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  • Pixel Shader Giving Black output

    - by Yashwinder
    I am coding in C# using Windows Forms and the SlimDX API to show the effect of a pixel shader. When I am setting the pixel shader, I am getting a black output screen but if I am not using the pixel shader then I am getting my image rendered on the screen. I have the following C# code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using SlimDX.Direct3D9; using SlimDX; using SlimDX.Windows; using System.Drawing; using System.Threading; namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 { // Vertex structure. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] struct Vertex { public Vector3 Position; public float Tu; public float Tv; public static int SizeBytes { get { return Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(Vertex)); } } public static VertexFormat Format { get { return VertexFormat.Position | VertexFormat.Texture1; } } } static class Program { public static Device D3DDevice; // Direct3D device. public static VertexBuffer Vertices; // Vertex buffer object used to hold vertices. public static Texture Image; // Texture object to hold the image loaded from a file. public static int time; // Used for rotation caculations. public static float angle; // Angle of rottaion. public static Form1 Window =new Form1(); public static string filepath; static VertexShader vertexShader = null; static ConstantTable constantTable = null; static ImageInformation info; [STAThread] static void Main() { filepath = "C:\\Users\\Public\\Pictures\\Sample Pictures\\Garden.jpg"; info = new ImageInformation(); info = ImageInformation.FromFile(filepath); PresentParameters presentParams = new PresentParameters(); // Below are the required bare mininum, needed to initialize the D3D device. presentParams.BackBufferHeight = info.Height; // BackBufferHeight, set to the Window's height. presentParams.BackBufferWidth = info.Width+200; // BackBufferWidth, set to the Window's width. presentParams.Windowed =true; presentParams.DeviceWindowHandle = Window.panel2 .Handle; // DeviceWindowHandle, set to the Window's handle. // Create the device. D3DDevice = new Device(new Direct3D (), 0, DeviceType.Hardware, Window.Handle, CreateFlags.HardwareVertexProcessing, presentParams); // Create the vertex buffer and fill with the triangle vertices. (Non-indexed) // Remember 3 vetices for a triangle, 2 tris per quad = 6. Vertices = new VertexBuffer(D3DDevice, 6 * Vertex.SizeBytes, Usage.WriteOnly, VertexFormat.None, Pool.Managed); DataStream stream = Vertices.Lock(0, 0, LockFlags.None); stream.WriteRange(BuildVertexData()); Vertices.Unlock(); // Create the texture. Image = Texture.FromFile(D3DDevice,filepath ); // Turn off culling, so we see the front and back of the triangle D3DDevice.SetRenderState(RenderState.CullMode, Cull.None); // Turn off lighting D3DDevice.SetRenderState(RenderState.Lighting, false); ShaderBytecode sbcv = ShaderBytecode.CompileFromFile("C:\\Users\\yashwinder singh\\Desktop\\vertexShader.vs", "vs_main", "vs_1_1", ShaderFlags.None); constantTable = sbcv.ConstantTable; vertexShader = new VertexShader(D3DDevice, sbcv); ShaderBytecode sbc = ShaderBytecode.CompileFromFile("C:\\Users\\yashwinder singh\\Desktop\\pixelShader.txt", "ps_main", "ps_3_0", ShaderFlags.None); PixelShader ps = new PixelShader(D3DDevice, sbc); VertexDeclaration vertexDecl = new VertexDeclaration(D3DDevice, new[] { new VertexElement(0, 0, DeclarationType.Float3, DeclarationMethod.Default, DeclarationUsage.PositionTransformed, 0), new VertexElement(0, 12, DeclarationType.Float2 , DeclarationMethod.Default, DeclarationUsage.TextureCoordinate , 0), VertexElement.VertexDeclarationEnd }); Application.EnableVisualStyles(); MessagePump.Run(Window, () => { // Clear the backbuffer to a black color. D3DDevice.Clear(ClearFlags.Target | ClearFlags.ZBuffer, Color.Black, 1.0f, 0); // Begin the scene. D3DDevice.BeginScene(); // Setup the world, view and projection matrices. //D3DDevice.VertexShader = vertexShader; //D3DDevice.PixelShader = ps; // Render the vertex buffer. D3DDevice.SetStreamSource(0, Vertices, 0, Vertex.SizeBytes); D3DDevice.VertexFormat = Vertex.Format; // Setup our texture. Using Textures introduces the texture stage states, // which govern how Textures get blended together (in the case of multiple // Textures) and lighting information. D3DDevice.SetTexture(0, Image); // Now drawing 2 triangles, for a quad. D3DDevice.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList , 0, 2); // End the scene. D3DDevice.EndScene(); // Present the backbuffer contents to the screen. D3DDevice.Present(); }); if (Image != null) Image.Dispose(); if (Vertices != null) Vertices.Dispose(); if (D3DDevice != null) D3DDevice.Dispose(); } private static Vertex[] BuildVertexData() { Vertex[] vertexData = new Vertex[6]; vertexData[0].Position = new Vector3(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[0].Tu = 0.0f; vertexData[0].Tv = 0.0f; vertexData[1].Position = new Vector3(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[1].Tu = 0.0f; vertexData[1].Tv = 1.0f; vertexData[2].Position = new Vector3(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[2].Tu = 1.0f; vertexData[2].Tv = 0.0f; vertexData[3].Position = new Vector3(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[3].Tu = 0.0f; vertexData[3].Tv = 1.0f; vertexData[4].Position = new Vector3(1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[4].Tu = 1.0f; vertexData[4].Tv = 1.0f; vertexData[5].Position = new Vector3(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[5].Tu = 1.0f; vertexData[5].Tv = 0.0f; return vertexData; } } } And my pixel shader and vertex shader code are as following // Pixel shader input structure struct PS_INPUT { float4 Position : POSITION; float2 Texture : TEXCOORD0; }; // Pixel shader output structure struct PS_OUTPUT { float4 Color : COLOR0; }; // Global variables sampler2D Tex0; // Name: Simple Pixel Shader // Type: Pixel shader // Desc: Fetch texture and blend with constant color // PS_OUTPUT ps_main( in PS_INPUT In ) { PS_OUTPUT Out; //create an output pixel Out.Color = tex2D(Tex0, In.Texture); //do a texture lookup Out.Color *= float4(0.9f, 0.8f, 0.0f, 1); //do a simple effect return Out; //return output pixel } // Vertex shader input structure struct VS_INPUT { float4 Position : POSITION; float2 Texture : TEXCOORD0; }; // Vertex shader output structure struct VS_OUTPUT { float4 Position : POSITION; float2 Texture : TEXCOORD0; }; // Global variables float4x4 WorldViewProj; // Name: Simple Vertex Shader // Type: Vertex shader // Desc: Vertex transformation and texture coord pass-through // VS_OUTPUT vs_main( in VS_INPUT In ) { VS_OUTPUT Out; //create an output vertex Out.Position = mul(In.Position, WorldViewProj); //apply vertex transformation Out.Texture = In.Texture; //copy original texcoords return Out; //return output vertex }

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  • Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives Part 2 - Jumpstarting your IAM program with R2

    - by Tanu Sood
    Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t a new concept. Over the past decade, companies have begun to address identity management through a variety of solutions that have primarily focused on provisioning. . The new age workforce is converging at a rapid pace with ever increasing demand to use diverse portfolio of applications and systems to interact and interface with their peers in the industry and customers alike. Oracle has taken a significant leap with their release of Identity and Access Management 11gR2 towards enabling this global workforce to conduct their business in a secure, efficient and effective manner. As companies deal with IAM business drivers, it becomes immediately apparent that holistic, rather than piecemeal, approaches better address their needs. When planning an enterprise-wide IAM solution, the first step is to create a common framework that serves as the foundation on which to build the cost, compliance and business process efficiencies. As a leading industry practice, IAM should be established on a foundation of accurate data for identity management, making this data available in a uniform manner to downstream applications and processes. Mature organizations are looking beyond IAM’s basic benefits to harness more advanced capabilities in user lifecycle management. For any organization looking to embark on an IAM initiative, consider the following use cases in managing and administering user access. Expanding the Enterprise Provisioning Footprint Almost all organizations have some helpdesk resources tied up in handling access requests from users, a distraction from their core job of handling problem tickets. This dependency has mushroomed from the traditional acceptance of provisioning solutions integrating and addressing only a portion of applications in the heterogeneous landscape Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11gR2 solves this problem by offering integration with third party ticketing systems as “disconnected applications”. It allows for the existing business processes to be seamlessly integrated into the system and tracked throughout its lifecycle. With minimal effort and analysis, an organization can begin integrating OIM with groups or applications that are involved with manually intensive access provisioning and de-provisioning activities. This aspect of OIM allows organizations to on-board applications and associated business processes quickly using out of box templates and frameworks. This is especially important for organizations looking to fold in users and resources from mergers and acquisitions. Simplifying Access Requests Organizations looking to implement access request solutions often find it challenging to get their users to accept and adopt the new processes.. So, how do we improve the user experience, make it intuitive and personalized and yet simplify the user access process? With R2, OIM helps organizations alleviate the challenge by placing the most used functionality front and centre in the new user request interface. Roles, application accounts, and entitlements can all be found in the same interface as catalog items, giving business users a single location to go to whenever they need to initiate, approve or track a request. Furthermore, if a particular item is not relevant to a user’s job function or area inside the organization, it can be hidden so as to not overwhelm or confuse the user with superfluous options. The ability to customize the user interface to suit your needs helps in exercising the business rules effectively and avoiding access proliferation within the organization. Saving Time with Templates A typical use case that is most beneficial to business users is flexibility to place, edit, and withdraw requests based on changing circumstances and business needs. With OIM R2, multiple catalog items can now be added and removed from the shopping cart, an ecommerce paradigm that many users are already familiar with. This feature can be especially useful when setting up a large number of new employees or granting existing department or group access to a newly integrated application. Additionally, users can create their own shopping cart templates in order to complete subsequent requests more quickly. This feature saves the user from having to search for and select items all over again if a request is similar to a previous one. Advanced Delegated Administration A key feature of any provisioning solution should be to empower each business unit in managing their own access requests. By bringing administration closer to the user, you improve user productivity, enable efficiency and alleviate the administration overhead. To do so requires a federated services model so that the business units capable of shouldering the onus of user life cycle management of their business users can be enabled to do so. OIM 11gR2 offers advanced administrative options for creating, managing and controlling business logic and workflows through easy to use administrative interface and tools that can be exposed to delegated business administrators. For example, these business administrators can establish or modify how certain requests and operations should be handled within their business unit based on a number of attributes ranging from the type of request or the risk level of the individual items requested. Closed-Loop Remediation Security continues to be a major concern for most organizations. Identity management solutions bolster security by ensuring only the right users have the right access to the right resources. To prevent unauthorized access and where it already exists, the ability to detect and remediate it, are key requirements of an enterprise-grade proven solution. But the challenge with most solutions today is that some of this information still exists in silos. And when changes are made to systems directly, not all information is captured. With R2, oracle is offering a comprehensive Identity Governance solution that our customer organizations are leveraging for closed loop remediation that allows for an automated way for administrators to revoke unauthorized access. The change is automatically captured and the action noted for continued management. Conclusion While implementing provisioning solutions, it is important to keep the near term and the long term goals in mind. The provisioning solution should always be a part of a larger security and identity management program but with the ability to seamlessly integrate not only with the company’s infrastructure but also have the ability to leverage the information, business models compiled and used by the other identity management solutions. This allows organizations to reduce the cost of ownership, close security gaps and leverage the existing infrastructure. And having done so a multiple clients’ sites, this is the approach we recommend. In our next post, we will take a journey through our experiences of advising clients looking to upgrade to R2 from a previous version or migrating from a different solution. Meet the Writers:   Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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  • Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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  • Oracle Tutor: Top 10 to Implement Sustainable Policies and Procedures

    - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com
    Overview Your organization (executives, managers, and employees) understands the value of having written business process documents (process maps, procedures, instructions, reference documents, and form abstracts). Policies and procedures should be documented because they help to reduce the range of individual decisions and encourage management by exception: the manager only needs to give special attention to unusual problems, not covered by a specific policy or procedure. As more and more procedures are written to cover recurring situations, managers will begin to make decisions which will be consistent from one functional area to the next.Companies should take a project management approach when implementing an environment for a sustainable documentation program and do the following:1. Identify an Executive Champion2. Put together a winning team3. Assign ownership4. Centralize publishing5. Establish the Document Maintenance Process Up Front6. Document critical activities only7. Document actual practice8. Minimize documentation9. Support continuous improvement10. Keep it simple 1. Identify an Executive ChampionAppoint a top down driver. Select one key individual to be a mentor for the procedure planning team. The individual should be a senior manager, such as your company president, CIO, CFO, the vice-president of quality, manufacturing, or engineering. Written policies and procedures can be important supportive aids when known to express the thinking for the chief executive officer and / or the president and to have his or her full support. 2. Put Together a Winning TeamChoose a strong Project Management Leader and staff the procedure planning team with management members from cross functional groups. Make sure team members have the responsibility - and the authority - to make things happen.The winning team should consist of the Documentation Project Manager, Document Owners (one for each functional area), a Document Controller, and Document Specialists (as needed). The Tutor Implementation Guide has complete job descriptions for these roles. 3. Assign Ownership It is virtually impossible to keep process documentation simple and meaningful if employees who are far removed from the activity itself create it. It is impossible to keep documentation up-to-date when responsibility for the document is not clearly understood.Key to the Tutor methodology, therefore, is the concept of ownership. Each document has a single owner, who is responsible for ensuring that the document is necessary and that it reflects actual practice. The owner must be a person who is knowledgeable about the activity and who has the authority to build consensus among the persons who participate in the activity as well as the authority to define or change the way an activity is performed. The owner must be an advocate of the performers and negotiate, not dictate practices.In the Tutor environment, a document's owner is the only person with the authority to approve an update to that document. 4. Centralize Publishing Although it is tempting (especially in a networked environment and with document management software solutions) to decentralize the control of all documents -- with each owner updating and distributing his own -- Tutor promotes centralized publishing by assigning the Document Administrator (gate keeper) to manage the updates and distribution of the procedures library. 5. Establish a Document Maintenance Process Up Front (and stick to it) Everyone in your organization should know they are invited to suggest changes to procedures and should understand exactly what steps to take to do so. Tutor provides a set of procedures to help your company set up a healthy document control system. There are many document management products available to automate some of the document change and maintenance steps. Depending on the size of your organization, a simple document management system can reduce the effort it takes to track and distribute document changes and updates. Whether your company decides to store the written policies and procedures on a file server or in a database, the essential tasks for maintaining documents are the same, though some tasks are automated. 6. Document Critical Activities Only The best way to keep your documentation simple is to reduce the number of process documents to a bare minimum and to include in those documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary. The first step to reducing process documentation is to document only those activities that are deemed critical. Not all activities require documentation. In fact, some critical activities cannot and should not be standardized. Others may be sufficiently documented with an instruction or a checklist and may not require a procedure. A document should only be created when it enhances the performance of the employee performing the activity. If it does not help the employee, then there is no reason to maintain the document. Activities that represent little risk (such as project status), activities that cannot be defined in terms of specific tasks (such as product research), and activities that can be performed in a variety of ways (such as advertising) often do not require documentation. Sometimes, an activity will evolve to the point where documentation is necessary. For example, an activity performed by single employee may be straightforward and uncomplicated -- that is, until the activity is performed by multiple employees. Sometimes, it is the interaction between co-workers that necessitates documentation; sometimes, it is the complexity or the diversity of the activity.7. Document Actual Practices The only reason to maintain process documentation is to enhance the performance of the employee performing the activity. And documentation can only enhance performance if it reflects reality -- that is, current best practice. Documentation that reflects an unattainable ideal or outdated practices will end up on the shelf, unused and forgotten.Documenting actual practice means (1) auditing the activity to understand how the work is really performed, (2) identifying best practices with employees who are involved in the activity, (3) building consensus so that everyone agrees on a common method, and (4) recording that consensus.8. Minimize Documentation One way to keep it simple is to document at the highest level possible. That is, include in your documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary.When writing a document, you should ask yourself, What is the purpose of this document? That is, what problem will it solve?By focusing on this question, you can target the critical information.• What questions are the end users likely to have?• What level of detail is required?• Is any of this information extraneous to the document's purpose? Short, concise documents are user friendly and they are easier to keep up to date. 9. Support Continuous Improvement Employees who perform an activity are often in the best position to identify improvements to the process. In other words, continuous improvement is a natural byproduct of the work itself -- but only if the improvements are communicated to all employees who are involved in the process, and only if there is consensus among those employees.Traditionally, process documentation has been used to dictate performance, to limit employees' actions. In the Tutor environment, process documents are used to communicate improvements identified by employees. How does this work? The Tutor methodology requires a process document to reflect actual practice, so the owner of a document must routinely audit its content -- does the document match what the employees are doing? If it doesn't, the owner has the responsibility to evaluate the process, to build consensus among the employees, to identify "best practices," and to communicate these improvements via a document update. Continuous improvement can also be an outgrowth of corrective action -- but only if the solutions to problems are communicated effectively. The goal should be to solve a problem once and only once, which means not only identifying the solution, but ensuring that the solution becomes part of the process. The Tutor system provides the method through which improvements and solutions are documented and communicated to all affected employees in a cost-effective, timely manner; it ensures that improvements are not lost or confined to a single employee. 10. Keep it Simple Process documents don't have to be complex and unfriendly. In fact, the simpler the format and organization, the more likely the documents will be used. And the simpler the method of maintenance, the more likely the documents will be kept up-to-date. Keep it simply by:• Minimizing skills and training required• Following the established Tutor document format and layout• Avoiding technology just for technology's sake No other rule has as major an impact on the success of your internal documentation as -- keep it simple. Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.Com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum.   Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM 

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  • Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

    - by BuckWoody
    Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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  • Community Outreach - Where Should I Go

    - by Roger Brinkley
    A few days ago I was talking to person new to community development and they asked me what guidelines I used to determine the worthiness of a particular event. After our conversation was over I thought about it a little bit more and figured out there are three ways to determine if any event (be it conference, blog, podcast or other social medias) is worth doing: Transferability, Multiplication, and Impact. Transferability - Is what I have to say useful to the people that are going to hear it. For instance, consider a company that has product offering that can connect up using a number of languages like Scala, Grovey or Java. Sending a Scala expert to talk about Scala and the product is not transferable to a Java User Group, but a Java expert doing the same talk with a Java slant is. Similarly, talking about JavaFX to any Java User Group meeting in Brazil was pretty much a wasted effort until it was open sourced. Once it was open sourced it was well received. You can also look at transferability in relation to the subject matter that you're dealing with. How transferable is a presentation that I create. Can I, or a technical writer on the staff, turn it into some technical document. Could it be converted into some type of screen cast. If we have a regular podcast can we make a reference to the document, catch the high points or turn it into a interview. Is there a way of using this in the sales group. In other words is the document purely one dimensional or can it be re-purposed in other forms. Multiplication - On every trip I'm looking for 2 to 5 solid connections that I can make with developers. These are long term connections, because I know that once that relationship is established it will lead to another 2 - 5 from that connection and within a couple of years were talking about some 100 connections from just one developer. For instance, when I was working on JavaHelp in 2000 I hired a science teacher with a programming background. We've developed a very tight relationship over the year though we rarely see each other more than once a year. But at this JavaOne, one of his employees came up to me and said, "Richard (Rick Hard in Czech) told me to tell you that he couldn't make it to JavaOne this year but if I saw you to tell you hi". Another example is from my Mobile & Embedded days in Brasil. On our very first FISL trip about 5 years ago there were two university students that had created a project called "Marge". Marge was a Bluetooth framework that made connecting bluetooth devices easier. I invited them to a "Sun" dinner that evening. Originally they were planning on leaving that afternoon, but they changed their plans recognizing the opportunity. Their eyes were as big a saucers when they realized the level of engineers at the meeting. They went home started a JUG in Florianoplis that we've visited more than a couple of times. One of them went to work for Brazilian government lab like Berkley Labs, MIT Lab, John Hopkins Applied Physicas Labs or Lincoln Labs in the US. That presented us with an opportunity to show Embedded Java as a possibility for some of the work they were doing there. Impact - The final criteria is how life changing is what I'm going to say be to the individuals I'm reaching. A t-shirt is just a token, but when I reach down and tug at their developer hearts then I know I've succeeded. I'll never forget one time we flew all night to reach Joan Pasoa in Northern Brazil. We arrived at 2am went immediately to our hotel only to be woken up at 6 am to travel 2 hours by car to the presentation hall. When we arrived we were totally exhausted. Outside the facility there were 500 people lined up to hear 6 speakers for the day. That itself was uplifting.  I delivered one of my favorite talks on "I have passion". It was a talk on golf and embedded java development, "Find your passion". When we finished a couple of first year students came up to me and said how much my talk had inspired them. FISL is another great example. I had been about 4 years in a row. FISL is a very young group of developers so capturing their attention is important. Several of the students will come back 2 or 3 years later and ask me questions about research or jobs. And then there's Louis. Louis is one my favorite Brazilians. I can only describe him as a big Brazilian teddy bear. I see him every year at FISL. He works primarily in Java EE but he's attended every single one of my talks over the last 4 years. I can't tell you why, but he always greets me and gives me a hug. For some reason I've had a real impact. And of course when it comes to impact you don't just measure a presentation but every single interaction you have at an event. It's the hall way conversations, the booth conversations, but more importantly it's the conversations at dinner tables or in the cars when you're getting transported to an event. There's a good story that illustrates this. Last year in the spring I was traveling to Goiânia in Brazil. I've been there many times and leaders there no me well. One young man has picked me up at the airport on more than one occasion. We were going out to dinner one evening and he brought his girl friend along. One thing let to another and I eventually asked him, in front of her, "Why haven't you asked her to marry you?" There were all kinds of excuses and she just looked at him and smiled. When I came back in December for JavaOne he came and sought me. "I just want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said, and I asked her to marry me. We're getting married next Spring." Sometimes just one presentation is all it takes to make an impact. Other times it takes years. Some impacts are directly related to the company and some are more personal in nature. It doesn't matter which it is because it's having the impact that matters.

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  • Mobile BI Comes of Age

    - by rich.clayton(at)oracle.com
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} One of the hot topics in the Business Intelligence industry is mobility.  More specifically the question is how business can be transformed by the iPhone and the iPad.  In June 2003, Gartner predicted that Mobile BI would be obsolete and that the technology was headed for the 'trough of disillusionment'.  I agreed with them at that time.  Many vendors like MicroStrategy and Business Objects jumped into the fray attempting to show how PDA's like Palm Pilots could be integrated with BI.  Their investments resulted in interesting demos with no commercial traction.  Why, because wireless networks and mobile operating systems were primitive, immature and slow. In my opinion, Apple's iOS has changed everything in Mobile BI.  Yes Blackberry, Android and Symbian and all the rest have their place in the market but I believe that increasingly consumers (not IT departments) influence BI decision making processes.  Consumers are choosing the iPhone and the iPad. The number of iPads I see in business meetings now is staggering.  Some use it for email and note taking and others are starting to use corporate applications.  The possibilities for Mobile BI are countless and I would expect to see iPads enterprise-wide over the next few years.   These new devices will provide just-in-time access to critical business information.  Front-line managers interacting with customers, suppliers, patients or citizens will have information literally at their fingertips. I've experimented with several mobile BI tools.  They look cool but like their Executive Information System (EIS) predecessors of the 1990's these tools lack a backbone and a plausible integration strategy.  EIS was a viral technology in the early 1990's.  Executives from every industry and job function were showcasing their dashboards to fellow co-workers and colleagues at the country club.  Just like the iPad, every senior manager wanted one.  EIS wasn't a device however, it was a software application.   EIS quickly faded into the software sunset as it lacked integration with corporate information systems.  BI servers  replaced EIS because the technology focused on the heavy data lifting of integrating, normalizing, aggregating and managing large, complex data volumes.  The devices are here to stay. The cute stand-alone mobile BI tools, not so much. If all you're looking to do is put Excel files on your iPad, there are plenty of free tools on the market.  You'll look cool at your next management meeting but after a few weeks, the cool factor will fade away and you'll be wondering how you will ever maintain it.  If however you want secure, consistent, reliable information on your iPad, you need an integration strategy and a way to model the data.  BI Server technologies like the Oracle BI Foundation is a market leading approach to tackle that issue. I liken the BI mobility frenzy to buying classic cars.  Classic Cars have two buying groups - teenagers and middle-age folks looking to tinker.  Teenagers look at the pin-stripes and the paint job while middle-agers (like me)  kick the tires a bit and look under the hood to check out the quality and reliability of the engine.  Mobile BI tools sure look sexy but don't go very far without an engine and a transmission or an integration strategy. The strategic question in Mobile BI is can these startups build a motor and transmission faster than Oracle can re-paint the car?  Oracle has a great engine and a transmission that connects to all enterprise information assets.  We're working on the new paint job and are excited about the possibilities.  Just as vertical integration worked in the automotive business, it too works in the technology industry.

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  • Agile Like Jazz

    - by Jeff Certain
    (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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  • 3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

    - by David
    I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

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  • Turning on collision crashes game

    - by MomentumGaming
    I am getting a null pointer excecption to both my sprite and level. I am working on my mob class, and when I try to move him and the move function is called, the game crashes after checking collision with a null pointer excecption. Taking out the one line that actually checks if the tile located in front of it fixes the problem. Also, if i keep collision ON but don't move the position of the mob (the spider) the game works fine. I will have collision, and the spider appears on the screen, only problem is, getting it to move causes this nasty error that i just can't fix. true Exception in thread "Display" java.lang.NullPointerException at com.apcompsci.game.entity.mob.Mob.collision(Mob.java:67) at com.apcompsci.game.entity.mob.Mob.move(Mob.java:38) at com.apcompsci.game.entity.mob.spider.update(spider.java:58) at com.apcompsci.game.level.Level.update(Level.java:55) at com.apcompsci.game.Game.update(Game.java:128) at com.apcompsci.game.Game.run(Game.java:106) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Here is my renderMob mehtod: public void renderMob(int xp,int yp,Sprite sprite,int flip) { xp -= xOffset; yp-=yOffset; for(int y = 0; y<32; y++) { int ya = y + yp; int ys = y; if(flip == 2||flip == 3)ys = 31-y; for(int x = 0; x<32; x++) { int xa = x + xp; int xs = x; if(flip == 1||flip == 3)xs = 31-x; if(xa < -32 || xa >=width || ya<0||ya>=height) break; if(xa<0) xa =0; int col = sprite.pixels[xs+ys*32]; if(col!= 0x000000) pixels[xa+ya*width] = col; } } } My spider class which determines the sprite and where I control movement, also rendering the spider onto the screen, when I increment ya to move the sprite, I get the crash, but without ya++, it runs flawlessly with a spider sprite on screen: package com.apcompsci.game.entity.mob; import com.apcompsci.game.entity.mob.Mob.Direction; import com.apcompsci.game.graphics.Screen; import com.apcompsci.game.graphics.Sprite; import com.apcompsci.game.level.Level; public class spider extends Mob{ Direction dir; private Sprite sprite; private boolean walking; public spider(int x, int y) { this.x = x <<4; this.y = y <<4; sprite = sprite.spider_forward; } public void update() { int xa = 0, ya = 0; ya++; if(ya<0) { sprite = sprite.spider_forward; dir = Direction.UP; } if(ya>0) { sprite = sprite.spider_back; dir = Direction.DOWN; } if(xa<0) { sprite = sprite.spider_side; dir = Direction.LEFT; } if(xa>0) { sprite = sprite.spider_side; dir = Direction.LEFT; } if(xa!= 0 || ya!= 0) { System.out.println("true"); move(xa,ya); walking = true; } else{ walking = false; } } public void render(Screen screen) { screen.renderMob(x, y, sprite, 0); } } This is th mob class that contains the move() method that is called in the spider class above. This move method calls the collision method. tile and sprite comes up null in the debugger: package com.apcompsci.game.entity.mob; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import com.apcompsci.game.entity.Entity; import com.apcompsci.game.entity.projectile.DemiGodProjectile; import com.apcompsci.game.entity.projectile.Projectile; import com.apcompsci.game.graphics.Sprite; public class Mob extends Entity{ protected Sprite sprite; protected boolean moving = false; protected enum Direction { UP,DOWN,LEFT,RIGHT } protected Direction dir; public void move(int xa,int ya) { if(xa != 0 && ya != 0) { move(xa,0); move(0,ya); return; } if(xa>0) dir = Direction.RIGHT; if(xa<0) dir = Direction.LEFT; if(ya>0)dir = Direction.DOWN; if(ya<0)dir = Direction.UP; if(!collision(xa,ya)){ x+= xa; y+=ya; } } public void update() { } public void shoot(int x, int y, double dir) { //dir = Math.toDegrees(dir); Projectile p = new DemiGodProjectile(x, y,dir); level.addProjectile(p); } public boolean collision(int xa,int ya) { boolean solid = false; for(int c = 0; c<4; c++) { int xt = ((x+xa) + c % 2 * 14 - 8 )/16; int yt = ((y+ya) + c / 2 * 12 +3 )/16; if(level.getTile(xt, yt).solid()) solid = true; } return solid; } public void render() { } } Finally, here is the method in which i call the add() method for the spider to add it to the level: protected void loadLevel(String path) { try{ BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(SpawnLevel.class.getResource(path)); int w = width =image.getWidth(); int h = height = image.getHeight(); tiles = new int[w*h]; image.getRGB(0, 0, w,h, tiles,0, w); } catch(IOException e){ e.printStackTrace(); System.out.println("Exception! Could not load level file!"); } add(new spider(20,45)); } I don't think i need to include the level class but just in case, I have provided a gistHub link for better context. It contains all of the full classes listed above , plus my entity class and maybe another. Thanks for the help if you decide to do so, much appreciated! Also, please tell me if i'm in the wrong section of stackeoverflow, i figured that since this is the gamign section that it belonged but debugging code normally goes into the general section.

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  • It was a figure of speech!

    - by Ratman21
    Yesterday I posted the following as attention getter / advertisement (as well as my feelings). In the groups, (I am in) on the social networking site, LinkedIn and boy did I get responses.    I am fighting mad about (a figure of speech, really) not having a job! Look just because I am over 55 and have gray hair. It does not mean, my brain is dead or I can no longer trouble shoot a router or circuit or LAN issue. Or that I can do “IT” work at all. And I could prove this if; some one would give me at job. Come on try me for 90 days at min. wage. I know you will end up keeping me (hope fully at normal pay) around. Is any one hearing me…come on take up the challenge!     This was the responses I got.   I hear you. We just need to retrain and get our skills up to speed is all. That is what I am doing. I have not given up. Just got to stay on top of the game. Experience is on our side if we have the credentials and we are reasonable about our salaries this should not be an issue.   Already on it, going back to school and have got three certifications (CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+. I am now studying for my CISCO CCNA certification. As to my salary, I am willing to work at very reasonable rate.   You need to re-brand yourself like a product, market and sell yourself. You need to smarten up, look and feel a million dollars, re-energize yourself, regain your confidents. Either start your own business, or re-write your CV so it stands out from the rest, get the template off the internet. Contact every recruitment agent in your town, state, country and overseas, and on the web. Apply to every job you think you could do, you may not get it but you will make a contact for your network, which may lead to a job at the end of the tunnel. Get in touch with everyone you know from past jobs. Do charity work. I maintain the IT Network, stage electrical and the Telecom equipment in my church,   Again already on it. I have email the world is seems with my resume and cover letters. So far, I have rewritten or had it rewrote, my resume and cover letters; over seven times so far. Re-energize? I never lost my energy level or my self-confidents in my work (now if could get some HR personal to see the same). I also volunteer at my church, I created and maintain the church web sit.   I share your frustration. Sucks being over 50 and looking for work. Please don't sell yourself short at min wage because the employer will think that’s your worth. Keep trying!!   I never stop trying and min wage is only for 90 days. If some one takes up the challenge. Some post asked if I am keeping up technology.   Do you keep up with the latest technology and can speak the language fluidly?   Yep to that and as to speaking it also a yep! I am a geek you know. I heard from others over the 50 year mark and younger too.   I'm with you! I keep getting told that I don't have enough experience because I just recently completed a Masters level course in Microsoft SQL Server, which gave me a project-intensive equivalent of between 2 and 3 years of experience. On top of that training, I have 19 years as an applications programmer and database administrator. I can normalize rings around experienced DBAs and churn out effective code with the best of them. But my 19 years is worthless as far as most recruiters and HR people are concerned because it is not the specific experience for which they're looking. HR AND RECRUITERS TAKE NOTE: Experience, whatever the language, translates across platforms and technology! By the way, I'm also over 55 and still have "got it"!   I never lost it and I also can work rings round younger techs.   I'm 52 and female and seem to be having the same issues. I have over 10 years experience in tech support (with a BS in CIS) and can't get hired either.   Ow, I only have an AS in computer science along with my certifications.   Keep the faith, I have been unemployed since August of 2008. I agree with you...I am willing to return to the beginning of my retail career and work myself back through the ranks, if someone will look past the grey and realize the knowledge I would bring to the table.   I also would like some one to look past the gray.   Interesting approach, volunteering to work for minimum wage for 90 days. I'm in the same situation as you, being 55 & balding w/white hair, so I know where you're coming from. I've been out of work now for a year. I'm in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is estimated to be 15% (the worst in the nation) & even though I've got 30+ years of IT experience ranging from mainframe to PC desktop support, it's difficult to even get a face-to-face interview. I had one prospective employer tell me flat out that I "didn't have the energy required for this position". Mostly I never get any feedback. All I can say is good luck & try to remain optimistic.   He said WHAT! Yes remaining optimistic is key. Along with faith in God. Then there was this (for lack of better word) jerk.   Give it up already. You were too old to work in high tech 10 years ago. Scratch that, 20 years ago! Try selling hot dogs in front of Fry's Electronics. At least you would get a chance to eat lunch with your previous colleagues....   You know funny thing on this person is that I checked out his profile. He is older than I am.

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  • Light following me around the room. Something is wrong with my shader!

    - by Robinson
    I'm trying to do a spot (Blinn) light, with falloff and attenuation. It seems to be working OK except I have a bit of a space problem. That is, whenever I move the camera the light moves to maintain the same relative position, rather than changing with the camera. This results in the light moving around, i.e. not always falling on the same surfaces. It's as if there's a flashlight attached to the camera. I'm transforming the lights beforehand into view space, so Light_Position and Light_Direction are already in eye space (I hope!). I made a little movie of what it looks like here: My camera rotating around a point inside a box. The light is fixed in the centre up and its "look at" point in a fixed position in front of it. As you can see, as the camera rotates around the origin (always looking at the centre), so don't think the box is rotating (!). The lighting follows it around. To start, some code. This is how I'm transforming the light into view space (it gets passed into the shader already in view space): // Compute eye-space light position. Math::Vector3d eyeSpacePosition = MyCamera->ViewMatrix() * MyLightPosition; MyShaderVariables->Set(MyLightPositionIndex, eyeSpacePosition); // Compute eye-space light direction vector. Math::Vector3d eyeSpaceDirection = Math::Unit(MyLightLookAt - MyLightPosition); MyCamera->ViewMatrixInverseTranspose().TransformNormal(eyeSpaceDirection); MyShaderVariables->Set(MyLightDirectionIndex, eyeSpaceDirection); Can anyone give me a clue as to what I'm doing wrong here? I think the light should remain looking at a fixed point on the box, regardless of the camera orientation. Here are the vertex and pixel shaders: /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Vertex Shader /////////////////////////////////////////////////// #version 420 /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Uniform Buffer Structures /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Camera. layout (std140) uniform Camera { mat4 Camera_View; mat4 Camera_ViewInverseTranspose; mat4 Camera_Projection; }; // Matrices per model. layout (std140) uniform Model { mat4 Model_World; mat4 Model_WorldView; mat4 Model_WorldViewInverseTranspose; mat4 Model_WorldViewProjection; }; // Spotlight. layout (std140) uniform OmniLight { float Light_Intensity; vec3 Light_Position; vec3 Light_Direction; vec4 Light_Ambient_Colour; vec4 Light_Diffuse_Colour; vec4 Light_Specular_Colour; float Light_Attenuation_Min; float Light_Attenuation_Max; float Light_Cone_Min; float Light_Cone_Max; }; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Streams (per vertex) /////////////////////////////////////////////////// layout(location = 0) in vec3 attrib_Position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 attrib_Normal; layout(location = 2) in vec3 attrib_Tangent; layout(location = 3) in vec3 attrib_BiNormal; layout(location = 4) in vec2 attrib_Texture; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Output streams (per vertex) /////////////////////////////////////////////////// out vec3 attrib_Fragment_Normal; out vec4 attrib_Fragment_Position; out vec2 attrib_Fragment_Texture; out vec3 attrib_Fragment_Light; out vec3 attrib_Fragment_Eye; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Main /////////////////////////////////////////////////// void main() { // Transform normal into eye space attrib_Fragment_Normal = (Model_WorldViewInverseTranspose * vec4(attrib_Normal, 0.0)).xyz; // Transform vertex into eye space (world * view * vertex = eye) vec4 position = Model_WorldView * vec4(attrib_Position, 1.0); // Compute vector from eye space vertex to light (light is in eye space already) attrib_Fragment_Light = Light_Position - position.xyz; // Compute vector from the vertex to the eye (which is now at the origin). attrib_Fragment_Eye = -position.xyz; // Output texture coord. attrib_Fragment_Texture = attrib_Texture; // Compute vertex position by applying camera projection. gl_Position = Camera_Projection * position; } and the pixel shader: /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Pixel Shader /////////////////////////////////////////////////// #version 420 /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Samplers /////////////////////////////////////////////////// uniform sampler2D Map_Diffuse; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Global Uniforms /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Material. layout (std140) uniform Material { vec4 Material_Ambient_Colour; vec4 Material_Diffuse_Colour; vec4 Material_Specular_Colour; vec4 Material_Emissive_Colour; float Material_Shininess; float Material_Strength; }; // Spotlight. layout (std140) uniform OmniLight { float Light_Intensity; vec3 Light_Position; vec3 Light_Direction; vec4 Light_Ambient_Colour; vec4 Light_Diffuse_Colour; vec4 Light_Specular_Colour; float Light_Attenuation_Min; float Light_Attenuation_Max; float Light_Cone_Min; float Light_Cone_Max; }; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Input streams (per vertex) /////////////////////////////////////////////////// in vec3 attrib_Fragment_Normal; in vec3 attrib_Fragment_Position; in vec2 attrib_Fragment_Texture; in vec3 attrib_Fragment_Light; in vec3 attrib_Fragment_Eye; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Result /////////////////////////////////////////////////// out vec4 Out_Colour; /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Main /////////////////////////////////////////////////// void main(void) { // Compute N dot L. vec3 N = normalize(attrib_Fragment_Normal); vec3 L = normalize(attrib_Fragment_Light); vec3 E = normalize(attrib_Fragment_Eye); vec3 H = normalize(L + E); float NdotL = clamp(dot(L,N), 0.0, 1.0); float NdotH = clamp(dot(N,H), 0.0, 1.0); // Compute ambient term. vec4 ambient = Material_Ambient_Colour * Light_Ambient_Colour; // Diffuse. vec4 diffuse = texture2D(Map_Diffuse, attrib_Fragment_Texture) * Light_Diffuse_Colour * Material_Diffuse_Colour * NdotL; // Specular. float specularIntensity = pow(NdotH, Material_Shininess) * Material_Strength; vec4 specular = Light_Specular_Colour * Material_Specular_Colour * specularIntensity; // Light attenuation (so we don't have to use 1 - x, we step between Max and Min). float d = length(-attrib_Fragment_Light); float attenuation = smoothstep(Light_Attenuation_Max, Light_Attenuation_Min, d); // Adjust attenuation based on light cone. float LdotS = dot(-L, Light_Direction), CosI = Light_Cone_Min - Light_Cone_Max; attenuation *= clamp((LdotS - Light_Cone_Max) / CosI, 0.0, 1.0); // Final colour. Out_Colour = (ambient + diffuse + specular) * Light_Intensity * attenuation; }

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 15, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 15, 2013Popular ReleasesMVC Forum: MVC Forum v1.0: Finally version 1.0 is here! We have been fixing a few bugs, and making sure the release is as stable as possible. We have also changed the way configuration of the application works, mostly how to add your own code or replace some of the standard code with your own. If you download and use our software, please give us some sort of feedback, good or bad!SharePoint 2013 TypeScript Definitions: Release 1.1: TypeScript 0.9 support SharePoint TypeScript Definitions are now compliant with the new version of TypeScript TypeScript generics are now used for defining collection classes (derivatives of SP.ClientCollection object) Improved coverage Added mQuery definitions (m$) Added SPClientAutoFill definitions SP.Utilities namespace is now fully covered SP.UI modal dialog definitions improved CSR definitions improved, added some missing methods and context properties, mostly related to list ...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI ??? 1.0.0: ????GoAgent GUI????,???????????.Net Framework 4.0 ???????: Windows 8 x64 Windows 8 x86 Windows 7 x64 Windows 7 x86 ???????: Windows 8.1 Preview (x86/x64) ???????: Windows XP ????: ????????GoAgent????,????????,?????????????,???????????????????,??????????,????。PiGraph: PiGraph 2.0.8.13: C?p nh?t:Các l?i dã s?a: S?a l?i không nh?p du?c s? âm. L?i tabindex trong giao di?n Thêm hàm Các l?i chua kh?c ph?c: L?i ghi chú nh?p nháy màu. L?i khung ghi chú vu?t ra kh?i biên khi luu file. Luu ý:N?u không kh?i d?ng duoc chuong trình, b?n nên c?p nh?t driver card d? h?a phiên b?n m?i nh?t: AMD Graphics Drivers NVIDIA Driver Xem yêu c?u h? th?ngD3D9Client: D3D9Client R12 for Orbiter Beta: D3D9Client release for orbiter BetaVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...Project Server 2013 Event Handler Admin Tool: PSI Event Admin Tool: Download & exract the File. Use LoggerAdmin to upload the event handlers in project server 2013. PSIEventLogger\LoggerAdmin\bin\DebugGherkin editor: Gherkin Editor Beta 2: Fix issue #7 and add some refactoring and code cleanupNew-NuGetPackage PowerShell Script: New-NuGetPackage.ps1 PowerShell Script v1.2: Show nuget gallery to push to when prompting user if they want to push their package.Site Templates By Steve: SharePoint 2010 CORE Site Theme By Steve WSP: Great Site Theme to start with from Steve. See project home page for install instructions. This is a nice centered, mega-menu, fixed width masterpage with styles. Remember to update the mega menu lists.SharePoint Solution Installer: SharePoint Solution Installer V1.2.8: setup2013.exe now supports CompatibilityLevel to target specific hive Use setup.exe for SP2007 & SP2010. Use setup2013.exe for SP2013.TBox - tool to make developer's life easier.: TBox 1.021: 1)Add console unit tests runner, to run unit tests in parallel from console. Also this new sub tool can save valid xml nunit report. It can help you in continuous integration. 2)Fix build scripts.LifeInSharepoint Modern UI Update: Version 2: Some minor improvements, including Audience Targeting support for quick launch links. Also removing all NextDocs references.Virtual Photonics: VTS MATLAB Package 1.0.13 Beta: This is the beta release of the MATLAB package with examples of using the VTS libraries within MATLAB. Changes for this release: Added two new examples to vts_solver_demo.m that: 1) generates and plots R(lambda) at a given rho, and chromophore concentrations assuming a power law for scattering, and 2) solves inverse problem for R(lambda) at given rho. This example solves for concentrations of HbO2, Hb and H20 given simulated measurements created using Nurbs scaled Monte Carlo and inverted u...Advanced Resource Tab for Blend: Advanced Resource Tab: This is the first alpha release of the advanced resource tab for Blend for Visual Studio 2012.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.96: Fix for issue #19957: EXE should output the name of the file(s) being minified. Discussion #449181: throw a Sev-2 warning when trailing commas are detected on an Array literal. Perfectly legal to do so, but the behavior ends up working differently on different browsers, so throw a cross-browser warning. Add a few more known global names for improved ES6 compatibility update Nuget package to version 2.5 and automatically add the AjaxMin.targets to your project when you update the package...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Categories and Colors: This new version has a major change in the drawing of the list items: - Using owner drawn code to format the appointments using GDI (some flickering may occur, but it looks a little bit better IMHO, with separate sections). - Added category color support (if more than one category, only one color will be shown). Here, the colors Outlook uses are slightly different than the ones available in System.Drawing, so I did a first approach matching. ;-) - Added appointment status support (to show fr...Columbus Remote Desktop: 2.0 Sapphire: Added configuration settings Added update notifications Added ability to disable GPU acceleration Fixed connection bugsLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.07: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.08: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the application throws an Unhandled Error and an HTTP Response Code of 200 when the connection to the database is lost. Security FixesNone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesNone ProvidersNoneNew Projects[.Net Intl] harroc_c;mallar_a;olouso_f: The goal of this project is to create a web crawler and a web front who allows you to search in your index. You will create a mini (or large!) search engine basButterfly Storage: Butterfly Storage is a data access technology based on object-oriented database model for Windows Store applications.KaveCompany: KaveCompleave that girl alone: a team project!MyClrProfiler: This project helps you learn about and develop your own CLR profiler.NETDeob: Deobfuscate obfuscated .NET files easilyProgram stomatologie: SummarySimple Graph Library: Simple portable class library for graphs data structures. .NET, Silverlight 4/5, Windows Phone, Windows RT, Xbox 360T6502 Emulator: T6502 is a 6502 emulator written in TypeScript using AngularJS. The goal is well-organized, readable code over performance.WP8 File Access Webserver: C# HTTP server and web application on Windows Phone 8. Implements file access, browsing and downloading.wpadk: wpadk????wp7?????? ?????????,?????、SDK、wpadk?????????????。??????????????????。??????????????????,????wpadk?????????????????????????????????????。xlmUnit: xlmUnit, Unit Testing

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  • first install for windows eight.....da beta

    - by raysmithequip
    The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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  • The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

    - by Phil Factor
    The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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  • Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center : Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other Content

    - by LeonShaner
    Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides numerous ways to deploy content, such as through OS Update Profiles, or as part of an OS Provisioning plan or combinations of those and other "Install Software" capabilities of Deployment Plans.  This short "how-to" blog will highlight an alternative way to deploy content using Operational Profiles. Usually we think of Operational Profiles as a way to execute a simple "one-time" script to perform a basic system administration function, which can optionally be based on user input; however, Operational Profiles can be much more powerful than that.  There is often more to performing an action than merely running a script -- sometimes configuration files, packages, binaries, and other scripts, etc. are needed to perform the action, and sometimes the user would like to leave such content on the system for later use. For shell scripts and other content written to be generic enough to work on any flavor of UNIX, converting the same scripts and configuration files into Solaris 10 SVR4 package, Solaris 11 IPS package, and/or a Linux RPM's might be seen as three times the work, for little appreciable gain.   That is where using an Operational Profile to deploy simple scripts and other generic content can be very helpful.  The approach is so powerful, that pretty much any kind of content can be deployed using an Operational Profile, provided the files involved are not overly large, and it is not necessary to convert the content into UNIX variant-specific formats. The basic formula for deploying content with an Operational Profile is as follows: Begin with a traditional script header, which is a UNIX shell script that will be responsible for decoding and extracting content, copying files into the right places, and executing any other scripts and commands needed to install and configure that content. Include steps to make the script platform-aware, to do the right thing for a given UNIX variant, or a "sorry" message if the operator has somehow tried to run the Operational Profile on a system where the script is not designed to run.  Ops Center can constrain execution by target type, so such checks at this level are an added safeguard, but also useful with the generic target type of "Operating System" where the admin wants the script to "do the right thing," whatever the UNIX variant. Include helpful output to show script progress, and any other informational messages that can help the admin determine what has gone wrong in the case of a problem in script execution.  Such messages will be shown in the job execution log. Include necessary "clean up" steps for normal and error exit conditions Set non-zero exit codes when appropriate -- a non-zero exit code will cause an Operational Profile job to be marked failed, which is the admin's cue to look into the job details for diagnostic messages in the output from the script. That first bullet deserves some explanation.  If Operational Profiles are usually simple "one-time" scripts and binary content is not allowed, then how does the actual content, packages, binaries, and other scripts get delivered along with the script?  More specifically, how does one include such content without needing to first create some kind of traditional package?   All that is required is to simply encode the content and append it to the end of the Operational Profile.  The header portion of the Operational Profile will need to contain the commands to decode the embedded content that has been appended to the bottom of the script.  The header code can do whatever else is needed, and finally clean up any intermediate files that were created during the decoding and extraction of the content. One way to encode binary and other content for inclusion in a script is to use the "uuencode" utility to convert the content into simple base64 ASCII text -- a form that is suitable to be appended to an Operational Profile.   The behavior of the "uudecode" utility is such that it will skip over any parts of the input that do not fit the uuencoded "begin" and "end" clauses.  For that reason, your header script will be skipped over, and uudecode will find your embedded content, that you will uuencode and paste at the end of the Operational Profile.  You can have as many "begin" / "end" clauses as you need -- just separate each embedded file by an empty line between "begin" and "end" clauses. Example:  Install SUNWsneep and set the system serial number Script:  deploySUNWsneep.sh ( <- right-click / save to download) Highlights: #!/bin/sh # Required variables: OC_SERIAL="$OC_SERIAL" # The user-supplied serial number for the asset ... Above is a good practice, showing right up front what kind of input the Operational Profile will require.   The right-hand side where $OC_SERIAL appears in this example will be filled in by Ops Center based on the user input at deployment time. The script goes on to restrict the use of the program to the intended OS type (Solaris 10 or older, in this example, but other content might be suitable for Solaris 11, or Linux -- it depends on the content and the script that will handle it). A temporary working directory is created, and then we have the command that decodes the embedded content from "self" which in scripting terms is $0 (a variable that expands to the name of the currently executing script): # Pass myself through uudecode, which will extract content to the current dir uudecode $0 At that point, whatever content was appended in uuencoded form at the end of the script has been written out to the current directory.  In this example that yields a file, SUNWsneep.7.0.zip, which the rest of the script proceeds to unzip, and pkgadd, followed by running "/opt/SUNWsneep/bin/sneep -s $OC_SERIAL" which is the command that stores the system serial for future use by other programs such as Explorer.   Don't get hung up on the example having used a pkgadd command.  The content started as a zip file and it could have been a tar.gz, or any other file.  This approach simply decodes the file.  The header portion of the script has to make sense of the file and do the right thing (e.g. it's up to you). The script goes on to clean up after itself, whether or not the above was successful.  Errors are echo'd by the script and a non-zero exit code is set where appropriate. Second to last, we have: # just in case, exit explicitly, so that uuencoded content will not cause error OPCleanUP exit # The rest of the script is ignored, except by uudecode # # UUencoded content follows # # e.g. for each file needed, #  $ uuencode -m {source} {source} > {target}.uu5 # then paste the {target}.uu5 files below # they will be extracted into the workding dir at $TDIR # The commentary above also describes how to encode the content. Finally we have the uuencoded content: begin-base64 444 SUNWsneep.7.0.zip UEsDBBQAAAAIAPsRy0Di3vnukAAAAMcAAAAKABUAcmVhZG1lLnR4dFVUCQADOqnVT7up ... VXgAAFBLBQYAAAAAAgACAJEAAADTNwEAAAA= ==== That last line of "====" is the base64 uuencode equivalent of a blank line, followed by "end" and as mentioned you can have as many begin/end clauses as you need.  Just separate each embedded file by a blank line after each ==== and before each begin-base64. Deploying the example Operational Profile looks like this (where I have pasted the system serial number into the required field): The job succeeded, but here is an example of the kind of diagnostic messages that the example script produces, and how Ops Center displays them in the job details: This same general approach could be used to deploy Explorer, and other useful utilities and scripts. Please let us know what you think?  Until next time...\Leon-- Leon Shaner | Senior IT/Product ArchitectSystems Management | Ops Center Engineering @ Oracle The views expressed on this [blog; Web site] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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  • Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

    - by John Murphy
    During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

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  • Exception Handling And Other Contentious Political Topics

    - by Justin Jones
    So about three years ago, around the time of my last blog post, I promised a friend I would write this post. Keeping promises is a good thing, and this is my first step towards easing back into regular blogging. I fully expect him to return from Pennsylvania to buy me a beer over this. However, it’s been an… ahem… eventful three years or so, and blogging, unfortunately, got pushed to the back burner on my priority list, along with a few other career minded activities. Now that the personal drama of the past three years is more or less resolved, it’s time to put a few things back on the front burner. What I consider to be proper exception handling practices is relatively well known these days. There are plenty of blog posts out there already on this topic which more or less echo my opinions on this topic. I’ll try to include a few links at the bottom of the post. Several years ago I had an argument with a co-worker who posited that exceptions should be caught at every level and logged. This might seem like sanity on the surface, but the resulting error log looked something like this: Error: System.SomeException Followed by small stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace.   These were all the same exception. The problem with this approach is that the error log, if you run any kind of analytics on in, becomes skewed depending on how far up the stack trace your exception was thrown. To mitigate this problem, we came up with the concept of the “PreLoggedException”. Basically, we would log the exception at the very top level and subsequently throw the exception back up the stack encapsulated in this pre-logged type, which our logging system knew to ignore. Now the error log looked like this: Error: System.SomeException Followed by small stack trace. Much cleaner, right? Well, there’s still a problem. When your exception happens in production and you go about trying to figure out what happened, you’ve lost more or less all context for where and how this exception was thrown, because all you really know is what method it was thrown in, but really nothing about who was calling the method or why. What gives you this clue is the entire stack trace, which we’re losing here. I believe that was further mitigated by having the logging system pull a system stack trace and add it to the log entry, but what you’re actually getting is the stack for how you got to the logging code. You’re still losing context about the actual error. Not to mention you’re executing a whole slew of catch blocks which are sloooooooowwwww……… In other words, we started with a bad idea and kept band-aiding it until it didn’t suck quite so bad. When I argued for not catching exceptions at every level but rather catching them following a certain set of rules, my co-worker warned me “do yourself a favor, never express that view in any future interviews.” I suppose this is my ultimate dismissal of that advice, but I’m not too worried. My approach for exception handling follows three basic rules: Only catch an exception if 1. You can do something about it. 2. You can add useful information to it. 3. You’re at an application boundary. Here’s what that means: 1. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. We’ll start with a trivial example of a login system that uses a file. Please, never actually do this in production code, it’s just concocted example. So if our code goes to open a file and the file isn’t there, we get a FileNotFound exception. If the calling code doesn’t know what to do with this, it should bubble up. However, if we know how to create the file from scratch we can create the file and continue on our merry way. When you run into situations like this though, What should really run through your head is “How can I avoid handling an exception at all?” In this case, it’s a trivial matter to simply check for the existence of the file before trying to open it. If we detect that the file isn’t there, we can accomplish the same thing without having to handle in in a catch block. 2. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. Continuing with the poorly thought out file based login system we contrived in part 1, if the code calls a Login(…) method and the FileNotFound exception is thrown higher up the stack, the code that calls Login must account for a FileNotFound exception. This is kind of counterintuitive because the calling code should not need to know the internals of the Login method, and the data file is an implementation detail. What makes more sense, assuming that we didn’t implement any of the good advice from step 1, is for Login to catch the FileNotFound exception and wrap it in a new exception. For argument’s sake we’ll say LoginSystemFailureException. (Sorry, couldn’t think of anything better at the moment.) This gives us two stack traces, preserving the original stack trace in the inner exception, and also is much more informative to the calling code. 3. Only catch an exception if you’re at an application boundary. At some point we have to catch all the exceptions, even the ones we don’t know what to do with. WinForms, ASP.Net, and most other UI technologies have some kind of built in mechanism for catching unhandled exceptions without fatally terminating the application. It’s still a good idea to somehow gracefully exit the application in this case if possible though, because you can no longer be sure what state your application is in, but nothing annoys a user more than an application just exploding. These unhandled exceptions need to be logged, and this is a good place to catch them. Ideally you never want this option to be exercised, but code as though it will be. When you log these exceptions, give them a “Fatal” status (e.g. Log4Net) and make sure these bugs get handled in your next release. That’s it in a nutshell. If you do it right each exception will only get logged once and with the largest stack trace possible which will make those 2am emergency severity 1 debugging sessions much shorter and less frustrating. Here’s a few people who also have interesting things to say on this topic:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/9538/Exception-Handling-Best-Practices-in-NET I know there’s more but I can’t find them at the moment.

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  • 5 Ways Android Still Disappoints (Me)

    - by TStewartDev
    Let me make this clear: I'm annoyed with Apple. I don't like their current policies and I don't like where Steve Jobs is taking the company. In general, I don't like it when any one company gets too much control in a market. When that happens, the leading company dictates the game and as consumers, our options all but disappear. That said, I'm still going to buy a new iPhone next week. My Apple-hating friends seem to desperately want me to go Android instead, but frankly, it's not good enough for me, and here are the reasons why. The Modern WinMo One of the reasons that Microsoft has identified for Windows Mobile's rapid decline is the breadth of hardware. They exercised little control over manufacturer's implementations. In theory, that sounds great. We as consumers have lots of choice. In practice, though, it meant among other things that updates to the devices were left up to the manufacturers. As a result, that rarely happened. (I'm still bitter at Toshiba for leaving me hanging back in 2002.) And now, Google is doing the same thing with Android. Case in point: my wife has a Motorola Backflip that we bought in April. It was released in March. Motorola says it will get Android 2.1 "sometime in Q3". Great. Meanwhile, I pull down the latest version of iPhone OS (now iOS) and install it the same day it's released. You may say that I can't judge Android by one lazy manufacturer. Yup, I sure can. With Apple, my original iPhone has been supported perfectly for 3 years. With Android, I will have to wait for upgrades after Google releases them, possibly indefinitely. Not cool. AT&T We signed a new contract with AT&T in April to get my wife's phone. I've had a reasonable experience with them. I don't imagine my experience with Verizon would be any better, and I'm relatively confident that Sprint doesn't have the coverage it takes to work well for us. The fact is, AT&T, for whatever reason, doesn't have jack for Android phones. May not be Android's fault, but it's still a shortcoming that prevents me from having it just like the iPhone's exclusivity keeps some folks on other networks from having it. Innovation? What Innovation? Android has a nice dashboard and a great notification system and… nothing else original. I keep reading about how disappointing the iPhone is nowadays. "It has no innovation," people say. Who does? Android has modeled its behavior after the iPhone. That's fine, but if all you've got is a similar product and I'm invested both skill-wise and app-wise in my current platform, why should I change? Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 looks somewhat innovative, and I'm pretty excited to see what they'll bring to the table, but that's another six months away, at least. I've got a 3 year old phone that has some annoying issues now (thanks to recent encounters with water). I need a new phone now. Is This Going to Work? There's no shortage of criticism of Apple over its App Store policies, and I've vented my own anger about it. However, I will give them credit: their screening of apps has done a great job of weeding out the crap and gives an excellent indication that the app will work on my device. How about Android? Nope. It might work on your phone. Maybe. You'll have to try it to see. Get burned by it? Well, write a nasty review to try to keep others from making the mistake you did. If you don't mind doing that stuff, then Android is the platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have a receptionist screening out the telemarketing and survey calls than hang up on them myself, but that's your call. Slow, Slowing, Slower All this yapping about multitasking. This is an area I've been on Apple's side from the beginning. Sorry folks, but this is the number one reason I hated Windows Mobile: the longer you use it, the slower it gets because it doesn't kill apps. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one: if you see a task manager, we're doing it wrong. I don't want to have to manually kill apps. I hate doing that on Windows let alone on a mobile device. To me, priority one should be keeping the device speedy. Waiting for your device to respond is unacceptable. Bonus! Taken from iPhone Letdown? 8 Things Apple Didn't Announce, here are my responses: 4G Yeah, let me know if your area actually has it. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. No carrier is going to have 4G here for at least 3 years. Meanwhile, you still get to pay for it. Yay! Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync You got me here. Of course, whether or not your Android device will be able to do it is always a good question. 3G Video Chat You got me here, too. I'm sure you spent countless hours in front of your phone with video chat. Also, I can't wait for the "No Video Chat While Driving" laws. Mobile Hotspot This is a neat feature, but as the author points out, it's left up to the carrier whether to implement it or not. Pretty sure any Android phones that come to AT&T won't have this enabled in the foreseeable future. Is Verizon even allowing this? I just figured Sprint was because they're failing so hard at keeping customers. Free MobileMe I use Google's services with my iPhone. The only people I know who use MobileMe are Apple fanboys and fangirls. If you choose to pay for a service that you can get for free, that's your decision, not Apple's. Voice Input Voice input has been available on phones (even "dumb" phones) for years now. iPhone does have the ability, though limited. Why don't I hear people telling their phones what to do? Maybe because it's still easier to use your fingers than talk to it. Get back to me when this becomes an important feature. Free Navigation Maybe this will be a bigger deal to me now that I'm getting a phone with GPS, but when using my buddy's 3gs, Google maps has worked just fine. Maybe I just don't trust turn-by-turn navigation enough to want it. Dashboard The only legitimate complaint on this list, to me. iPhone's home screen is pathetic, doubly so for the iPad. What a waste of perfectly usable space. I also want to add notifications to this list. Android's notification panel is far superior to the iPhone's. I don't want to hunt all over my screen to find little red dots. Put 'em in one place, Apple.

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  • Loaded OBJ Model Will Not Display in OpenGL / C++ Project

    - by Drake Summers
    I have been experimenting with new effects in game development. The programs I have written have been using generic shapes for the visuals. I wanted to test the effects on something a bit more complex, and wrote a resource loader for Wavefront OBJ files. I started with a simple cube in blender, exported it to an OBJ file with just vertices and triangulated faces, and used it to test the resource loader. I could not get the mesh to show up in my application. The loader never gave me any errors, so I wrote a snippet to loop through my vertex and index arrays that were returned from the loader. The data is exactly the way it is supposed to be. So I simplified the OBJ file by editing it directly to just show a front facing square. Still, nothing is displayed in the application. And don't worry, I did check to make sure that I decreased the value of each index by one while importing the OBJ. - BEGIN EDIT I also tested using glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 3 ); to draw the first triangle and it worked! So the issue could be in the binding of the VBO/IBO items. END EDIT - INDEX/VERTEX ARRAY OUTPUT: GLOBALS AND INITIALIZATION FUNCTION: GLuint program; GLint attrib_coord3d; std::vector<GLfloat> vertices; std::vector<GLushort> indices; GLuint vertexbuffer, indexbuffer; GLint uniform_mvp; int initialize() { if (loadModel("test.obj", vertices, indices)) { GLfloat myverts[vertices.size()]; copy(vertices.begin(), vertices.end(), myverts); GLushort myinds[indices.size()]; copy(indices.begin(), indices.end(), myinds); glGenBuffers(1, &vertexbuffer); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(myverts), myverts, GL_STATIC_DRAW); glGenBuffers(1, &indexbuffer); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, indexbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(myinds), myinds, GL_STATIC_DRAW); // OUTPUT DATA FROM NEW ARRAYS TO CONSOLE // ERROR HANDLING OMITTED FOR BREVITY } GLint link_result = GL_FALSE; GLuint vert_shader, frag_shader; if ((vert_shader = create_shader("tri.v.glsl", GL_VERTEX_SHADER)) == 0) return 0; if ((frag_shader = create_shader("tri.f.glsl", GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER)) == 0) return 0; program = glCreateProgram(); glAttachShader(program, vert_shader); glAttachShader(program, frag_shader); glLinkProgram(program); glGetProgramiv(program, GL_LINK_STATUS, &link_result); // ERROR HANDLING OMITTED FOR BREVITY const char* attrib_name; attrib_name = "coord3d"; attrib_coord3d = glGetAttribLocation(program, attrib_name); // ERROR HANDLING OMITTED FOR BREVITY const char* uniform_name; uniform_name = "mvp"; uniform_mvp = glGetUniformLocation(program, uniform_name); // ERROR HANDLING OMITTED FOR BREVITY return 1; } RENDERING FUNCTION: glm::mat4 model = glm::translate(glm::mat4(1.0f), glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, -4.0)); glm::mat4 view = glm::lookAt(glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, 4.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, 3.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 1.0, 0.0)); glm::mat4 projection = glm::perspective(45.0f, 1.0f*(screen_width/screen_height), 0.1f, 10.0f); glm::mat4 mvp = projection * view * model; int size; glUseProgram(program); glUniformMatrix4fv(uniform_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(mvp)); glClearColor(0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT|GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glEnableVertexAttribArray(attrib_coord3d); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glVertexAttribPointer(attrib_coord3d, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, 0); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, indexbuffer); glGetBufferParameteriv(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, GL_BUFFER_SIZE, &size); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, size/sizeof(GLushort), GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, 0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(attrib_coord3d); VERTEX SHADER: attribute vec3 coord3d; uniform mat4 mvp; void main(void) { gl_Position = mvp * vec4(coord3d, 1.0); } FRAGMENT SHADER: void main(void) { gl_FragColor[0] = 0.0; gl_FragColor[1] = 0.0; gl_FragColor[2] = 1.0; gl_FragColor[3] = 1.0; } OBJ RESOURCE LOADER: bool loadModel(const char * path, std::vector<GLfloat> &out_vertices, std::vector<GLushort> &out_indices) { std::vector<GLfloat> temp_vertices; std::vector<GLushort> vertexIndices; FILE * file = fopen(path, "r"); // ERROR HANDLING OMITTED FOR BREVITY while(1) { char lineHeader[128]; int res = fscanf(file, "%s", lineHeader); if (res == EOF) { break; } if (strcmp(lineHeader, "v") == 0) { float _x, _y, _z; fscanf(file, "%f %f %f\n", &_x, &_y, &_z ); out_vertices.push_back(_x); out_vertices.push_back(_y); out_vertices.push_back(_z); } else if (strcmp(lineHeader, "f") == 0) { unsigned int vertexIndex[3]; int matches = fscanf(file, "%d %d %d\n", &vertexIndex[0], &vertexIndex[1], &vertexIndex[2]); out_indices.push_back(vertexIndex[0] - 1); out_indices.push_back(vertexIndex[1] - 1); out_indices.push_back(vertexIndex[2] - 1); } else { ... } } // ERROR HANDLING OMITTED FOR BREVITY return true; } I can edit the question to provide any further info you may need. I attempted to provide everything of relevance and omit what may have been unnecessary. I'm hoping this isn't some really poor mistake, because I have been at this for a few days now. If anyone has any suggestions or advice on the matter, I look forward to hearing it. As a final note: I added some arrays into the code with manually entered data, and was able to display meshes by using those arrays instead of the generated ones. I do not understand!

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  • BI Applications overview

    - by sv744
    Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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  • PASS: SQLRally Thoughts

    - by Bill Graziano
    The PASS Board recently decided that we wouldn’t put another US-based SQLRally on the calendar until we had a chance to review the program. I wanted to provide some of my thinking around this. Keep in mind that this is the opinion of one Board member. The Board committed to complete two SQLRally events to determine if an event modeled between SQL Saturday and the Summit was viable. We’ve completed the two events and now it’s time to step back and review the program. This is my seventh year on the PASS Board. Over that time people have asked me why PASS does certain things. Many, many times my answer has been “Because that’s the way we did it last year”. And I am tired of giving that answer. We need to take a step back and review the US-based SQLRally before we schedule another one. It would be irresponsible for me as a Board member to commit resources to this without validating that what we’re doing makes sense for the organization and our members. I have no doubt that this was a great event for the attendees. We just need to validate it’s the best use of our resources. Please keep in mind that we haven’t cancelled the event. We’ve just said we need to review it before scheduling another one. My opinion is that some fairly serious changes are needed to the model before we consider it again – IF we do it again. I’ve come to that conclusion after speaking with the Dallas organizers, our HQ team, our Marketing team, other Board members (including one of the Orlando organizers), attendees in Orlando and Dallas and visiting other similar events. I should point out that their views aren’t unanimous on nearly any part of this event -- which is one of the reasons I want to take some time and think about this before continuing. I think it’s helpful to look at the original goals of what we were trying to accomplish. Andy Warren wrote these up in August of 2010. My summary of these goals and some thoughts on each one is below. Many of these thoughts revolve around the growth of SQL Saturdays. In the two years since that document was written these events have grown significantly. The largest SQL Saturdays are now over 500 people which mean they are nearly the same size as our recent SQLRally. Our goals included: Geographic diversity. We wanted an event in an area of the country that was away from any given Summit location. I think that’s still a valid goal. But we also have SQL Saturdays all over the country. What does SQLRally bring to this that SQLSaturday doesn’t? Speaker growth. One of the stated goals was to build a “farm club” for speakers. This gives us a way for speakers to work up to speaking at Summit by speaking in front of larger crowds. What does SQLRally bring to this that the larger SQL Saturdays aren’t providing? Pre-Conference speakers is one obvious answer here. Lower price. On a per-day basis, SQLRally is roughly 1/4th the price of the Summit. We wanted a way for people to experience something Summit-like at a lower price point. The challenge is that we are very budget constrained at that lower price point. International Event Model.  (I need to write more about this but I’m out of time.  I’ll cover it in the next installment.) There are a number of things I really like about SQLRally. I love the smaller conferences. They give me a chance to meet more people than at something the size of Summit. I like the two day format. That gives you two evenings to be at social events with people. Seeing someone a second day is a great way to build a bond with that person. That’s more difficult to do at a SQL Saturday. We also need to talk about the financial aspects of the event. Last year generated a small $17,000 profit on revenues of $200,000. Percentage-wise that’s reasonable but on an absolute basis it’s not a huge amount in our budget. We think this year will lose between $30,000 and $50,000 and take roughly 1,000 hours of HQ time. We don’t have detailed financials back yet but that’s our best guess at this point. Part of that was driven by using a convention center instead of a hotel. Until we get detailed financials back we won’t have the full picture around the financial impact. This event also takes time and mindshare from our Marketing team. This may sound like a small thing but please don’t underestimate it. Our original vision for this was something that would take very little time from our Marketing team and just a few mentions in the Connector. It turned out to need more than that. And all those mentions and emails take up space we could use to talk about other events and other programs. Last I wanted to talk about some of the things I’m thinking about. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying if we just fix “X” it all gets better. Is this that much better of an event than SQL Saturdays? What if we gave a few SQL Saturdays some extra resources? When SQL Saturdays were around 250 people that wasn’t as viable. With some of those events over 500 we need to reconsider this. We need to get back to a hotel venue. That will help with cost and networking. Is this the best use of the 1,000 HQ hours that we invested in the event? Is our price-point correct? I’m leaning toward raising our price closer to Summit on a per-day basis. I think this will let us put on a higher quality event and alleviate much of the budget pressure. Should growing speakers be a focus? Having top-line pre-conference speakers helps market the event. It will also have an impact on pricing and overall profit. We should also ask if it actually does grow speakers. How many of these people will eventually register for Summit? Attend chapters? Is SQLRally a driver into PASS or is it something that chapters, etc. drive people to? Should we have one paid day and one free instead of two paid days? This is a very interesting model that is used by SQLBits in the UK. This gives you the two day aspect as well as offering options for paid and free attendees. I’m very intrigued by this. Should we focus on a topic? Buried in the minutes is a discussion of whether PASS should have a Business Analytics conference separate from Summit. This is an interesting question to consider. Would making SQLRally be focused on a particular topic make it more attractive? Would that even be a SQLRally? Can PASS effectively manage the two events? (FYI - Probably not.) Would it help differentiate it from Summit and SQL Saturday? These are all questions that I think should be asked and answered before we do this event again. And we can’t do that if we don’t take time to have the discussion. I wanted to get this published before I take off for a few days of vacation. When I get back I’d like to write more about why the international events are different and talk about where we go from here.

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  • Apache load balancer limits with Tomcat over AJP

    - by PAS
    Hi All, I have Apache acting as a load balancer in front of 3 Tomcat servers. Occasionally, Apache returns 503 responses, which I would like to remove completely. All 4 servers are not under significant load in terms of CPU, memory, or disk, so I am a little unsure what is reaching it's limits or why. 503s are returned when all workers are in error state - whatever that means. Here are the details: Apache config: <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 30 MinSpareServers 30 MaxSpareServers 60 MaxClients 200 MaxRequestsPerChild 1000 </IfModule> ... <Proxy *> AddDefaultCharset Off Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> # Tomcat HA cluster <Proxy balancer://mycluster> BalancerMember ajp://10.176.201.9:8009 keepalive=On retry=1 timeout=1 ping=1 BalancerMember ajp://10.176.201.10:8009 keepalive=On retry=1 timeout=1 ping=1 BalancerMember ajp://10.176.219.168:8009 keepalive=On retry=1 timeout=1 ping=1 </Proxy> # Passes thru track. or api. ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyStatus On # Original tracker ProxyPass /m balancer://mycluster/m ProxyPassReverse /m balancer://mycluster/m Tomcat config: <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN"> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" /> <Service name="Catalina"> <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" /> <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" /> <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost"> <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false"> </Engine> </Service> </Server> Apache error log: [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: proxy: AJP: attempt to connect to 10.176.201.10:8009 (10.176.201.10) failed [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (10.176.201.10) [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: AJP: failed to make connection to backend: 10.176.201.10 [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: proxy: AJP: attempt to connect to 10.176.201.9:8009 (10.176.201.9) failed [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (10.176.201.9) [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: AJP: failed to make connection to backend: 10.176.201.9 [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: proxy: AJP: attempt to connect to 10.176.219.168:8009 (10.176.219.168) failed [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (10.176.219.168) [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: AJP: failed to make connection to backend: 10.176.219.168 [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state [Mon Mar 22 18:39:47 2010] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mycluster). All workers are in error state Load balancer top info: top - 23:44:11 up 210 days, 4:32, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.11, 0.09 Tasks: 135 total, 2 running, 133 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.1%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.2%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.3%st Mem: 524508k total, 517132k used, 7376k free, 9124k buffers Swap: 1048568k total, 352k used, 1048216k free, 334720k cached Tomcat top info: top - 23:47:12 up 210 days, 3:07, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00 Tasks: 63 total, 1 running, 62 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.2%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.8%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2097372k total, 2080888k used, 16484k free, 21464k buffers Swap: 4194296k total, 380k used, 4193916k free, 1520912k cached Catalina.out does not have any error messages in it. According to Apache's server status, it seems to be maxing out at 143 requests/sec. I believe the servers can handle substantially more load than they are, so any hints about low default limits or other reasons why this setup would be maxing out would be greatly appreciated.

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  • ERROR: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt

    - by SPSamL
    I get this error after having edited a few pages in SharePoint 2010. I have to do an IISReset on both front ends to get this to resolve. I don't know how to fix it or even what else to supply here, but please let me know as the resets now happen several times per day. Log Name: Application Source: ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0 Date: 1/26/2011 11:12:48 AM Event ID: 1309 Task Category: Web Event Level: Warning Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: PINTSPSFE02.samcstl.org Description: Event code: 3005 Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred. Event time: 1/26/2011 11:12:48 AM Event time (UTC): 1/26/2011 5:12:48 PM Event ID: c52fb336b7f147a3913fff3617a99d57 Event sequence: 4965 Event occurrence: 2178 Event detail code: 0 Application information: Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/1449762715/ROOT-2-129405348166941887 Trust level: WSS_Minimal Application Virtual Path: / Application Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\ Machine name: PINTSPSFE02 Process information: Process ID: 5928 Process name: w3wp.exe Account name: SAMC\MossAppPool Exception information: Exception type: AccessViolationException Exception message: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt. Request information: Request URL: http://mosscluster/Pages/Home.aspx Request path: /Pages/Home.aspx User host address: 10.3.60.26 User: SAMC\BARNMD Is authenticated: True Authentication Type: NTLM Thread account name: SAMC\MossAppPool Thread information: Thread ID: 110 Thread account name: SAMC\MossAppPool Is impersonating: False Stack trace: at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Delete(String key, Boolean recursive, DeletionReason reason) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Get(String key) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.Get(String objectTypeName, String id) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileServiceProxy.GetPartitionPropertiesCache(Guid applicationID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_PartitionPropertiesCache() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.DataCache.get_PartitionProperties() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, Guid partitionID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, SPServiceContext serviceContext) at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.EnsureMySiteUrls() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.get_PortalMySiteUrlAvailable() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) Custom event details: Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0" /> <EventID Qualifiers="32768">1309</EventID> <Level>3</Level> <Task>3</Task> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2011-01-26T17:12:48.000000000Z" /> <EventRecordID>35834</EventRecordID> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>PINTSPSFE02.samcstl.org</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data>3005</Data> <Data>An unhandled exception has occurred.</Data> <Data>1/26/2011 11:12:48 AM</Data> <Data>1/26/2011 5:12:48 PM</Data> <Data>c52fb336b7f147a3913fff3617a99d57</Data> <Data>4965</Data> <Data>2178</Data> <Data>0</Data> <Data>/LM/W3SVC/1449762715/ROOT-2-129405348166941887</Data> <Data>WSS_Minimal</Data> <Data>/</Data> <Data>C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\</Data> <Data>PINTSPSFE02</Data> <Data> </Data> <Data>5928</Data> <Data>w3wp.exe</Data> <Data>SAMC\MossAppPool</Data> <Data>AccessViolationException</Data> <Data></Data> <Data>http://mosscluster/Pages/Home.aspx</Data> <Data>/Pages/Home.aspx</Data> <Data>10.3.60.26</Data> <Data>SAMC\BARNMD</Data> <Data>True</Data> <Data>NTLM</Data> <Data>SAMC\MossAppPool</Data> <Data>110</Data> <Data>SAMC\MossAppPool</Data> <Data>False</Data> <Data> at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Delete(String key, Boolean recursive, DeletionReason reason) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Get(String key) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.Get(String objectTypeName, String id) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileServiceProxy.GetPartitionPropertiesCache(Guid applicationID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_PartitionPropertiesCache() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.DataCache.get_PartitionProperties() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, Guid partitionID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, SPServiceContext serviceContext) at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.EnsureMySiteUrls() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.get_PortalMySiteUrlAvailable() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) </Data> </EventData> </Event>

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  • WPF Layout algorithm woes - control will resize, but not below some arbitrary value.

    - by Quantumplation
    I'm working on an application for a client, and one of the requirements is the ability to make appointments, and display the current week's appointments in a visual format, much like in Google Calender's or Microsoft Office. I found a great (3 part) article on codeproject, in which he builds a "RangePanel", and composes one for each "period" (for example, the work day.) You can find part 1 here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/OutlookWpfCalendarPart1.aspx The code presents, but seems to choose an arbitrary height value overall (440.04), and won't resize below that without clipping. What I mean to say, is that the window/container will resize, but it just cuts off the bottom of the control, instead of recalculating the height of the range panels, and the controls in the range panels representing the appointment. It will resize and recalculate for greater values, but not less. Code-wise, what's happening is that when you resize below that value, first the "MeasureOverride" is called with the correct "new height". However, by the time the "ArrangeOverride" method is called, it's passing the same 440.04 value as the height to arrange to. I need to find a solution/workaround, but any information that you can provide that might direct me for things to look into would also be greatly appreciated ( I understand how frustrating it is to debug code when you don't have the codebase in front of you. :) ) The code for the various Arrange and Measure functions are provided below. The "CalendarView" control has a "CalendarViewContentPresenter", which handles several periods. Then, the periods have a "CalendarPeriodContentPresenter", which handles each "block" of appointments. Finally, the "RangePanel" has it's own implementation. (To be honest, i'm still a bit hazy on how the control works, so if my explanations are a bit hazy, the article I linked probably has a more cogent explanation. :) ) CalendarViewContentPresenter: protected override Size ArrangeOverride(Size finalSize) { int columnCount = this.CalendarView.Periods.Count; Size columnSize = new Size(finalSize.Width / columnCount, finalSize.Height); double elementX = 0; foreach (UIElement element in this.visualChildren) { element.Arrange(new Rect(new Point(elementX, 0), columnSize)); elementX = elementX + columnSize.Width; } return finalSize; } protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size constraint) { this.GenerateVisualChildren(); this.GenerateListViewItemVisuals(); // If it's coming back infinity, just return some value. if (constraint.Width == Double.PositiveInfinity) constraint.Width = 10; if (constraint.Height == Double.PositiveInfinity) constraint.Height = 10; return constraint; } CalendarViewPeriodPersenter: protected override Size ArrangeOverride(Size finalSize) { foreach (UIElement element in this.visualChildren) { element.Arrange(new Rect(new Point(0, 0), finalSize)); } return finalSize; } protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size constraint) { this.GenerateVisualChildren(); return constraint; } RangePanel: protected override Size ArrangeOverride(Size finalSize) { double containerRange = (this.Maximum - this.Minimum); foreach (UIElement element in this.Children) { double begin = (double)element.GetValue(RangePanel.BeginProperty); double end = (double)element.GetValue(RangePanel.EndProperty); double elementRange = end - begin; Size size = new Size(); size.Width = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? finalSize.Width : elementRange / containerRange * finalSize.Width; size.Height = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? elementRange / containerRange * finalSize.Height : finalSize.Height; Point location = new Point(); location.X = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? 0 : (begin - this.Minimum) / containerRange * finalSize.Width; location.Y = (Orientation == Orientation.Vertical) ? (begin - this.Minimum) / containerRange * finalSize.Height : 0; element.Arrange(new Rect(location, size)); } return finalSize; } protected override Size MeasureOverride(Size availableSize) { foreach (UIElement element in this.Children) { element.Measure(availableSize); } // Constrain infinities if (availableSize.Width == double.PositiveInfinity) availableSize.Width = 10; if (availableSize.Height == double.PositiveInfinity) availableSize.Height = 10; return availableSize; }

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