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  • Parsing stdout with custom format or standard format?

    - by linquize
    To integrate with other executables, a executable may launch another executable and capture its output from stdout. But most programs writes the output message to stdout in custom format and usually in human readable format. So it requires the system integrator to write a function to parse the output, which is considered trouble and the parser code may be buggy. Do you think this is old fashioned? Most Unix-style programs do that. Very few programs write to stdout in standard format such as XML or JSON, which is more modern. Example: Veracity (DVCS) writes JSON to stdout. Should we switch to use modern formats? For a console program, human readable or easy parsable: which is more important ?

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  • New Responsibilities

    - by Robert May
    With the start of the new year, I’m starting new responsibilities at Veracity. One responsibility that is staying constant is my love and evangelism of Agile.  In fact, I’ll be spending more time ensuring that all Veracity teams are performing agile, Scrum specifically, in a consistent manner so that all of our clients and consultants have a similar experience. Imagine, if you will, working for a consulting company on a project.  On that project, the project management style is Waterfall in iterations.  Now you move to another project and in that project, you’re doing real Scrum, but in both cases, you were told that what you were doing was Scrum.  Rather confusing.  I’ve found, however, that this happens on many teams and many projects.  Most companies simply aren’t disciplined enough to do Scrum.  Some think that being Agile means not being disciplined.  The opposite is true! So, my goals for Veracity are to make sure that all of our consultants have a consistent feel for Scrum and what it is and how it works and then to make sure that on the projects they’re assigned to, Scrum is appropriately applied for their situation.  This will help keep them happier, but also make switching to other projects easier and more consistent.  If we aren’t doing the project management on the project, we’ll help them know what good Agile practices should look like so that they can give good advice to the client, and so that if they move to another project, they have a consistent feel. I’m really looking forward to these new duties. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum

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  • Time Passes

    - by Robert May
    It’s been half a year since my last post.  My how time flies.  My new years resolution is to post more frequently.  After a short stint at a local company, which shall remain nameless, I’m back at Veracity.  Overall, Veracity Solutions is one of the best companies I’ve worked for, and I’m relieved to be back. So, this year, I’m going to do the following on my blog: Finish the Agile posts I started (IN MAY!!!). Blog about some code for a logging helper to make debug logging easier. Blog some resharper snippets to help with logging. Blog a Unity Container helper to allow you to specify dependency mappings with attributes on interfaces. If I can accomplish all of those, I’ll have done well this year, and since I’ve put this out to the public, I’m accountable for it, right? Technorati Tags: Agile,logging

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  • Agile Executives

    - by Robert May
    Over the years, I have experienced many different styles of software development. In the early days, most of the development was Waterfall development. In the last few years, I’ve become an advocate of Scrum. As I talked about last month, many people have misconceptions about what Scrum really is. The reason why we do Scrum at Veracity is because of the difference it makes in the life of the team doing Scrum. Software is for people, and happy motivated people will build better software. However, not all executives understand Scrum and how to get the information from development teams that use Scrum. I think that these executives need a support system for managing Agile teams. Historical Software Management When Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, I doubt he realized the impact he’d have on Management through the ages. Historically, management was about managing the process of building things. The people were just cogs in that process. Like all cogs, they were replaceable. Unfortunately, most of the software industry followed this same style of management. Many of today’s senior managers learned how to manage companies before software was a significant influence on how the company did business. Software development is a very creative process, but too many managers have treated it like an assembly line. Idea’s go in, working software comes out, and we just have to figure out how to make sure that the ideas going in are perfect, then the software will be perfect. Lean Manufacturing In the manufacturing industry, Lean manufacturing has revolutionized Henry Ford’s assembly line. Derived from the Toyota process, Lean places emphasis on always providing value for the customer. Anything the customer wouldn’t be willing to pay for is wasteful. Agile is based on similar principles. We’re building software for people, and anything that isn’t useful to them doesn’t add value. Waterfall development would have teams build reams and reams of documentation about how the software should work. Agile development dispenses with this work because excessive documentation doesn’t add value. Instead, teams focus on building documentation only when it truly adds value to the customer. Many other Agile principals are similar. Playing Catch-up Just like in the manufacturing industry, many managers in the software industry have yet to understand the value of the principles of Lean and Agile. They think they can wrap the uncertainties of software development up in a nice little package and then just execute, usually followed by failure. They spend a great deal of time and money trying to exactly predict the future. That expenditure of time and money doesn’t add value to the customer. Managers that understand that Agile know that there is a better way. They will instead focus on the priorities of the near term in detail, and leave the future to take care of itself. They have very detailed two week plans with less detailed quarterly plans. These plans are guided by a general corporate strategy that doesn’t focus on the exact implementation details. These managers also think in smaller features rather than large functionality. This adds a great deal of value to customers, since the features that matter most are the ones that the team focuses on in the near term and then are able to deliver to the customers that are paying for them. Agile managers also realize that stale software is very costly. They know that keeping the technology in their software current is much less expensive and risky than large rewrites that occur infrequently and schedule time in each release for refactoring of the existing software. Agile Executives Even though Agile is a better way, I’ve still seen failures using the Agile process. While some of these failures can be attributed to the team, most of them are caused by managers, not the team. Managers fail to understand what Agile is, how it works, and how to get the information that they need to make good business decisions. I think this is a shame. I’m very pleased that Veracity understands this problem and is trying to do something about it. Veracity is a key sponsor of Agile Executives. In fact, Galen is this year’s acting president for Agile Executives. The purpose of Agile Executives is to help managers better manage Agile teams and see better success. Agile Executives is trying to build a community of executives that range from managers interested in Agile to managers that have successfully adopted Agile. Together, these managers can form a community of support and ideas that will help make Agile teams more successful. Helping Your Team You can help too! Talk with your manager and get them involved in Agile Executives. Help Veracity build the community. If your manager understands Agile better, he’ll understand how to help his teams, which will result in software that adds more value for customers. If you have any questions about how you can be involved, please let me know. Technorati Tags: Agile,Agile Executives

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  • Big Data: Size isn’t everything

    - by Simon Elliston Ball
    Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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  • Searching for the last logon of users in Active Directory

    - by Robert May
    I needed to clean out a bunch of old accounts at Veracity Solutions, and wanted to delete those that hadn’t used their account in more than a year. I found that AD has a property on objects called the lastLogonTimestamp.  However, this value isn’t exposed to you in any useful fashion.  Sure, you can pull up ADSI Edit and and eventually get to it there, but it’s painful. I spent some time searching, and discovered that there’s not much out there to help, so I thought a blog post showing exactly how to get at this information would be in order. Basically, what you end up doing is using System.DirectoryServices to search for accounts and then filtering those for users, doing some conversion and such to make it happen.  Basically, the end result of this is that you get a list of users with their logon information and you can then do with that what you will.  I turned my list into an observable collection and bound it into a XAML form. One important note, you need to add a reference to ActiveDs Type Library in the COM section of the world in references to get to LargeInteger. Here’s the class: namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.DirectoryServices; using ActiveDs; using log4net; /// <summary> /// Finds users inside of the active directory system. /// </summary> public class UserFinder { /// <summary> /// Creates the default logger /// </summary> private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(UserFinder)); /// <summary> /// Finds last logon information /// </summary> /// <param name="domain">The domain to search.</param> /// <param name="userName">The username for the query.</param> /// <param name="password">The password for the query.</param> /// <returns>A list of users with their last logon information.</returns> public IList<UserLoginInformation> GetLastLogonInformation(string domain, string userName, string password) { IList<UserLoginInformation> result = new List<UserLoginInformation>(); DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry(domain, userName, password, AuthenticationTypes.Secure); DirectorySearcher directorySearcher = new DirectorySearcher(entry); directorySearcher.PropertyNamesOnly = true; directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name"); directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("lastLogonTimeStamp"); SearchResultCollection searchResults; try { searchResults = directorySearcher.FindAll(); } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to do a find all.", ex); throw; } try { foreach (SearchResult searchResult in searchResults) { DirectoryEntry resultEntry = searchResult.GetDirectoryEntry(); if (resultEntry.SchemaClassName == "user") { UserLoginInformation logon = new UserLoginInformation(); logon.Name = resultEntry.Name; PropertyValueCollection timeStampObject = resultEntry.Properties["lastLogonTimeStamp"]; if (timeStampObject.Count > 0) { IADsLargeInteger logonTimeStamp = (IADsLargeInteger)timeStampObject[0]; long lastLogon = (long)((uint)logonTimeStamp.LowPart + (((long)logonTimeStamp.HighPart) << 32)); logon.LastLogonTime = DateTime.FromFileTime(lastLogon); } result.Add(logon); } } } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to iterate search results.", ex); throw; } return result; } } } Some important things to note: Username and Password can be set to null and if your computer us part of the domain, this may still work. Domain should be set to something like LDAP://servername/CN=Users,CN=Domain,CN=com You’re actually getting a com object back, so that’s why the LongInteger conversions are happening.  The class for UserLoginInformation looks like this:   namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; /// <summary> /// Represents user login information. /// </summary> public class UserLoginInformation { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets Name /// </summary> public string Name { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets LastLogonTime /// </summary> public DateTime LastLogonTime { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the age of the account. /// </summary> public TimeSpan AccountAge { get { TimeSpan result = TimeSpan.Zero; if (this.LastLogonTime != DateTime.MinValue) { result = DateTime.Now.Subtract(this.LastLogonTime); } return result; } } } } I hope this is useful and instructive. Technorati Tags: Active Directory

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  • Time Application Startup

    - by Clinton Blackmore
    Is there anyway to time how long it takes an Application to start up on the Mac? We were getting reports of Word 2008 taking a half-hour to launch, and, while we think we've resolved the problem, it would be nice, in the future, to be able to: verify the veracity of such statements, and see if any of our changes make a difference.

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  • Asking potential developers to draw UML diagrams during the interview

    - by DotnetDude
    Our interview process currently consists of several coding questions, technical questions and experiences at their current and previous jobs. Coding questions are typically a single method that does something (Think of it as fizzbuzz or reverse a string kind of question) We are planning on introducing an additional step where we give them a business problem and ask them to draw a flowchart, activity, class or a sequence diagram. We feel that our current interview process does not let us evaluate the candidate's thinking at a higher level (which is relevant for architect/senior level positions). To give you some context, we are a mid size software company with around 30 developers in the team. If you have this step in your interview process, how has it improved your interviewing veracity? If not, what else has helped you evaluate the candidates better from a technical perspective.

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  • Ruby email_veracity_checker getting Recipient OK for invalid emails

    - by digger69
    I was testing out email_veracity_checker from rails console and found that when I tested a google apps domain (w/ catchall), yahoo and another company domain, the smtp server always returned 250 recipient ok for invalid emails (wellformed, but bogus). It seems that these servers are always returning OK perhaps to prevent email harvesting. But it does seem to raise the question 'why even validate up-front', is this approach even valid in today's environment? Note: gmail did return 550 email account doesn't exist for invalid. related to How check if an email exist without send in Ruby? Use of email_veracity_checker send-in-ruby-use-of-email-veracity-checker I appreciate your thoughts.

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 22, 2010 -- #844

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, David Anson, Mike Snow, Jason Alderman, Denis Gladkikh, John Papa, Adam Kinney, and CrocusGirl. Shoutout: Mike Snow is moving his blog to Silverlight Tips of The Day... his first is a repeat of number 110 of the last list, but you'll want to bookmark the page. Falling in the 'too cool not to mention' category... Pete Brown posted another MIX10 interview: New Channel 9 Video: Josh Blake on NaturalShow Multi-touch in WPF Adam Kinney announced that the Upgrade to Expression Studio v4 for free – now in writing! From SilverlightCream.com: Visuals staring at the mouse cursor Miroslav Miroslavov at SilverlightShow has a first part post up on the design of the CompleteIT site... going through the 'follow the mouse' effect that is so cool on the main page... with source. Today's DataVisualizationDemos release includes new demos showing off stacked series behavior Falling squarly into the category of "when does he sleep"... David Anson has another Visualization post up today... adding a stacked series and Text-to-Chat sample. Silverlight: Unable to start Debugging. The Silverlight managed debugging package isn’t installed. Mike Snow has a tip up about what to do if you get an "Unable to start debugging" box when you crank up VS ... not a great solution, but it's a solution. Introducing Pillbox for Windows Phone The folks at Veracity definitely have way too much fun with technology :) ... check out the WP7 app that Jason Alderman blogged about... he has a link out to another page with screenshots... oh, AND the code... Export data to Excel from Silverlight/WPF DataGrid Denis Gladkikh demonstrates using COM Interop to export to Excel from both WPF and Silverlight. He discusses isses he had and has all the source for both platforms available. Silverlight TV 21: Silverlight 4 - A Customer's Perspective John Papa has Silverlight TV number 21 up and he's chatting with Franck Jeannin of Ormetis, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade, and Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems, all presenters in the Keynote at DevConnections. Avatar Mosaic -Experimenting with the Artefact Animator Adam Kinney spent enough time with Artefact Animator to put up a lengthy post about it including his project. Artefact Animator itself is available on CodePlex, and Adam has the link... this looks like good stuff. Windows Phone 7 Design Notes – Part2: Metro + Adrian Frutiger CrocusGirl continues her WP7 Metro discussion with a great long post on background she's researched and some of her own work with typography... a great read. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • SQL SERVER – Introduction to Big Data – Guest Post

    - by pinaldave
    BIG Data – such a big word – everybody talks about this now a days. It is the word in the database world. In one of the conversation I asked my friend Jasjeet Sigh the same question – what is Big Data? He instantly came up with a very effective write-up.  Jasjeet is working as a Technical Manager with Koenig Solutions. He leads the SQL domain, and holds rich IT industry experience. Talking about Koenig, it is a 19 year old IT training company that offers several certification choices. Some of its courses include SharePoint Training, Project Management certifications, Microsoft Trainings, Business Intelligence programs, Web Design and Development courses etc. Big Data, as the name suggests, is about data that is BIG in nature. The data is BIG in terms of size, and it is difficult to manage such enormous data with relational database management systems that are quite popular these days. Big Data is not just about being large in size, it is also about the variety of the data that differs in form or type. Some examples of Big Data are given below : Scientific data related to weather and atmosphere, Genetics etc Data collected by various medical procedures, such as Radiology, CT scan, MRI etc Data related to Global Positioning System Pictures and Videos Radio Frequency Data Data that may vary very rapidly like stock exchange information Apart from difficulties in managing and storing such data, it is difficult to query, analyze and visualize it. The characteristics of Big Data can be defined by four Vs: Volume: It simply means a large volume of data that may span Petabyte, Exabyte and so on. However it also depends organization to organization that what volume of data they consider as Big Data. Variety: As discussed above, Big Data is not limited to relational information or structured Data. It can also include unstructured data like pictures, videos, text, audio etc. Velocity:  Velocity means the speed by which data changes. The higher is the velocity, the more efficient should be the system to capture and analyze the data. Missing any important point may lead to wrong analysis or may even result in loss. Veracity: It has been recently added as the fourth V, and generally means truthfulness or adherence to the truth. In terms of Big Data, it is more of a challenge than a characteristic. It is difficult to ascertain the truth out of the enormous amount of data and the one that has high velocity. There are always chances of having un-precise and uncertain data. It is a challenging task to clean such data before it is analyzed. Big Data can be considered as the next big thing in the IT sector in terms of innovation and development. If appropriate technologies are developed to analyze and use the information, it can be the driving force for almost all industrial segments. These include Retail, Manufacturing, Service, Finance, Healthcare etc. This will help them to automate business decisions, increase productivity, and innovate and develop new products. Thanks Jasjeet Singh for an excellent write up.  Jasjeet Sign is working as a Technical Manager with Koenig Solutions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Database, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Big Data

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