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• I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

  - by kmote

  I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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• How to avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

  - by GlenPeterson

  When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later? Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Is there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure? ANSWERS: I think this is a valid answer: How To Solve It. I found the link as an answer to Steps to solve or approach towards a solution. There were also some really good tips at Is thinking out loud during an interview really the best strategy?. A great and concise argument for TDD is the first answer to TDD Writing code vs Figuring out the answer to a problem?. My question may be a near-duplicate of that one.

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• Cry Engine 3 vs UDK

  - by Daniele Riccardelli

  I'm new here and I hope that other people may find this question interesting. Me and a bunch of guys from my University are thinking about getting started in game development, but, even though the game design is kind of ready, we are stucked at the point "which Engine should we choose". At first, we were thinking about Unity3D Free, in particular because we are pretty familiar with C# and, even better, it's completely free, but on the other hand there are some cons like no dynamic shadowing that make the realization of our game kinda hard. So, we are thinking about moving either to UDK or Cry Engine, since they are not as expensive as Unity3D Pro (at least before the game deployment) . The thing we are worried the most, though, is that we are kind of scared about the support for team work(i mean, that we might find it hard to coordinate our efforts without software support), since in Unity3D the team features are part of purchasable content, and we are not interested in paying that much for a project we are not even sure we can complete. So, finally, I hope one of you knows the mentioned engines enough to give us a tip telling which one offers better team features and is advisable for guys that have barely worked before on videogames but have good object oriented programming skills. Probably might be helpful for your suggestion, if i say that our game is an exploration game. Thanks to anybody who's going to answer.

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• How do I simplify a 2D game grid for level management while keeping its by-pixel features?

  - by Eric Thoma

  (I cross-posted this from StackOverflow as this seems to be a more appropriate forum. I've looked around a little here and I did not find an answer, so I hope this is not a recurring question.) This is a question dealing with 2D world design. I am playing around by creating a 2D bird's eye view shooter game, and I am looking to make the game sleek and advanced. I hope to be able to write physics so projectiles have momentum and knock-down properties. I am immediately running into the problem of world design. I need a way to have level files that store everything there is about a game. This is easiest by just having a grid of objects. But there are thin-walls and other objects that don't seem to fit into a traditional cell of a grid. I want to be able to fit all these together so I can streamline level design; so I don't have to put in the exact pixel-specific start and end of a wall. There doesn't seem to be an obvious translation from level file to game without forcing myself into a pacman-life scenario, meaning a scenario where the game feels boxy and discrete. There is a contrast between the smoothly (relatively) moving characters and finite jumps in a grid. I would appreciate an answer that would describe implementation options or point me to resources that do. I would also appreciate references to sites that teach game design. The language I am using is Java (although I would love to use C or C++, but I can never find convenient resources in those languages). Thank you for any answers. Please leave any questions in the space below; I will be able to answer them later tonight (28th Nov).

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• Microsoft Access as a Weapon of War

  - by Damon

  A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit.  This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire.  I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing: Tracking.mdb Oh yes.  Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield.  My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores.  But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms.  Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round. Hope that solider could write a good query :)

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• Web Hosting Checklist

  - by Chris

  I am a web developer that is starting to look into hosting his own website. I would like to showcase my programming skills (PHP, MySQl, C#, Wordpress). My knowledge of languages I am OK with but the actually hosting site is where my knowledge starts to get a little shaky. I know the basics (bandwidth, sub-domains, re-write rules) but I would love your input, to help me formulate a check list of certain web-hosting services that I should be on the look-out for. Also I was wondering if there were any reliable hosting providers who give you the option to host both c# code-behinds and PHP code. As I would like to have two versions of my site, one in C# and one in PHP the hope is that if I need to look for another job this website will help me show possible employers my server side knowledge. I hope this is enough info, I did some researching online but found a bunch of unless articles and I've always have had luck on the StackExchange sites. So hopefully you, can help me. Thanks alot.

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• 1360x768x32 Resolution in Windows 8 in VirtualBox

  - by mbcrump

  My Lenovo ThinkPad's built-in screen maxes at 1366x768x32. I wanted to use that same resolution with Windows 8 Developer Preview inside of VirtualBox. So, what did I do? Downloaded the latest build of VirtualBox v4.1.6 (because it supports Windows 8 x64) Installed Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox as I did earlier this year. Installed Guest Additions. Ran the CustomVideoMode described in this blog post. …and quickly found out that I didn’t have the option to use 1366x768x32 inside of VirtualBox despite using the following command: VBoxManage.exe setextradata  "[Virtual Machine Name]" CustomVideoMode1 1920x1080x32   So how do you fix it? If you do a little research on this resolution, then you will find it is a non-standard resolution. Even if you run the command: VBoxManage.exe setextradata "[Virtual Machine Name]" CustomVideoMode1 1366x768x32 It will still not show that resolution inside of VirtualBox. You can fix this easily by using the following command as shown below: VBoxManage.exe setextradata "[Virtual Machine Name]" CustomVideoMode1 1360x768x32 I hope that you noticed the command used the resolution of 1360 instead of 1366. Now if you go to your display option for Windows 8 inside of Virtualbox then you can select that resolution. Anyways, I hope this helps someone with a similar problem. I created this blog partially for myself but it is always nice to help my fellow developer.  Thanks for reading. Subscribe to my feed

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• Unable to start after 13.04 > 13.10 udate

  - by romainl

  At the end of the update process, clicking on the Restart button had no visible effect whatsoever. After waiting 5 to 10 minutes, I decided to reboot the computer manually. Since then, I rebooted a good dozen times (not with the hope that it would work but with the hope of reading the messages) with the same non-result and the same symptoms: I get the ASCII text-on-purple Ubuntu 13.10 . . . . splash screen with these messages: * Restoring resolver state... [OK] * Starting crash report submission daemon [OK] * Starting CUPS printing spooler/server [OK] Everything disappears. The whole process hangs at a purple screen with the mouse cursor right in the middle. At this point, I'm unable to use the mouse and the keyboard. Booting from a 12.04 CD works perfectly, Disk Utility says that all my disks are OK and I can mount my main partition without problems. Something obviously went wrong at the end of the upgrade but I have no idea what. I'd appreciate any pointer. This is the kind of moment where you really think "Next time, I'll separate my /home partition for sure". My machine is an aging but working Dell Inspiron 530 with an Intel Core Duo E2160 processor, 2 GHz of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD3650 video card. Thanks.

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• CentOS drive mapping? [on hold]

  - by DroidOS

  This is the first time I am posting on this particular StackExchange forum and I hope that I am using the right one for the present question. Briefly, this is what I need to do I am running a web service where users can, amongst other things, upload and store files on the server. What I want to do is to hive off user file storage to a different location so my server (CentOS 64 bit) can concentrate on what it does best - server side scripting and database management. As things stand all user files go into subdirectories in a folder called stash that lies above DOC_ROOT. What I would like to do is Transparently detect all attempts to read/write to stash/sub_folder and get/set file data on a remote server - ideally the latter would be one which replicates files like a CDN so they can be delivered from the closest/fastest location based on where the user's location. Even nicer would be if for all read accesses I could provide a URL that allows the user's browser to fetch the relevant file directly without having to funnel them via my server. I am a relative newbie when it comes to this sort of thing so I hope that I have phrased this question adequately well. From the little searching I done I gathered that WebDAV can be used to map drives to a different location on the web so perhaps that is a starting point. But if that will work I need to Establish how to get WebDAV up and running on my CentOS 64 bit server. Ideally, identify a service that allows this kind of file storage and provides an API I can use in my own scripting. I'd much appreciate any help with this.

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• Iterative and Incremental Principle Series 5: Conclusion

  - by llowitz

  Thank you for joining me in the final segment in the Iterative and Incremental series.  During yesterday’s segment, I discussed Iteration Planning, and specifically how I planned my daily exercise (iteration) each morning by assessing multiple factors, while following my overall Implementation plan. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, regardless of the type of exercise or how many increment sets I decide to complete each day, I apply the 6 minute interval sets and a timebox approach.  When the 6 minutes are up, I stop the interval, even if I have more to give, saving the extra energy to apply to my next interval set.   Timeboxes are used to manage iterations.  Once the pre-determined iteration duration is reached – whether it is 2 weeks or 6 weeks or somewhere in between-- the iteration is complete.  Iteration group items (requirements) not fully addressed, in relation to the iteration goal, are addressed in the next iteration.  This approach helps eliminate the “rolling deadline” and better allows the project manager to assess the project progress earlier and more frequently than in traditional approaches. Not only do smaller, more frequent milestones allow project managers to better assess potential schedule risks and slips, but process improvement is encouraged.  Even in my simple example, I learned, after a few interval sets, not to sprint uphill!  Now I plan my route more efficiently to ensure that I sprint on a level surface to reduce of the risk of not completing my increment.  Project managers have often told me that they used an iterative and incremental approach long before OUM.   An effective project manager naturally organizes project work consistent with this principle, but a key benefit of OUM is that it formalizes this approach so it happens by design rather than by chance.    I hope this series has encouraged you to think about additional ways you can incorporate the iterative and incremental principle into your daily and project life.  I further hope that you will share your thoughts and experiences with the rest of us.

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• Google PageSpeed, optimizing Google's own elements

  - by mowgli

  I'm trying Google's PageSpeed online service Ironically, it's primarily highlighting Google's own services as something that needs improvement on my site 1) jQuery from Google: blocking. So I moved all javascript from <head> to the end of the document before </body>. That helped 2) Linking to external Google Font CSS (in <head>): blocking. But the font is critical to the design of the page and should load before much else 3) Google Analytics: Caching is not good. (Google has set it internally to 2 hours expiration). Don't know how to change this (this is also placed at the bottom of page) The Google Font is highlighted as a big priority to change. How can I fix this? Where/how should I call the the font?

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• Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group – SharePoint 2010 Mini-Launch Event - Review

  - by dmccollough

  The Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group set a record for attendance last night at our SharePoint 2010 Mini-Launch Event. Approximately 40+ people showed up to listen to SharePoint MVP Eric Shupps, The SharePoint Cowboy to discuss all of the new features for both administrators and developers. All of the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group Officers worked very hard to ensure that this event happened. We hosted our event at our local Dave & Busters and it was a great location with good food and great service. All of the officers of the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group would like to extend a big Thank You to all of our sponsor that helped us in making our SharePoint 2010 Mini-Launch Event a reality.

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• Interview with Tomas Ulin at the MySQL Innovation Day

  - by Monica Kumar

  MySQL Innovation Day held on June 5, 2012 was a great event for the MySQL engineers, users and customers to gather, share and network. I was able to get a few minutes with Tomas Ulin, Vice President of MySQL Engineering at Oracle, to ask him some questions. Here are the highlights of my interview with Tomas. Monica: This was the first MySQL Innovation Day, correct?  Why now, what was the strategy behind hosting this kind of event? Tomas: In the last year, we have rolled out an incredible number of MySQL events worldwide – some targeted at developers that are new to MySQL and others for the MySQL savvy. At the MySQL Innovation Day, our first event of this kind,, we had a number of our key engineers presenting lightning talks delivering previews of key new features as well as discussing roadmap. Our goal is to keep an open dialogue with the MySQL community. In fact, we are hosting a two-day conference, another first, for the MySQL community called MySQL Connect on Sept. 29-30 in San Francisco. If you attended the MySQL Innovation Day and liked what we did, you are going to love MySQL Connect. We’ll have a lot more of our engineers and many users and community members presenting hour long sessions and hands on labs. Our engineers will be presenting new MySQL features as well offer previews of upcoming enhancements. Monica: What's the big take-away from today's MySQL Innovation Day? Tomas: I hope the most important takeaway for attendees was to see that Oracle has been driving, and continues to drive MySQL innovation with a steady stream of new great GA and Development Milestone releases. Monica: What were attendees most interested in? What feedback did they have? Tomas: Feedback from attendees was incredibly positive and encouraging. In particular, they liked the interaction with the MySQL engineers and were also excited about the new early access features in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.3. In addition, sessions delivered by MySQL users like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter were very well received. For example, Pinterest talked about using MySQL to scale from 0 to billions of page views/month, Twitter talked about “Scaling twitter with MySQL” and Facebook discussed the many options to implement MySQL master failover solutions. The presentations are already available for download while some of the session videos will be made available on the MySQL Innovation Day web page shortly. Monica: How would you distinguish the use of MySQL vs. Oracle Database? What key factors should customers consider? Tomas: MySQL and Oracle Database complement each other. They are very different products, best suited to different use cases. Customers can choose world-class solutions from Oracle to fulfill a variety of needs. MySQL is a great choice for enterprise web-based, custom and embedded apps. Oracle Database is the leading choice for enterprise packaged applications such as ERP, CRM as well as high-end data warehousing and business intelligence applications. Monica: What are the highlights of the current MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release and early access features for MySQL Cluster 7.3? Tomas: MySQL 5.6 development milestone release builds on MySQL 5.5 by improving: Optimizer for better Performance, Scalability Performance Schema for better instrumentation InnoDB for better transactional throughput Replication for higher availability, data integrity NoSQL options for more flexibility We announced some new early access features in MySQL 5.6, including binary log group commit. We also announced early access features in MySQL Cluster 7.3 including support for foreign key constraints. Monica: How do people get these releases? Tomas: You can access development milestone releases by going to: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysqlThen select the “Development Release” tab. The MySQL Cluster 7.3 and other early access features can be downloaded at: http://labs.mysql.com Monica: What's coming up next for MySQL? Tomas: Our development team is working in overdrive, cranking out new features with community feedback. Don’t miss the MySQL Connect conference being held in San Francisco on Sept. 29 and 30th. My team and I will be there. I hope you can join us! Monica: Thank you for your time, Tomas. I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference. To our followers, I hope you found this interview informative. I welcome your comments. Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. Note: Monica Kumar is Senior Director of product marketing for Linux, Virtualization and MySQL at Oracle.

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• Book Review Charlene Li's New Book: Open Leadership

  - by david.talamelli

  A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I looked in our mail box. I had received an Advance Copy of Charlene Li's new book titled "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead". Charlene sent a tweet a while back asking anyone interested in receiving the book to submit their details. I sent off my details and didn't think I would hear anything back, so it was a pleasant surprise. With that I almost feel bad that it has taken me 3 weeks to read her book. It took this long mainly because it has been hard to fit in some quality reading time for myself with work, the kids, volunteering, etc..... I am happy to report I have finished her book and wanted to run through my initial thoughts with you. I first came across Charlene Li after reading her book "Groundswell" a few years ago, her latest book "Open Leadership" is a follow on from Groundswell and to me it seems like a natural progression from the question "Ok the business landscape is changing, what do we do now?" For me these two books have a different writing style to them. Groundswell from memory spoke about broad social media concepts and adoption and alerted us to some of the changes taking place in the SM landscape. Open Leadership seems to be focussed on taking those broad concepts and finding ways to implement them into your environment. That is breaking broad concepts down into individual action items that can be measured and analysed. As the business world changes Leaders must change their approach and let go of control to more control. One of the things I love reading about is seeing real life examples of how people and organisations are making these things happen. In this book Charlene has collected some great collateral and case studies from companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, The Red Cross and The State Bank of India (as a side-note, I wish now that I submitted my input for the Leaders I work with here at Oracle - there are some great examples here of people who empower their staff). As society becomes more adept at using social media it is inevitable that Leaders must become open with their employees, clients and partners. From the book some of the key points I took away are (I actually took away a lot more from this book, this is just an overview) : 1) Organisations should encourage risk taking. Without being a "hacker", how can we improve ourselves, our processes, our business, etc... The old saying you only fail by not trying applies here. If Leaders create a culture where people are afraid to stick their neck out - how will you innovate? 2) Leaders need to lead by example - if you want to promote an open and transparent business, a Leader needs to exemplify the traits they would like to see out of their employees. 3) The definition of a Leader is changing, open leadership is about being a catalyst to change that uses networks to spread a vision as opposed to traditional leadership that is viewed as a role. 4) There is a cultural and business shift taking place. Information is more wide-spread and is being disseminated faster than any other time in the past. Leaders who are open and transparent will thrive in this new business environment. 5) Leadership is not defined by a title - it is defined by a person's actions. Also anyone can be a Leader or has Leadership potential in them- it is a matter of drawing that out of people. I found this book useful and I also found myself looking at my own actions and the actions of others around me (including my management) to see how open and transparent I am in my work. For me I am glad I read this book as it validated my own thoughts of the changes we are seeing take place. This book has certainly given me some new ideas and helped me push my own boundaries of what I can do. The book has a number of action plans at the end of some of the chapters such as "Conducting you Openness Audit" that I think have helped me take thoughts and ideas and turn them into concrete action items. I have included a link to the introduction of the book here if anyone wants to have a read of it. If anyone else has read this book, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments/review. Leave your comments below. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• Aero Isn’t Gone in Windows 8: 6 Aero Features You Can Still Use

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Many people think Aero is completely gone in Windows 8, but this isn’t true. Microsoft hasn’t helped matters by saying they’ve “moved beyond Aero” in several blog posts. However, hardware acceleration and most Aero features are still present. Aero is more than Glass. What’s actually gone is the Aero branding and the Aero Glass theme with transparent, blurred window borders. The Flip 3D feature, which wasn’t used by many Windows users, has also been removed. How To Delete, Move, or Rename Locked Files in Windows HTG Explains: Why Screen Savers Are No Longer Necessary 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7

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• Persistent Storage in Windows Phone 7

  - by Richard Jones

  Mark Arteaga – fellow MVP just helped me with this,  thought I’d share. Windows Phone 7 SilverLight supports persistent storage, which is a great way of saving settings betweens runs of your application. However I couldn’t get it to work. If you do this to create a persistant storage instance -    private IsolatedStorageSettings userSettings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; To retrieve settings do the following - string xx = userSettings[“SomeValue”].ToString();   Hiowever the bit that got me was how to save settings, you have todo this - userSettings.Add("Hello", DateTime.Now.ToShortTimeString());           userSettings.Save(); // <- This is the bit that got me   Hope this helps others

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• Panduit Delivers on the Digital Business Promise

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  How a 60-Year-Old Company Transformed into a Modern Digital BusinessConnecting with audiences through a robust online experience across multiple channels and devices is a nonnegotiable requirement in today’s digital world. Companies need a digital platform that helps them create, manage, and integrate processes, content, analytics, and more.Panduit, a company founded nearly 60 years ago, needed to simplify and modernize its enterprise application and infrastructure to position itself for long-term growth. Learn how it transformed into a digital business using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management. Join this webcast for an in-depth look at how these Oracle technologies helped Panduit: Increase self-service activity on their portal by 75% Improve number and quality of sales leads through increased customer interactions and registration over the web and mobile Create multichannel self-service interactions and content-enabled business processes Register now for this webcast. Register Now Presented by:Andy KershawSenior Director, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle BPM and Oracle Social Network Product Management, OracleVidya IyerIT Delivery Manager, PanduitPatrick GarciaIT Solutions Architect, Panduit Copyright © 2014, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement

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• Brad, are you alive?

  So you might have been wondering, given that it's been oh... 4 years since my last blog post if I was still alive. The answer is yes.  In fact I've been posting over on the MDOP blog. I've been on a bit of a journey after my time in VB/SQL/ASP.NET land.  I hired a team here in Redmond that helped to drive the global MSDN and TechNet sites and bring alot to of the great content to folks around the world.  After that project and set of sites were up and running I switched gears...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• No alternative drivers appearing on Software Sources and manual install leads to no unity

  - by Gausie

  I just got a new laptop, installed Ubuntu 12.10 and am trying to install proprietary nvidia drivers. Once I understood the change from jockey, I did a fresh install and followed these instructions: http://techhamlet.com/2012/11/install-nvidia-drivers-in-ubuntu-12-10/ But when I do, Unity crashes on startup. My hardware on lspci | grep VGA is as follows 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107 [GeForce GT 650M] (rev a1) I've followed a couple of nvidia 12.10 tutorials on Google but none have helped. Can I get any specific advice?

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• Do your good deed for the day: nominate an exceptional DBA

  - by Rebecca Amos

  Do you know an exceptional DBA? Think they deserve recognition at the world’s largest technical SQL Server conference? Nominate them for the Exceptional DBA Award 2011, and they could be accepting the prize at this year’s PASS Summit. Hard-working DBAs are crucial to the smooth-running of the companies they work for, so we want you to help us celebrate their achievements. Nominating someone for the Exceptional DBA Award simply involves answering a few questions about the nominee’s achievements and experience as a DBA, activities they’re involved in within the SQL Server community, and any mistakes they might have made along the way (we’ve all made them!), and how they handled them. They could win full conference registration to the PASS Summit (where the Award will be presented), and a copy of Red Gate’s SQL DBA Bundle. And you’ll have the feel-good satisfaction of knowing that you’ve helped a colleague or friend get the recognition they deserve (they’ll probably owe you a drink or two, too…). So do your good deed for the day: have a look at our website for all the info, and get started on your nomination: www.exceptionaldba.com

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• Weekend With #iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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• Find only physical network adapters with WMI Win32_NetworkAdapter class

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  WMI is Windows Management Instrumentation infrastructure for managing data and machines. We can access it by using WQL (WMI querying language or SQL for WMI). One thing to remember from the WQL link is that it doesn't support ORDER BY. This means that when you do SELECT * FROM wmiObject, the returned order of the objects is not guaranteed. It can return adapters in different order based on logged-in user, permissions of that user, etc… This is not documented anywhere that I've looked and is derived just from my observations. To get network adapters we have to query the Win32_NetworkAdapter class. This returns us all network adapters that windows detect, real and virtual ones, however it only supplies IPv4 data. I've tried various methods of combining properties that are common on all systems since Windows XP. The first thing to do to remove all virtual adapters (like tunneling, WAN miniports, etc…) created by Microsoft. We do this by adding WHERE Manufacturer!='Microsoft' to our WMI query. This greatly narrows the number of adapters we have to work with. Just on my machine it went from 20 adapters to 5. What was left were one real physical Realtek LAN adapter, 2 virtual adapters installed by VMware and 2 virtual adapters installed by VirtualBox. If you read the Win32_NetworkAdapter help page you'd notice that there's an AdapterType that enumerates various adapter types like LAN or Wireless and AdapterTypeID that gives you the same information as AdapterType only in integer form. The dirty little secret is that these 2 properties don't work. They are both hardcoded, AdapterTypeID to "0" and AdapterType to "Ethernet 802.3". The only exceptions I've seen so far are adapters that have no values at all for the two properties, "RAS Async Adapter" that has values of AdapterType = "Wide Area Network" and AdapterTypeID = "3" and various tunneling adapters that have values of AdapterType = "Tunnel" and AdapterTypeID = "15". In the help docs there isn't even a value for 15. So this property was of no help. Next property to give hope is NetConnectionId. This is the name of the network connection as it appears in the Control Panel -> Network Connections. Problem is this value is also localized into various languages and can have different names for different connection. So both of these properties don't help and we haven't even started talking about eliminating virtual adapters. Same as the previous one this property was also of no help. Next two properties I checked were ConfigManagerErrorCode and NetConnectionStatus in hopes of finding disabled and disconnected adapters. If an adapter is enabled but disconnected the ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 with different NetConnectionStatus. If the adapter is disabled it reports ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22. This looked like a win by using (ConfigManagerErrorCode=0 or ConfigManagerErrorCode=22) in our condition. This way we get enabled (connected and disconnected adapters). Problem with all of the above properties is that none of them filter out the virtual adapters installed by virtualization software like VMware and VirtualBox. The last property to give hope is PNPDeviceID. There's an interesting observation about physical and virtual adapters with this property. Every virtual adapter PNPDeviceID starts with "ROOT\". Even VMware and VirtualBox ones. There were some really, really old physical adapters that had PNPDeviceID starting with "ROOT\" but those were in pre win XP era AFAIK. Since my minimum system to check was Windows XP SP2 I didn't have to worry about those. The only virtual adapter I've seen to not have PNPDeviceID start with "ROOT\" is the RAS Async Adapter for Wide Area Network. But because it is made by Microsoft we've eliminated it with the first condition for the manufacturer. Using the PNPDeviceID has so far proven to be really effective and I've tested it on over 20 different computers of various configurations from Windows XP laptops with wireless and bluetooth cards to virtualized Windows 2008 R2 servers. So far it always worked as expected. I will appreciate you letting me know if you find a configuration where it doesn't work. Let's see some C# code how to do this: ManagementObjectSearcher mos = null;// WHERE Manufacturer!='Microsoft' removes all of the // Microsoft provided virtual adapters like tunneling, miniports, and Wide Area Network adapters.mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft'");// Trying the ConfigManagerErrorCode and NetConnectionStatus variations // proved to still not be enough and it returns adapters installed by // the virtualization software like VMWare and VirtualBox// ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 -> Device is working properly. This covers enabled and/or disconnected devices// ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 AND NetConnectionStatus = 0 -> Device is disabled and Disconnected. // Some virtual devices report ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 (disabled) and some other NetConnectionStatus than 0mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft' AND (ConfigManagerErrorCode = 0 OR (ConfigManagerErrorCode = 22 AND NetConnectionStatus = 0))");// Final solution with filtering on the Manufacturer and PNPDeviceID not starting with "ROOT\"// Physical devices have PNPDeviceID starting with "PCI\" or something else besides "ROOT\"mos = new ManagementObjectSearcher(@"SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter WHERE Manufacturer != 'Microsoft' AND NOT PNPDeviceID LIKE 'ROOT\\%'");// Get the physical adapters and sort them by their index. // This is needed because they're not sorted by defaultIList<ManagementObject> managementObjectList = mos.Get() .Cast<ManagementObject>() .OrderBy(p => Convert.ToUInt32(p.Properties["Index"].Value)) .ToList();// Let's just show all the properties for all physical adapters.foreach (ManagementObject mo in managementObjectList){ foreach (PropertyData pd in mo.Properties) Console.WriteLine(pd.Name + ": " + (pd.Value ?? "N/A"));}   That's it. Hope this helps you in some way.

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• Does Ubuntu generally post timely security updates?

  - by Jo Liss

  Concrete issue: The Oneiric nginx package is at version 1.0.5-1, released in July 2011 according to the changelog. The recent memory-disclosure vulnerability (advisory page, CVE-2012-1180, DSA-2434-1) isn't fixed in 1.0.5-1. If I'm not misreading the Ubuntu CVE page, all Ubuntu versions seem to ship a vulnerable nginx. Is this true? If so: I though there was a security team at Canonical that's actively working on issues like this, so I expected to get a security update within a short timeframe (hours or days) through apt-get update. Is this expectation -- that keeping my packages up-to-date is enough to stop my server from having known vulnerabilities -- generally wrong? If so: What should I do to keep it secure? Reading the Ubuntu security notices wouldn't have helped in this case, as the nginx vulnerability was never posted there.

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• SaaS Customer Service Matters

  - by charles.knapp

  You probably know that Oracle CRM On Demand goes beyond contact and transaction tracking by providing valuable real-time insights. Do you know that Oracle CRM On Demand also delivers valuable service to our customers? Don't take my word for it. "Prior to Oracle CRM On Demand, we were too busy looking in the rear view mirror on our sales activities and needed a forward-looking tool to maximize sales and coaching opportunities," said Christian Doelle, Vice President Sales & Marketing, MonierLifetile. "After evaluating other organization's solutions, we found Oracle as the most proven with the real-time reporting and detailed reviews of sales opportunities that helped us to address our blind spots. Additionally, we have found throughout our implementation phase that Oracle's commitment to customer attention and service is incomparable." Learn more here about MonierLifetile's experience with Oracle CRM On Demand.

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• Ubuntu 14.04.1 will not load - stops in tty1

  - by Mitya Stiglitz

  I was following some "guides" on how to clean my system and have cleaned it so well that it doesn't work anymore. Example: in synaptic, I completely removed all packages in "Not installed: residual configuration" and a ton of other packages I "don't need". I know this has probably been asked a trillion times but I really need to find out how to get back to the working OS I had about two hours ago. One hour of googling has not helped me, so I am asking here. When I start Ubuntu, usually nothing happens for quite some time and then tty1 starts. I can log in normally, but I don't know how to proceed from there. I can do: less /var/log/apt/history.log and get a log, but I don't know how to get started with this...

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