threads and run in parallel." His engineers, he points out, have never been interested in producing chips that sell as mere components."Our chips are always designed to go into systems and be combined with various pieces of software," he says. "Our job is to enable the creation of systems."

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• Regular Expressions Cookbook Is in The Money—Win a Copy

  - by Jan Goyvaerts

  %COOKBOOKFRAME%You may have heard some people say that most book authors never get any royalties. That’s not true because most authors get an advance royalty that is paid before the book is published. That’s the author’s main incentive for writing the book, at least as far as money is concerned. (If money is your main concern, don’t write books.) What is true is that most authors never see any money beyond the advance royalty. Royalty rates are very low. A 10% royalty of the publisher’s price is considered normal. The publisher’s price is usually 45% of the retail price. So if you pay full price in a bookstore, the author gets 4.5% of your money. If there’s more than one author, they split the royalty. It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that a book needs to sell quite a few copies for the royalty to add up to a meaningful amount of money. But Steven and I must have done something right. Regular Expressions Cookbook is in the money. My royalty statement for the 3rd quartier of 2009, which is the 2nd quarter that the book was on the market, came with a check. I actually received it last month but didn’t get around to blogging about. The amount of the check is insignificant. The point is that the balance is no longer negative. I’m taking this opportunity to pat myself and my co-author on the back. To celebrate the occassion O’Reilly has offered to sponsor a give-away of five (5) copies of Regular Expressions Cookbook. These are the rules of the game: You must post a comment to this blog article including your actual name and actual email address. Names are published, email addresses are not. Comments are moderated by myself (Jan Goyvaerts). If I consider a comment to be offensive or spam it will not be published and not be eligible for any prize. If you don’t know what to say in the comment, just wish me a happy 100000nd birthday, so I don’t have to feel so bad about entering the 6-bit era. Each person commenting has only one chance to win, regardless of the number of comments posted. O’Reilly will be provided with the names and email addresses of the winners (and those email addresses only) in order to arrange delivery. Each winner can choose to receive a printed copy or ebook (DRM-free PDF). If you choose the printed book, O’Reilly pays for shipping to anywhere in the world but not for any duties or taxes your country may impose on books imported from the USA. If you choose the ebook, you’ll need to create an O’Reilly account that is then granted access to the PDF download. You can make your choice after you’ve won, so it doesn’t influence your chance of winning. Contest ends 28 February 2010, GMT+7 (Thai time). Chosen by five calls to Random(78)+1 in Delphi 2010, the winners are: 48: Xiaozu 45: David Chisholm 19: Miquel Burns 33: Aaron Rice 17: David Laing Thanks to everybody who participated. The winners have been notified by email on how to collect their prize.

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• Interviews Gone Bad.....Now What Do I Do?

  - by david.talamelli

  We have all done it at some stage of our working careers - you know those times when you leave an interview and then you think to yourself "why didn't I ask that question" or "I can't believe I said that" or "how could I have forgotten to say that". It happens to everyone but how you handle things moving forwards could be critical in helping you land that dream job. There is nothing better than seeing that dream job with the dream company that you are looking to work for advertised (or in some cases getting called by the Recruiter to let you know about that job). The role may seem perfect and it could be just what you are looking for and it is with the right company as well. You have sent in your resume and have subsequently had one, two or maybe three interviews for the role. After each step of the process you get a little bit more excited about the role as you start to think about your work day in your new role/company. Then it happens, you get it: you get The Phone Call to inform you that you have not been successful in securing the position that you have invested so much time and effort into. It can be disappointing to hear this news but what you do next is important in potentially keeping that door open for future opportunities with that company. How you handle yourself in this situation is important: if any of you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure Books do you: Tell the Recruiter (maybe get aggressive) they are wrong in their assessment and that you are the right candidate for the role Switch off and say ok thanks and hang up without engaging in any further dialogue Thank the company for their time and enquire if there may be any other opportunities in the future to explore If you chose the first option - the company in question may consider whether or not to look at you for other opportunities. How you handle yourself in the recruitment process could be an indication of how you would deal with clients/colleagues in your role and the impression that you leave a potential employer may be what sticks in their mind when they think of you (eg: isn't that the person who couldn't handle it when we told him he wasn't right for our role). The second option potentially produces a similar outcome. If you rush to get off the phone, the company may come back to you to talk about other roles when they come up, but you also leave open the potential thought with the company you were only interested in that role and therefore not interested in any other opportunities. Why take the risk of the company thinking that and potentially not getting back to you in the future. By picking the third option, you actively engage with the company and keep the dialogue open for future discussions. Ok, so you didn't get the role you interviewed for - you don't know who else the company may have been interviewing - maybe they found someone who was a better fit, or maybe there were too many boxes you didn't tick to step straight into that specific role. Take a deep breath and keep the company engaged. You are fresh in their mind - take advantage of that fact and let them know that while you respect their decision, that you are still interested in the company and would like to be kept in mind for future roles. Ask if it is ok to keep in touch and when they would like to keep in touch, as long as you are interested let them know you are still interested. You do need to balance that though if you come across as too keen or start stalking people - it could equally damage your brand. Companies normally have more than one open role. New roles are created all the time, circumstances change and hiring people is not a static business, it changes course from everyone's best laid initial plans. If you didn't get that initial role you wanted, keep the door open with that company so that when those new roles do come up or when circumstances do change you have already laid the ground to step into those new positions.

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• Is Microsoft&rsquo;s Cloud Bet Placed on the Ground?

  - by andrewbrust

  Today at the Unversity of Washington, Steve Ballmer gave a speech on Microsoft’s cloud strategy.  Significantly, Azure was only briefly mentioned and was not shown.  Instead, Ballmer spoke about what he called the five “dimensions” of the cloud, and used that as the basis for an almost philosophical discussion.  Ballmer opined on how the cloud should be distinguished from the Internet.as well as what the cloud will and should enable.  Ballmer worked hard to portray the cloud not as a challenger to Windows and PCs (as Google would certainly suggest it is) but  really as just the latest peripheral that adds value to PCs and devices. At one point during his speech, Ballmer said “We start with Windows at Microsoft.  It’s the most popular smart device on the planet.  And our design center for the future of Windows is to make it one of those smarter devices that the cloud really wants.”  I’m not sure I agree with Ballmer’s ambition here, but I must admit he’s taken the “software + services” concept and expanded on it in more consumer-friendly fashion. There were demos too.  For example, Blaise Aguera y Arcas reprised his Bing Maps demo from the TED conference held last month.  And Simon Atwell showed how Microsoft has teamed with Sky TV in the UK to turn Xbox into something that looks uncannily like Windows Media Center.  Specifically, an Xbox console app called Sky Player provides full access to Sky’s on-demand programming but also live TV access to an array of networks carried on its home TV service, complete with an on-screen programming guide.  Windows Phone 7 Series was shown quickly and Ballmer told us that while Windows Mobile/Phone 6.5 and earlier were designed for voice and legacy functionality, Windows Phone 7 Series is designed for the cloud. Over and over during Ballmer’s talk (and those of his guest demo presenters), the message was clear: Microsoft believes that client (“smart”) devices, and not mere HTML terminals, are the technologies to best deliver on the promise of the cloud.  The message was that PCs running Windows, game consoles and smart phones  whose native interfaces are Internet-connected offer the most effective way to utilize cloud capabilities.  Even the Bing Maps demo conveyed this message, because the advanced technology shown in the demo uses Silverlight (and thus the PCs computing power), and not AJAX (which relies only upon the browser’s native scripting and rendering capabilities) to produce the impressive interface shown to the audience. Microsoft’s new slogan, with respect to the cloud, is “we’re all in.”  Just as a Texas Hold ‘em player bets his entire stash of chips when he goes all in, so too is Microsoft “betting the company” on the cloud.  But it would seem that Microsoft’s bet isn’t on the cloud in a pure sense, and is instead on the power of the cloud to fuel new growth in PCs and other client devices, Microsoft’s traditional comfort zone.  Is that a bet or a hedge?  If the latter, is Microsoft truly all in?  I don’t really know.  I think many people would say this is a sucker’s bet.  But others would say it’s suckers who bet against Microsoft.  No matter what, the burden is on Microsoft to prove this contrarian view of the cloud is a sensible one.  To do that, they’ll need to deliver on cloud-connected device innovation.  And to do that, the whole company will need to feel that victory is crucial.  Time will tell.  And I expect to present progress reports in future posts.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Experimenting with ACID Transactions, SQL Compliant, Elastically Scalable Database

  - by pinaldave

  Database technology is huge and big world. I like to explore always beyond what I know and share the learning. Weekend is the best time when I sit around download random software on my machine which I like to call as a lab machine (it is a pretty old laptop, hardly a quality as lab machine) and experiment it. There are so many free betas available for download that it’s hard to keep track and even harder to find the time to play with very many of them.  This blog is about one you shouldn’t miss if you are interested in the learning various relational databases. NuoDB just released their Beta 7.  I had already downloaded their Beta 6 and yesterday did the same for 7.   My impression is that they are onto something very very interesting.  In fact, it might be something really promising in terms of database elasticity, scale and operational cost reduction. The folks at NuoDB say they are working on the world’s first “emergent” database which they tout as a brand new transitional database that is intended to dramatically change what’s possible with OLTP.  It is SQL compliant, guarantees ACID transactions, yet scales elastically on heterogeneous and decentralized cloud-based resources. Interesting note for sure, making me explore more. Based on what I’ve seen so far, they are solving the architectural challenge that exists between elastic, cloud-based compute infrastructures designed to scale out in response to workload requirements versus the traditional relational database management system’s architecture of central control. Here’s my experience with the NuoDB Beta 6 so far: First they pretty much threw away all the features you’d associate with existing RDBMS architectures except the SQL and ACID transactions which they were smart to keep.  It looks like they have incorporated a number of the big ideas from various algorithms, systems and techniques to achieve maximum DB scalability. From a user’s perspective, the NuoDB Beta software behaves like any other traditional SQL database and seems to offer all the benefits users have come to expect from standards-based SQL solutions. One of the interesting feature is that one can run a transactional node and a storage node on my Windows laptop as well on other platforms – indeed interesting for sure. It’s quite amazing to see a database elastically scale across machine boundaries. So, one of the basic NuoDB concepts is that as you need to scale out, you can easily use more inexpensive hardware when/where you need it.  This is unlike what we have traditionally done to scale a database for an application – we replace the hardware with something more powerful (faster CPU and Disks). This is where I started to feel like NuoDB is on to something that has the potential to elastically scale on commodity hardware while reducing operational expense for a big OLTP database to a degree we’ve never seen before. NuoDB is able to fully leverage the cloud in an asynchronous and highly decentralized manner – while providing both SQL compliance and ACID transactions. Basically what NuoDB is doing is so new that it is all hard to believe until you’ve experienced it in action.  I will keep you up to date as I test the NuoDB Beta 7 but if you are developing a web-scale application or have an on-premise app you are thinking of moving to the cloud, testing this beta is worth your time. If you do try it, let me know what you think.  Before I say anything more, I am going to do more experiments and more test on this product and compare it with other existing similar products. For me it was a weekend worth spent on learning something new. I encourage you to download Beta 7 version and share your opinions here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• MvcExtensions - PerRequestTask

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  In the previous post, we have seen the BootstrapperTask which executes when the application starts and ends, similarly there are times when we need to execute some custom logic when a request starts and ends. Usually, for this kind of scenario we create HttpModule and hook the begin and end request events. There is nothing wrong with this approach, except HttpModules are not at all IoC containers friendly, also defining the HttpModule execution order is bit cumbersome, you either have to modify the machine.config or clear the HttpModules and add it again in web.config. Instead, you can use the PerRequestTask which is very much container friendly as well as supports execution orders. Lets few examples where it can be used. Remove www Subdomain Lets say we want to remove the www subdomain, so that if anybody types http://www.mydomain.com it will automatically redirects to http://mydomain.com. public class RemoveWwwSubdomain : PerRequestTask { public RemoveWww() { Order = DefaultOrder - 1; } protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(PerRequestExecutionContext executionContext) { const string Prefix = "http://www."; Check.Argument.IsNotNull(executionContext, "executionContext"); HttpContextBase httpContext = executionContext.HttpContext; string url = httpContext.Request.Url.ToString(); bool startsWith3W = url.StartsWith(Prefix, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase); bool shouldContinue = true; if (startsWith3W) { string newUrl = "http://" + url.Substring(Prefix.Length); HttpResponseBase response = httpContext.Response; response.StatusCode = (int)HttpStatusCode.MovedPermanently; response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"; response.RedirectLocation = newUrl; response.SuppressContent = true; shouldContinue = false; } return shouldContinue ? TaskContinuation.Continue : TaskContinuation.Break; } } As you can see, first, we are setting the order so that we do not have to execute the remaining tasks of the chain when we are redirecting, next in the ExecuteCore, we checking the whether www is present, if present we are sending a permanently moved http status code and breaking the task execution chain otherwise we are continuing with the chain. Blocking IP Address Lets take another scenario, your application is hosted in a shared hosting environment where you do not have the permission to change the IIS setting and you want to block certain IP addresses from visiting your application. Lets say, you maintain a list of IP address in database/xml files which you want to block, you have a IBannedIPAddressRepository service which is used to match banned IP Address. public class BlockRestrictedIPAddress : PerRequestTask { protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(PerRequestExecutionContext executionContext) { bool shouldContinue = true; HttpContextBase httpContext = executionContext.HttpContext; if (!httpContext.Request.IsLocal) { string ipAddress = httpContext.Request.UserHostAddress; HttpResponseBase httpResponse = httpContext.Response; if (executionContext.ServiceLocator.GetInstance<IBannedIPAddressRepository>().IsMatching(ipAddress)) { httpResponse.StatusCode = (int)HttpStatusCode.Forbidden; httpResponse.StatusDescription = "IPAddress blocked."; shouldContinue = false; } } return shouldContinue ? TaskContinuation.Continue : TaskContinuation.Break; } } Managing Database Session Now, let see how it can be used to manage NHibernate session, assuming that ISessionFactory of NHibernate is already registered in our container. public class ManageNHibernateSession : PerRequestTask { private ISession session; protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(PerRequestExecutionContext executionContext) { ISessionFactory factory = executionContext.ServiceLocator.GetInstance<ISessionFactory>(); session = factory.OpenSession(); return TaskContinuation.Continue; } protected override void DisposeCore() { session.Close(); session.Dispose(); } } As you can see PerRequestTask can be used to execute small and precise tasks in the begin/end request, certainly if you want to execute other than begin/end request there is no other alternate of HttpModule. That’s it for today, in the next post, we will discuss about the Action Filters, so stay tuned.

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• Functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Also, I asked myself if my impression is just plainly wrong due to lack of knowledge. E.g., do C# and C++11 support FP as extensively as, say, Scala or Caml do? In this case, my question would be simply non-existent. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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• Algorithm to Find the Aggregate Mass of "Granola Bar"-Like Structures?

  - by Stuart Robbins

  I'm a planetary science researcher and one project I'm working on is N-body simulations of Saturn's rings. The goal of this particular study is to watch as particles clump together under their own self-gravity and measure the aggregate mass of the clumps versus the mean velocity of all particles in the cell. We're trying to figure out if this can explain some observations made by the Cassini spacecraft during the Saturnian summer solstice when large structures were seen casting shadows on the nearly edge-on rings. Below is a screenshot of what any given timestep looks like. (Each particle is 2 m in diameter and the simulation cell itself is around 700 m across.) The code I'm using already spits out the mean velocity at every timestep. What I need to do is figure out a way to determine the mass of particles in the clumps and NOT the stray particles between them. I know every particle's position, mass, size, etc., but I don't know easily that, say, particles 30,000-40,000 along with 102,000-105,000 make up one strand that to the human eye is obvious. So, the algorithm I need to write would need to be a code with as few user-entered parameters as possible (for replicability and objectivity) that would go through all the particle positions, figure out what particles belong to clumps, and then calculate the mass. It would be great if it could do it for "each" clump/strand as opposed to everything over the cell, but I don't think I actually need it to separate them out. The only thing I was thinking of was doing some sort of N2 distance calculation where I'd calculate the distance between every particle and if, say, the closest 100 particles were within a certain distance, then that particle would be considered part of a cluster. But that seems pretty sloppy and I was hoping that you CS folks and programmers might know of a more elegant solution? Edited with My Solution: What I did was to take a sort of nearest-neighbor / cluster approach and do the quick-n-dirty N2 implementation first. So, take every particle, calculate distance to all other particles, and the threshold for in a cluster or not was whether there were N particles within d distance (two parameters that have to be set a priori, unfortunately, but as was said by some responses/comments, I wasn't going to get away with not having some of those). I then sped it up by not sorting distances but simply doing an order N search and increment a counter for the particles within d, and that sped stuff up by a factor of 6. Then I added a "stupid programmer's tree" (because I know next to nothing about tree codes). I divide up the simulation cell into a set number of grids (best results when grid size ˜7 d) where the main grid lines up with the cell, one grid is offset by half in x and y, and the other two are offset by 1/4 in ±x and ±y. The code then divides particles into the grids, then each particle N only has to have distances calculated to the other particles in that cell. Theoretically, if this were a real tree, I should get order N*log(N) as opposed to N2 speeds. I got somewhere between the two, where for a 50,000-particle sub-set I got a 17x increase in speed, and for a 150,000-particle cell, I got a 38x increase in speed. 12 seconds for the first, 53 seconds for the second, 460 seconds for a 500,000-particle cell. Those are comparable speeds to how long the code takes to run the simulation 1 timestep forward, so that's reasonable at this point. Oh -- and it's fully threaded, so it'll take as many processors as I can throw at it.

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• Who Makes a Good Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product.  Note that I didn’t say about the product itself.  Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners.  Products only matter in relationship to their customers.  If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product. A good product owner is also a good negotiator.  They recognize that many different priorities exist inside of a corporation, but that there can be only one list that developers work from.  A good product owner recognizes that its their job to help others around them prioritize (perhaps with a Product Council), but also understand that they alone have the final say about priorities and are willing to make the tough decisions required.  Deciding the priority between two perfectly valid stories is very difficult, especially when the stories are from two different departments! A good product owner is deeply interested in helping the team be successful.  They don’t seek to control the team, but instead seek to understand what the team can do and then work with the team to get the best product possible for the Customer.  A good product owner is never denigrating to team members, ever.  They recognize that such behavior would damage the trust that needs to be present between team members and product owners and will avoid it at all costs. In general, technical people (i.e. former or current developers) make poor product owners.  In their minds, they can’t separate implementation details from user functionality, so their stories end up sounding like implementation details.  For example, “The user enters their username on the password screen” is something that a technical product owner would write.  The proper wording for that story is “A user supplies the system with their credentials.”  Because technical people think different from the rest of the population, they are generally not a good fit. A good product owner is also a good writer.  Writing good stories demands good writing.  The art of persuasion, descriptiveness and just general good grammar are all required.  A good Product Owner must also be well spoken, since most of what will be conveyed will be conveyed with the spoken word, not just written word. A good product owner is a “People Person.”  They like talking to people and are very patient.  They don’t mind having questions repeated or fielding many questions, because they want to make sure that the ideas they’re conveying are properly understood so the customer gets the best product possible.  They are happy to answer any questions a team member may have and invite feedback and criticism of designs and stories, since they want a good product.  They really have little ego that gets in the way of building a great product. All of these qualities can be hard to find, but if you look close enough, you’ll find the right person in your organization.  Product owners can be found anywhere, not just in upper management.  Some of the best product owners are those that are very close to the customer.  In fact, check your customer support staff.  I’d bet that several great product owners are lurking there. Final note about what makes a good product owner.  You’re probably NOT going to find a good product owner in a manager, especially if they consider themselves a “Manager.”  Product owners don’t manage anything but the backlog, so be especially careful if the person you’re selecting for Product Owner is a manager. Up Next, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Microsoft Cloud Day - the ups and downs

  - by Charles Young

  The term ‘cloud’ can sometimes obscure the obvious.  Today’s Microsoft Cloud Day conference in London provided a good example.  Scott Guthrie was halfway through what was an excellent keynote when he lost network connectivity.  This proved very disruptive to his presentation which centred on a series of demonstrations of the Azure platform in action.  Great efforts were made to find a solution, but no quick fix presented itself.  The venue’s IT facilities were dreadful – no WiFi, poor 3G reception (forget 4G…this is the UK) and, unbelievably, no-one on hand from the venue staff to help with infrastructure issues.  Eventually, after an unscheduled break, a solution was found and Scott managed to complete his demonstrations.  Further connectivity issues occurred during the day. I can say that the cause was prosaic.  A member of the venue staff had interfered with a patch board and inadvertently disconnected Scott Guthrie’s machine from the network by pulling out a cable. I need to state the obvious here.  If your PC is disconnected from the network it can’t communicate with other systems.  This could include a machine under someone’s desk, a mail server located down the hall, a server in the local data centre, an Internet search engine or even, heaven forbid, a role running on Azure. Inadvertently disconnecting a PC from the network does not imply a fundamental problem with the cloud or any specific cloud platform.  Some of the tweeted comments I’ve seen today are analogous to suggesting that, if you accidently unplug your microwave from the mains, this suggests some fundamental flaw with the electricity supply to your house.   This is poor reasoning, to say the least. As far as the conference was concerned, the connectivity issue in the keynote, coupled with some later problems in a couple of presentations, served to exaggerate the perception of poor organisation.   Software problems encountered before the conference prevented the correct set-up of a smartphone app intended to convey agenda information to attendees.  Although some information was available via this app, the organisers decided to print out an agenda at the last moment.  Unfortunately, the agenda sheet did not convey enough information, and attendees were forced to approach conference staff through the day to clarify locations of the various presentations. Despite these problems, the overwhelming feedback from conference attendees was very positive.  There was a real sense of excitement in the morning keynote.  For many, this was their first sight of new Azure features delivered in the ‘spring’ release.  The most common reaction I heard was amazement and appreciation that Azure’s new IaaS features deliver built-in template support for several flavours of Linux from day one.  This coupled with open source SDKs and several presentations on Azure’s support for Java, node.js, PHP, MongoDB and Hadoop served to communicate that the Azure platform is maturing quickly.  The new virtual network capabilities also surprised many attendees, and the much improved portal experience went down very well. So, despite some very irritating and disruptive problems, the event served its purpose well, communicating the breadth and depth of the newly upgraded Azure platform.  I enjoyed the day very much.

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• PHP and Ruby: how to leverage both? and, is it worth it?

  - by dukeofgaming

  As you might have noticed from the title, this is not a "PHP or Ruby", or a "PHP vs. Ruby" question. This is a question on how to leverage PHP + Ruby in the same business. I myself am a PHP developer, I love the language because of its convenience and I specially love the ecosystem of resources that surround it: Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Symfony2, Doctrine2, etc. However, the language itself can be a little disappointing sometimes. OTOH, Ruby looks like a very beautiful language and —from studying it superficially in several aspects— I could say it is leaner than Python as a language per se. However, from what I've seen there is pretty much only RoR making noise, and I don't like RoR so much (mainly because its model layer). As Co-CEO and CTO at my company I'm trying to think outside of the box since I want to start to focus on the human side of technology and see if its sane to use both PHP and Ruby. Here are some random thoughts: Ruby folk seem to be generally better suited programmers than PHP folk (in terms of averages), I know the previous statement is somewhat baloney because very good and well architected PHP can be written, but I'd say the Ruby programmer culture is better than PHP's. The thing about Ruby is that it seems better suited for rapid development, I don't really know if this is only the case for RoR, but I do know that there are certain practices (perhaps not so good) like monkey patching that let business needs be satified quicker. From a marketing point of view (yep, sometimes you need to leverage the marketing BS for the sake of your company) Ruby seems better while PHP carries some stigmas. PHP 5.4 is bringing traits, and that is better/cleaner than mixins. That could really make PHP as lean as Ruby —or more— for certain stuff. Now, concretely, my questions: Would a PHP programmer want to learn Ruby?, I know I do, but conversely, would a Ruby programmer want to learn PHP?. What kinds of projects or situations would be better suited for Ruby that are not suited for PHP?. What is the actual ecosystem of Ruby?, aside from RoR, I have not seen other hyped technologies/frameworks (I've seen RSpec, but I confess being a total noob on what BDD really consists of and its implications). Supposing there are a certain type of projects ideal for Ruby, would there be a moment that its better to move it to PHP?. I know PHP can handle lots of stuff, but I've read that Ruby has its limitations when scaling (or is that RoR?, or is that baloney for both?). Finally and most importantly, would it be sane to maintain projects in two languages?, or is that just stupid. As I said, it looks like Ruby is leaner on the short term and that can make a project happen and succeed, but I'm not so sure about that on the long run. I'm looking for insights mainly from people that know well the strengths and weaknesses of the languages —preferably both of them— and Ruby's ecosystem in real practice, meaning: frameworks and applications like the ones I quoted from PHP's ecosystem. Best regards and thanks for your time.

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• TechEd Israel 2010 may only accept speakers from sponsors

  - by RoyOsherove

  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 it’s going to be this november! “Great news” I thought to myself. I’d 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 to hear from a couple of people that Microsoft Israel plans to only accept non-MS teched speakers, only from sponsors of the event. That means that according to the amount that you have paid, you get to insert one or more of your own selected speakers as part of teched. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to gather more evidence of this, and have gotten some input from within MS about this information. It looks like that is indeed the case, though no MS rep. was prepared to answer any email I had publicly. If they approach me now I’d be happy to print their response. What does this mean? If this is true, it means that Microsoft Israel is making a grave mistake – They are diluting the quality of the speakers for pure money factors. That means, that as a teched attendee, who paid good money, you might be sitting down to watch nothing more that a bunch of infomercials, or sub-standard speakers – since speakers are no longer selected on quality or interest in their topic. They are turning the conference from a learning event to a commercial driven event They are closing off the stage to the community of speakers who may not be associated with any organization  willing to be a sponsor They are losing speakers (such as myself) who will not want to be part of such an event. (yes – even if my company ends up sponsoring the event, I will not take part in it, Sorry Eli!) They are saying “F&$K you” to the community of MVPs who should be the people to be approached first about technical talks (my guess is many MVPs wouldn’t want to talk at an event driven that way anyway ) I do hope this ends up not being true, but it looks like it is. MS Israel had already done such a thing with the Developer Days event previouly held in Israel – only sponsors were allowed to insert speakers into the event. If this turns out to be true I would urge the MS community in Israel to NOT TAKE PART AT THIS EVENT in any form (attendee, speaker, sponsor or otherwise). by taking part, you will be telling MS Israel it’s OK to piss all over the community that they are quietly suffocating anyway. The MVP case MS Israel has managed to screw the MVP program as well. MS MVPs (I’m one) have had a tough time here in Israel the past couple of years. ever since yosi taguri left the blue badge ranks, there was not real community leader left. Whoever runs things right now has their eyes and minds set elsewhere, with the software MVP community far from mind and heart. No special MVP events (except a couple of small ones this year). No real MVP leadership happens here, with the MVP MEA lead (Ruari) being on a remote line, is not really what’s needed. “MVP? What’s that?” I’m sure many MS Israel employees would say. Exactly my point. Last word I’ve been disappointed by the MS machine for a while now, but their slowness to realize what real community means in the past couple of years really turns me off. Maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe I shouldn’t be chasing people at MS Israel begging for a room to host the Agile Israel user group. Maybe it’s time to say a big bye bye and start looking at a life a bit more disconnected.

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• T-SQL Tuesday - the swag

  - by Rob Farley

  This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kendal van Dyke (@SQLDBA), and is on the topic of swag. He asks about the best SQL Server swag that we’ve ever received from a conference. I can’t say I ever focus on getting the swag at conferences, as I see some people doing. I know there are plenty of people that get around all the sponsors as soon as they’ve arrived, collecting whatever goodies they can, sometimes as token gifts for those at home, sometimes as giveaways for the user groups they attend. I remember a few years ago at my first PASS Summit, the SQLCAT team gave me a large pile of leftover SQL Server swag to give away to my user group – piles of branded things to stop your phone sliding off your car dashboard, and other things. The user group members thought it was great, and over the course of a few months, happily cleared me out of it all. I tend to consider swag to be something that you haven’t earned except by being at a conference, and there was no winning associated with it, it was simply a giveaway item at a sponsor booth. That means I don’t include the HP Mini laptop that was given away at TechEd Australia a few years ago to every attendee, or the SQL Server bag and Camelbak bottle that I was given as a thank-you for writing a guest blog post (which I use as my regular laptop bag and water bottle for work). I don’t even include the copy of Midtown Madness that I got as a door prize at my vey first TechEd event in 1999 (that was a really good game, and even meant that when I went to Chicago last year, I felt a strange familiarity about the place). I don’t want to include shirts in the mix either. I was given a nice SQL Server shirt about five years ago TechEd Australia. It’s a business shirt (buttons, cuffs, pocket on the chest), black with the SQL Server logo on it. It was such a nice shirt that I commented about it to the Product Marketing Manager for Australia (Christine, at the time), who unexpectedly arranged for me to get another one. That was certainly an improvement on the tent I was given at one of the MVP conference I attended. So when I consider these ‘rules’, two pieces of swag come to mind, and I think both were at PASS Summits (although I can’t be sure). One was a hand-warmer from HP, one of the “crystallisation-type” ones, which proved extremely popular when I got home, until one day when it didn’t survive being recharged – not overly SQL related, but still it was good swag. The other was an umbrella, from expressor, which was from the PASS Summit in 2010, my first PASS Summit. I remember it well – Blythe Morrow (now Gietz) (@blythemorrow) was working the booth, having stopped working for PASS some time before, but she’d been on my list of people to meet, as I’d had plenty of contact with her while she’d worked at PASS, my being a chapter leader and general volunteer. There had been an expressor dinner on one of the first evenings, which I’d been asked to be at, which is when I’d met lots of SQL people in person for the first time, including Ted Krueger (@onpnt), Jessica Moss (@jessicamoss) and Blythe. Anyway, at some point the next day I swung by their booth to say hello and thank them for the dinner, and Blythe says “Oh, we have the best swag – here!” and handed me an umbrella. And she was right. It’s excellent. @rob_farley

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