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• Got Samba, Got PyNeighbourhood but still no connection. What else do I need?

  - by Frank A

  I am sure I had already hit post before but then could only find it by backing through browser. Was it deleted? is the question too dumb, sorry that I do not know the right jargon just trying to get answers to my problem anyway have reworded stuff a bit This seems to be a number one requirement for lots of people and 2 months on from setting up my Ubuntu pc, I am still unable to get a lasting connection in either direction. Adding a windows pc to a network is so easy... just a few clicks and get on with using it all. Using all command approaches and modifying configuration files is hardly user friendly. Googling brings up thousands of solutions but mostly they are too techy or assume the user is fully aware of how to use Linux. I do realise that their must be a lot of flavours for connecting to networks. So far I have installed Samba and fiddled with its config file. The day I did all that it worked from XP to Ubuntu. When I came back two days later to transfer my data over it would not connect. Although the the share does show up in Windows (XP) My Network Places. Today I installed PyNeighbourhood and this shows the Ubuntu box and all of the shares I had created at some point on Ubuntu and it even shows this under the XP workgroup name. But instructions on setting the connection up seem to relate to an earlier version and nothing seems to work there either. (I unshared most of those test folders but they still show up her but that is another question. When I click on mount- I can only click on one on the Ubuntu machine, there is one with no name so I assume this to be my attempt to add one XP Shared drive using ipaddress, I get errors. (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", mount error(6): No such device or address Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) OK tried to find the manual referred to... only an old comment that manual would be produced for future versions. I saw in another thread that Winbind is needed as well or at least I assume as well? Totally lost again? Please help, what else needs to be installed to connect to win pcs on the network.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• Survey: Your Plans for Adopting New Firefox Releases?

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Mozilla is committing to releasing new Firefox versions every six weeks.  Mozilla released Firefox 5 this week.  With this release, Mozilla states that Firefox 4 is End-of-Life and will not receive any additional security updates.  In a comment thread posted on to a Mike Kaply's blog article discussing these new Firefox policies, Asa Dotzler from Mozilla stated: ... Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.  In a later comment, he added: ... A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I’d much rather Mozilla spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don’t have enterprise support systems already taking care of them. Asa then confirmed that every new Firefox release will put the previous one into End-of-Life: As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?” He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.  He added: “You’re basically saying you don’t care about corporations.” Yes, I’m basically saying that I don’t care about making Firefox enterprise friendly. Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla later stated to PC Mag: The Web and Web browsers continue to evolve rapidly. Mozilla's focus is on providing users with the best Web experience possible, and Firefox needs to evolve at the pace the Web's users and developers expect. By releasing small, focused updates more often, we are able to deliver improved security and stability even as we introduce new features, which is better for our users, and for the Web.We recognize that this shift may not be compatible with a large organization's IT Policy and understand that it is challenging to organizations that have effort-intensive certification polices. However, our development process is geared toward delivering products that support the Web as it is today, while innovating and building future Web capabilities. Tying Firefox product development to an organizational process we do not control would make it difficult for us to continue to innovate for our users and the betterment of the Web.  Your feedback needed for E-Business Suite certifications  Mozilla's new support policy has significant implications for enterprise users of Firefox with Oracle E-Business Suite.  We are reviewing the implications for our certification and support policies for Firefox now.  It would be very helpful if you could let me know about your organisation's plans for Firefox in light of this new information.  Please feel free to drop me a private email, or post a comment here if that's appropriate. 

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• Microsoft and Application Architectures

  Microsoft has dealt with several kinds of application architectures to include but not limited to desktop applications, web applications, operating systems, relational database systems, windows services, and web services. Because of the size and market share of Microsoft, virtually every modern language works with or around a Microsoft product. Some of the languages include: Visual Basic, VB.Net, C#, C++, C, ASP.net, ASP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java and XML. From my experience, Microsoft strives to maintain an n-tier application standard where an application is comprised of multiple layers that perform specific functions, for example: presentation layer, business layer, data access layer are three general layers that just about every formally structured application contains. The presentation layer contains anything to do with displaying information to the screen and how it appears on the screen. The business layer is the middle man between the presentation layer and data access layer and transforms data from the data access layer in to useable information to be stored later or sent to an output device through the presentation layer. The data access layer does as its name implies, it allows the business layer to access data from a data source like MS SQL Server, XML, or another data source. One of my favorite technologies that Microsoft has come out with recently is the .Net Framework. This framework allows developers to code an application in multiple languages and compiles them in to one intermediate language called the Common Language Runtime (CLR). This allows VB and C# developers to work seamlessly together as if they were working in the same project. The only real disadvantage to using the .Net Framework is that it only natively runs on Microsoft operating systems. However, Microsoft does control a majority of the operating systems currently installed on modern computers and servers, especially with personal home computers. Given that the Microsoft .Net Framework is so flexible it is an ideal for business to develop applications around it as long as they wanted to commit to using Microsoft technologies and operating systems in the future. I have been a professional developer for about 9+ years now and have seen the .net framework work flawlessly in just about every instance I have used it. In addition, I have used it to develop web applications, mobile phone applications, desktop applications, web service applications, and windows service applications to name a few.

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• Java JRE 1.6.0_37 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  My apologies: this certification announcement got lost in the OpenWorld maelstorm.  Better late than never. The section below entitled, "All JRE 1.6 releases are certified with EBS upon release" should obviate the need for these announcements, but I know that people have gotten used to seeing these certifications referenced explicitly.  The latest Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0_37 (a.k.a. JRE 6u37-b06) is now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12 desktop clients.   What's new in Java 1.6.0_37?See the 1.6.0_37 Update Release Notes for details about what has changed in this release.  This release is available for download from the usual Sun channels and through the 'Java Automatic Update' mechanism. 32-bit and 64-bit versions certified This certification includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit JRE versions. 32-bit JREs are certified on: Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 2 (SP2) Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) 64-bit JREs are certified only on 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Worried about the 'mismanaged session cookie' issue? No need to worry -- it's fixed.  To recap: JRE releases 1.6.0_18 through 1.6.0_22 had issues with mismanaging session cookies that affected some users in some circumstances. The fix for those issues was first included in JRE 1.6.0_23. These fixes will carry forward and continue to be fixed in all future JRE releases.  In other words, if you wish to avoid the mismanaged session cookie issue, you should apply any release after JRE 1.6.0_22.All JRE 1.6 releases are certified with EBS upon release Our standard policy is that all E-Business Suite customers can apply all JRE updates to end-user desktops from JRE 1.6.0_03 and later updates on the 1.6 codeline.  We test all new JRE 1.6 releases in parallel with the JRE development process, so all new JRE 1.6 releases are considered certified with the E-Business Suite on the same day that they're released by our Java team.  You do not need to wait for a certification announcement before applying new JRE 1.6 releases to your EBS users' desktops. Important For important guidance about the impact of the JRE Auto Update feature on JRE 1.6 desktops, see: Planning Bulletin for JRE 7: What EBS Customers Can Do Today References Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 285218.1) Upgrading Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) with Oracle Applications 11i for Windows Clients (Metalink Note 290807.1) Recommended Browsers for Oracle Applications 12 (MetaLink Note 389422.1) Upgrading JRE Plugin with Oracle Applications R12 (MetaLink Note 393931.1) Related Articles Mismanaged Session Cookie Issue Fixed for EBS in JRE 1.6.0_23 Roundup: Oracle JInitiator 1.3 Desupported for EBS Customers in July 2009

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• Arçelik A.S. Uses Advanced Analytics to Improve Product Development

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  "Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management’s advanced analytics gives us better insight into the product development process by helping us to identify potential roadblocks.” – Iffet Iyigun Meydanli, Innovation and System Development Manager, R&D Center, Arçelik A.S. Founded in 1955, Arçelik A.S. is now the leading household appliance manufacturer in Turkey, and the third-largest household appliance company in Europe. It operates 14 production facilities in five countries (Turkey, Romania, Russia, China, and South Africa), with international sales and marketing offices in 20 countries. Additionally, the company manages 10 brands (Arçelik, Beko, Grundig, Blomberg, Elektrabregenz, Arctic, Leisure, Flavel, Defy, and Altus). The company has a household presence in more than 100 countries, including China and the United States. Arçelik’s Beko brand is among the top-10 household appliance brands in world, as a market leader for refrigerators, freezers, and washing machines in the United Kingdom. Arçelik implemented Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management for improved management of its design and manufacturing projects. With the solution, Arelik has improved its research and development (R&D) with the ability to evaluate technology risks when planning its projects. Also, it is now more easy to make plans for several locations, monitor all resources, and plan for future projects.  Challenges Improve monitoring of R&D resources?including human resources and critical laboratory equipment?to optimize management of the company’s R&D project portfolio Establish a transparent project platform to enable better product and process planning, gain insight into product performance, and facilitate advanced analytics that support R&D and overall business decisions Identify potential roadblocks for better risk management Solutions Worked with Oracle Partner PRM to implement Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to manage the entire household-appliance, R&D project portfolio lifecycle, enabling managers and project leaders to better track and monitor resources and deliverables in real time Improved risk analysis and evaluation abilities for R&D projects Supported long-term planning needs Used advanced reporting features to capture data needed for budgeting and other project details, including employee performance evaluations Improved monitoring abilities and insight into the overall performance of products postproduction Enabled flexible, fast, and customized reporting with the P6 dashboard on a centralized platform to meet custom reporting needs for project leaders and support on-time and on-budget deliverables Integrated with other corporate departments, such as accounts payable, to upload project invoice data into the Primavera solution and the company’s e-mail system, so that project leaders will be alerted about milestones and other project related information Partner“Oracle Partner PRM provided us with a quick, reliable, and solution-focused approach to its support,” said Iffet Iyigun Meydanli, innovation and system development manager, R&D Center, Arçelik A.S. “The company’s service covered the entire spectrum of our needs, including implementation, training, configuration, problem solving, and integration.”

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• Best Frameworks/libraries/engines for 2D multiplayer C# Webbased RPG

  - by Thirlan

  Title is a mouthful but important because I'm looking to meet a specific criteria and it's complex enough that I need a lot of help in finding what I'm looking for. I really want people's suggestions because I trust it a lot more than anything else, so I just need to clearly define what it is I want heh : P Game is a 2D RPG. Think of Secret of Mana. Game is online multiplayer, but not MMO sized. Game must be webbased! I'm looking to the future and want to hit as many platforms as possible. I'm leaning to Webgl because of this, but still looking around. Since the users are seeing the game through the webbrowser the front-end should be mainly responsible for drawing, taking input and some basic checking such as preliminary collision detection. This is important because it means the game engine is NOT on the client's machine. The server should be responsible for the game engine and all the calculations. This means the server is doing all the work and the client is mostly a dumb terminal. Server language is c# I'm looking for fast project execution so I want to use as many pre-existing tools as possible. This would make sense because I'm making a game here, not an engine. I'm not creating some new revolutionary graphics or pushing the physics engines to the next level. Preference for commercially supported tools. For game mechanics reasons and for reasons 4 and 5, don't think I can use existing 2D rpg engines. I've seen them out there and I fear that if I try and use them they will have too many restrictions, but will be happy to hear out suggestions. So all this means I need a game engine on the server, or maybe just a physics engine, and then I need another engine/library to draw everything that the server is sending to the client on the webbrowser. Maybe this is how 50% of games work on the web and there are plenty of frameworks that support this! I wouldn't actually don't know : ( but my gut is telling me that most webgames are single player and 90% of the game is running on the client. So... any suggestions?

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• Update in Certification Exam Score Report Access Process!

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Please note that exam results for all Oracle Certification exams will be accessed through CertView, starting October 30th, 2012. Exam results will no longer be available at the test center, or on the Pearson VUE website. Candidates will receive an email from Oracle within 30 minutes of completing the exam to let them know that their exam results are available on CertView. Candidates must have an Oracle Web Account to access CertView. This new process applies to exam results for all Oracle Certification exams - proctored and non-proctored as well beta exams. CertView, Oracle's self-service certification portal will be the partners’ one stop source for all their certification and exam history! Other benefits of this change include: driving all candidates to have an Oracle Web Account which will lead to tighter integration with Oracle University records in the future, increased security around data privacy and a higher validity rate for candidate email addresses. Existing benefits of CertView include, self-service access to exam and certification records and logos, and access to Oracle's self service certification verification. Accessing Exam Results  Returning CertView Users ·         Click the link in the email sent by Oracle or go to certview.oracle.com ·         Select the See My New Exam Results Now link to view exam results ·         Select the Print My New Exam Results Now link to print exam results  New CertView Users - Who Have An Oracle Web Account ·         First time Users must authenticate their CertView account ·         Account Authentication requires the Oracle Testing ID and email address from your Pearson VUE profile ·         Click the link in the email sent by Oracle or go to certview.oracle.com and follow the Authenticate My CertView Account link.  New CertView Users - Who Do Not Have An Oracle Web Account ·         CertView users are required to have an Oracle Web Account ·         To create an Oracle Web Account, go to certview.oracle.com and select theCreate My Oracle Web Account Now link. Then follow the remaining instructions under I do not have an Oracle Web Account on that page.

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• Data Virtualization: Federated and Hybrid

  - by Krishnamoorthy

  Data becomes useful when it can be leveraged at the right time. Not only enterprises application stores operate on large volume, velocity and variety of data. Mobile and social computing are in the need of operating in foresaid data. Replicating and transferring large swaths of data is one challenge faced in the field of data integration. However, smaller chunks of data aggregated from a variety of sources presents and even more interesting challenge in the industry. Over the past few decades, technology trends focused on best user experience, operating systems, high performance computing, high performance web sites, analysis of warehouse data, service oriented architecture, social computing, cloud computing, and big data. Operating on the ‘dark data’ becomes mandatory in the future technology trend, although, no solution can make dark data useful data in a single day. Useful data can be quantified by the facts of contextual, personalized and on time delivery. In most cases, data from a single source may not be complete the picture. Data has to be combined and computed from various sources, where data may be captured as hybrid data, meaning the combination of structured and unstructured data. Since related data is often found across disparate sources, effectively integrating these sources determines how useful this data ultimately becomes. Technology trends in 2013 are expected to focus on big data and private cloud. Consumers are not merely interested in where data is located or how data is retrieved and computed. Consumers are interested in how quick and how the data can be leveraged. In many cases, data virtualization is the right solution, and is expected to play a foundational role for SOA, Cloud integration, and Big Data. The Oracle Data Integration portfolio includes a data virtualization product called ODSI (Oracle Data Service Integrator). Unlike other data virtualization solutions, ODSI can perform both read and write operations on federated/hybrid data (RDBMS, Webservices,  delimited file and XML). The ODSI Engine is built on XQuery, hence ODSI user can perform computations on data either using XQuery or SQL. Built in data and query caching features, which reduces latency in repetitive calls. Rightly positioning ODSI, can results in a highly scalable model, reducing spend on additional hardware infrastructure.

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• Assessing Relative Maintainability

  - by João Bragança

  We (a contractor, actually) are implementing an off the shelf system to replace a legacy homegrown system for the core domain of the company (designing widgets). Unfortunately both systems will have to run concurrently for some time, as the product just isn't ready yet. Also, the decision was made to only migrate some of the widgets from the legacy system, based on date of last sale activity. Later on a new requirement came down: certain people in the company, most of them outside of the widget development context, want to search all widgets. The search results screen has 3 pieces of data: a GUID, a human readable id that is searchable, and a brief description (may need to be searchable in the future). In the widget details, there will be multiple screens. These screens align very well along SOA / bounded context lines - a screen for marketing data, a screen for sales history, etc. UML ahead! I am probably using the wrong kind of arrows here so please forgive me. The current solution - which is not in production yet - is something like the following: Both systems will be queried and the controller will merge the results. The new system has its own proprietary query language (we've alleviated this a bit with a LINQ provider). It also puts a lot of data on the wire. 15 search results typically run about 60k of unintelligible SOAP-wrapped xml. So I would prefer to avoid querying this system directly. These two systems publish events to help us integrate with other systems, mainly an ERP system. One of these events contains all the data necessary for the search screen. I proposed the following alternative: However I am being told that 'adding another database' will create more maintenance down the road. However, I believe this to be false, as I had to add a relatively simple feature that took several hours longer than anticipated because of this merging code. I want to get a feel for which system is more maintainable in the long run. I personally have not had the burden of maintaining any large system. I want something more than my gut. Specifically I'd like to know if having more, specialized physical databases is more or less maintainable than having less larger physical databases.

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• Styling Windows Phone Silverlight Applications

  - by Tim Murphy

  If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get.  One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade.  What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file.  This is of course analogous to placing a style in your HTML file versus an external CSS file.  This is the type of style I will concentrate on in this post. The first thing to look it how styles associate to elements.  TargetType defines the object type that your style will apply to.  In the example below the style is targeting the TextBlock object type. <Style x:Key="TextBlockSmallGray" TargetType="TextBlock"> Next we use a Setter which allows you to apply values for specific attributes of the target object type.  The setters can be a simple value or complex.  The first example here is simply applying a color to the background property of the target. <Setter Property="Background" Value="White"/> The second setter example here is for the same property, but we are applying a the definition of a LinearGradientBrush. <Setter Property="Background"> <Setter.Value> <LinearGradientBrush> <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Black"/> <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="White"/> </LinearGradientBrush> </Setter.Value> </Setter> The last thing I want to cover here is that you can leverage the system styles and then override or extend them.  The BasedOn attribute of the Style tag allows this sort of inheritance.  In the example below I am going to start with the PhoneTextTitleStyle and then override properties as needed. <Style x:Key="TextBlockTitle" BasedOn="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}" TargetType="TextBlock"> So now that we have our styles defined applying it is fairly straight forward.  Add the style name as a static resource to the style property of the element in your page and off you go. <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Style="{StaticResource PageGridStyle}"> So this is one step in creating consistency in your application’s look.  In future posts I will dig a little deeper. del.icio.us Tags: windows phone 7,mobile development,windows phone 7 development,.NET,software development,design,UX

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• What is a good design model for my new class?

  - by user66662

  I am a beginning programmer who, after trying to manage over 2000 lines of procedural php code, now has discovered the value of OOP. I have read a few books to get me up to speed on the beginning theory, but would like some advice on practical application. So,for example, let's say there are two types of content objects - an ad and a calendar event. what my application does is scan different websites (a predefined list), and, when it finds an ad or an event, it extracts the data and saves it to a database. All of my objects will share a $title and $description. However, the Ad object will have a $price and the Event object will have $startDate. Should I have two separate classes, one for each object? Should I have a 'superclass' with the $title and $description with two other Ad and Event classes with their own properties? The latter is at least the direction I am on now. My second question about this design is how to handle the logic that extracts the data for $title, $description, $price, and $date. For each website in my predefined list, there is a specific regex that returns the desired value for each property. Currently, I have an extremely large switch statement in my constructor which determines what website I am own, sets the regex variables accordingly, and continues on. Not only that, but now I have to repeat the logic to determine what site I am on in the constructor of each class. This doesn't feel right. Should I create another class Algorithms and store the logic there for each site? Should the functions of to handle that logic be in this class? or specific to the classes whos properties they set? I want to take into account in my design two things: 1) I will add different content objects in the future that share $title and $description, but will have their own properties, so, I want to be able to easily grow these as needed. 2) I will add more websites constantly (each with their own algorithms for data extraction) so I would like to plan efficienty managing and working with these now. I thought about extending the Ad or Event class with 'websiteX' class and store its functions there. But, this didn't feel right either as now I have to manage 100s of little website specific class files. Note, I didn't know if this was the correct site or stackoverflow was the better choice. If so, let me know and I'll post there.

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• What to answer to a customer who asks which one of two equivalent technologies must be used?

  - by MainMa

  As a freelancer, I am often asked by my customers what they must choose between similar elements, neither of which being better than another. Examples: “Do I need my e-commerce website be in PHP or ASP.NET?” “Do I need to host this ordinary web service in Cloud or use an ordinary hosting service?” “Which one is better for my new website: MySQL or Oracle?” etc. There is maybe at most 1% of cases where the choice is relevant, and there is a real, objective reason to use one over another, based on the precise metrics and studies. In all other cases, it doesn't matter at all. It is totally, completely irrelevant, either because there are no implications¹, or because those implications are too small to be taken in account², or, finally, because it's impossible to predict those implications³. If you know one thing and not another one, the answer to those questions is easy: “You can either write the application in C# or Java, both being probably equivalent in your case. Note that I'm a C# developer, so if you choose Java, I would not be able to work on your project and you would need to find another freelancer.” When you know both technologies, you can't answer that. In this case, how to explain to the customer that the question he asks is subject to flamewar and has no real consequences on his project? In other words, how to explain that you've chosen to use one technology rather than an equivalent one for the reasons related to human resources, without giving the impression to be unprofessional or to not care about the project? ¹ Example: Is MySQL better (worse?), performance-wise, compared to Oracle, for a personal website which will be accessed by, oh, let's be optimistic, two people per day? ² Example: for a given project, I was asked to asset if Windows Azure hosting would be cheaper than the hosting of the same application on a well-known ASP.NET hosting provider. The cost revealed to be exactly the same. ³ Example: your customer have an idea of a future application (the idea itself being extremely vague). There is no business plan, no requirements, nothing at all. Just an idea. You are asked if Java is better than C# for this app. What do you answer?

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• What arguments can I use to "sell" the BDD concept to a team reluctant to adopt it?

  - by S.Robins

  I am a bit of a vocal proponent of the BDD methodology. I've been applying BDD for a couple of years now, and have adopted StoryQ as my framework of choice when developing DotNet applications. Even though I have been unit testing for many years, and had previously shifted to a test-first approach, I've found that I get much more value out of using a BDD framework, because my tests capture the intent of the requirements in relatively clear English within my code, and because my tests can execute multiple assertions without ending the test halfway through - meaning I can see which specific assertions pass/fail at a glance without debugging to prove it. This has really been the tip of the iceberg for me, as I've also noticed that I am able to debug both test and implementation code in a more targeted manner, with the result that my productivity has grown significantly, and that I can more easily determine where a failure occurs if a problem happens to make it all the way to the integration build due to the output that makes its way into the build logs. Further, the StoryQ api has a lovely fluent syntax that is easy to learn and which can be applied in an extraordinary number of ways, requiring no external dependencies in order to use it. So with all of these benefits, you would think it an easy to introduce the concept to the rest of the team. Unfortunately, the other team members are reluctant to even look at StoryQ to evaluate it properly (let alone entertain the idea of applying BDD), and have convinced each other to try and remove a number of StoryQ elements from our own core testing framework, even though they originally supported the use of StoryQ, and that it doesn't impact on any other part of our testing system. Doing so would end up increasing my workload significantly overall and really goes against the grain, as I am convinced through practical experience that it is a better way to work in a test-first manner in our particular working environment, and can only lead to greater improvements in the quality of our software, given I've found it easier to stick with test first using BDD. So the question really comes down to the following: What arguments can I use to really drive the point home that it would be better to use StoryQ, or at the very least apply the BDD methodology? Can you point me to any anecdotal evidence that I can use to support my argument to adopt BDD as our standard method of choice? What counter arguments can you think of that could suggest that my wish to convert the team efforts to BDD might be in error? Yes, I'm happy to be proven wrong provided the argument is a sound one. NOTE: I am not advocating that we rewrite our tests in their entirety, but rather to simply start working in a different manner for all future testing work.

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• How do I know if I am using Scrum methodologies?

  - by Jake

  When I first started at my current job, my purpose was to rewrite a massive excel-VBA workbook-application to C# Winforms because it was thought that the new C# app will fix all existing problems and have all the new features for a perfect world. If it were a direct port, in theory it would be easy as i just need to go through all the formulas, conditional formatting, validations, VBA etc. to understand it. However, that was not the case. Many of the new features are tightly dependant on business logic which I am unfamiliar with. As a solo programmer, the first year was spent solely on deciphering the excel workbook and writing the C# app. In theory, I had the business people to "help" me specify requirements, how GUI looks and work, and testing of the app etc; but in practice it is like a contant tsunami of feature creep. At the beginning of the second year I managed to convince the management that this is not going anywhere. I made them start from scratch with the excel-VBA. I have this "issue log" saved on the network, each time they found something they didn't like about the excel-VBA app, they will write it in there. I check the log daily and consolidate issues (in my mind) mainly into 2 groups: (1) requires massive change. (2) can be fixed in current version. For massive change issues, I make a copy of the latest excel-VBA and give it a new version number, then work on it whenever I can. For current version fixes, I make the changes in a few days to a week, and then immediately release it. I also ensure I update the same change in any in-progress massive change future versions. This has gone on for about 4 months and I feel it works great. I made many releases and solved many real issues, also understood the business logic more and more. However, my boss (non-IT trained) thinks what I am doing are just adhoc changes and that i am not looking at the "bigger picture". I am struggling to convince my boss that this works. So I hope to formalise my approach and maybe borrow a buzzword to confuse him. Incidentally, I read about Agile and SCRUM, about backlog and sprints. But it's all very vague to me still. QUESTION (finally): I want to tell him that this is SCRUM! But I want to hold my breath first and ask whether my current approach is considered SCRUM or SCRUM-like? How can I make it more SCRUM-like? Note that I have only myself, there's no project leader or teams.

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• Feedback from SQLBits 8

  - by Peter Larsson

  This years SQLBits occurred in Brighton. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to attend the full conference, I did a presentation at Saturday. Getting to Brighton was easy. Drove to Copenhagen airport at 0415, flew 0605 and arrived at Gatwick 0735. Then I took the direct train to Brighton and showed up at 0830, just one hour before presenting. This was the easy part. Getting home was much worse. Presentation ended at 1030 and I had to rush to the train station to get back to London, change to tube for Heathrow. Made it at the gate just 15 seconds before closing. That included a half mile run in the airport… Anyway, yesterday I got the feedback for my presentation. It does look good, especially since English is not my first language. This is the first graph Seems to be just halfway between conference average and best session. I can live with that. Second graph shows more detail about attendees voting. It also look acceptable. A wider spread for the 9’s, but it is an inevitable effect from how attendees percept the session. I did get a lot of 8’s and the lower grades in an descending order. The two people voting 4 and 5 didn’t say why they voted this so I don’t know how to remedy this. Third graph is about each category of votes.   Again, I find this acceptable. The Session abstract and Speaker’s knowledge seems to follow attendees expectations compared to conference average. I seem to have met the attendees expectations (and some more) for the other four categories, also compared to conference average. Since this did encourage me, I believe I will present some more at future meetings. I do have a new presentation about something all developers are doing every day but they may not know it. I will also cover this new topic in the next Deep Dives II book. Stay tuned! //Peter

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• Analysing SQLBits Feedback

  - by jamiet

  Earlier this week I received all the feedback that people offered on my session at SQLBits 7 in York – “SSIS Dataflow Performance Tuning” (the video is available online if you wish to see it). As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog and my less-SQLy-focused Wordpress blog I am a big fan of collecting and tracking both personal and public data and session feedback lends itself very well to tracking because it is quantitative rather than qualitative; by that I mean attendees are invited to provide marks out of ten rather than (or, in the case of SQLBits, as well as) written comments. The SQLBits feedback is also useful because they use a consistent format – the same questions are asked each time – this means it is particularly easy to to track whether the scores that people give are trending up or down. I suspect that somewhere the SQLBits organisers have a big Analysis Services cube (ok, perhaps its an Excel pivot table) that allows them to analyse these scores per conference, speaker, track etc.… and there’s no reason that we as session speakers cannot do the same thing. To that end I have started to store my feedback in an Excel spreadsheet of my own which in the interests of transparency is available for public viewing (only a web browser required) on SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/Misc/Personal%20SQLBits%20Session%20Feedback.xlsx. I have used a pivot table to aggregate all that feedback and here is a screenshot: I am hereby making a public plea to the SQLBits organisers (on the off-chance that they are reading) to please continue to keep the feedback format consistent in the future and I encourage them to publish all of the feedback in an anonymised form. I would also encourage anyone doing conference speaking to track their conference feedback in the same way that I am doing so that you get an insight into whether or not you are improving over time. It is not difficult to setup and maintaining it as you do more sessions takes very little effort. Storing feedback data like this leads me to wider thoughts about well-known conventions and data format standardisation. Let’s imagine a utopia where there were a standard set of questions for capturing session feedback that were leveraged at every conference regardless of subject matter, location or culture; that would give rise to immense cross-conference and cross-discipline analysis – the data analyst in me goes giddy at the thought of it. It is scenarios like this that drive my interest both in data formats such as iCalendar, microformats and RDF, and in emerging movements such as the semantic web and linked data, all things which I have written about in the past. I don’t know whether we will ever reach the stage where every piece of data has structured, descriptive metadata associated with it but I live in hope. @Jamiet

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• Running a program on boot without login, using the screen

  - by configurator

  Preface: I have a server running on an old laptop. The screen is always on with a login prompt, but because its keyboard is in pretty bad shape, I use it exclusively via ssh. The screen is in a good position, though; I want to use it to display a clock and some stats about what my server is doing. I have scripts to display all those things, but I want to always show them on the monitor screen. My question is, how do I get my script (called HUD) to run on /dev/tty1, instead of the login prompt. Hopefully, it should be possible to accept keyboard input as well as display its output, so that it can use the keyboard to show more info where needed in a future version. I'd also like tty2 etc. to remain active as login screens, in face I actually do need to login locally. For a start, I tried creating a script that I can run from ssh to start the HUD. It goes something like this: ( flock -n 9 watch --interval 0.2 --precise --color --notitle --exec /path/to/script & disown ) 9> /var/lock/hud > /dev/tty1 2> /dev/tty1 < /dev/tty1 (I had to use & disown instead of nohup because nohup recognized the tty and redirects output to nohup.out instead.) This sort-of works. However, it has a few issues: It doesn't steal the terminal's keyboard input, so you can't ctrl+c to get out of it (nor change the script to actually use the keyboard input), and if you press enter it show it and scrolls the display, never refreshing it correctly afterwards. Oddly, if I disconnect the ssh session which created it, it stops working and shows a message: exec: No such file or directory. If I reconnect to ssh, it resumes functioning properly. It feels hackish. Is there a better way to do this? How?

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• Perfect is the enemy of “Good Enough”

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the quotes that I was against, but now it is totally part of my core beliefs: "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough" Folks used to share this quote a lot with me in my early career and my frequent interpretation was that they were incompetent people that were satisfied with mediocrity, i.e. I ignored them and their advice. (Yes, I went through an arrogance phase). I later "grew up" and "realized" that they were missing the point, so instead of ignoring them I would retort: "Of course we have to aim for perfection, because as human beings we'll never achieve perfection, so by aiming for perfection we will indeed achieve good enough results". (Yes, I went through a smart ass phase). Later I grew up a bit more and "understood" that what I was really being told is to finish my work earlier and move on to other things because by trying to perfect that one thing, another N things that I was responsible for were suffering by not getting my attention - all things on my plate need to move beyond the line, not just one of them to go way over the line. It is really a statement of increasing scale and scope. To put it in other words, getting PASS grades on 10 things is better than getting an A+ with distinction on 1-2 and a FAIL on the rest. Instead of saying “I am able to do very well these X items” it is best if you can say I can do well enough on these X * Y items”, where Y > 1. That is how breadth impact is achieved. In the future, I may grow up again and have a different interpretation, but for now - even though I secretly try to "perfect" things, I try not to do that at the expense of other responsibilities. This means that I haven't had anybody quote that saying to me in a while (or perhaps my quality of work has dropped so much that it doesn't apply to me any more - who knows :-)). Wikipedia attributes the quote to Voltaire and it also makes connections to the “Law of diminishing returns”, and to the “80-20 rule” or “Pareto principle”… it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort …check out the Wikipedia entry on “Perfect is the enemy of Good” and its links. Also use your favorite search engine to search and see what others are saying (Bing, Google) – it is worth internalizing this in a way that makes sense to you… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How to explain bad software to non-technical people?

  - by mtutty

  In discussing software development with non-technical people (customers, business owners, project sponsors, etc.), I often resort to analogies and metaphors. It's relatively easy and effective to use a "house" or other metaphor for describing the size and complexity of new development. However, we often inherit someone else's code or data, and this approach doesn't seem to hold up as well when trying to explain why we're gutting something that already seems to work. Of course we can point to cycle time and cost to be saved in the future but this generally means nothing to business folks. I know doctors can say "just take this pill," but I'm not sure that software devs have the same authority. Ideas? EDIT: Let me add a bit to the discussion. The specific project I'm talking about has customers that don't realize (or care) about specific aspects of the system we're retiring (i.e., they think it was just fine): The system would save a NEW RECORD every time someone updated a field The system contained tables for reference data. These tables had new records added every day, even though they were duplicates of previous records. And there was no way to tie the reference data used for a particular case at the time it was closed. This is like 99% of the data in the old system. The field NAMES also have spaces, apostrophes and other inappropriate characters in them, making everything harder to work with. In addition to the incredible amount of duplicate data, they have around 1000 XLS files with data they want added to the system. Previously, they would do a spreadsheet for each case in the database, IN ADDITION TO what they typed into the database. Getting rid of this old, unneeded information and piping in the XLS data comprises about 80% of the total project effort, and was not something we could accurately predict. I'm trying to find a concrete way to describe how bad this thing was, mostly so that the customer will understand why the migration process has been so time-consuming. The actual coding was done pretty quickly and the new system works fine, but without the old data they won't be happy. Sorry to get into the weeds, but most of the answers I've seen so far are pretty basic scope/schedule/cost things. I've been doing this for 15 years, so this really is more of a reflective, philosophical question - but without some of the details it can be difficult to really appreciate the awful beauty of this problem.

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• Cloud Infrastructure has a new standard

  - by macoracle

  I have been working for more than two years now in the DMTF working group tasked with creating a Cloud Management standard. That work has culminated in the release today of the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) version 1.0 by the DMTF. CIMI is a single interface that a cloud consumer can use to manage their cloud infrastructure in multiple clouds. As CIMI is adopted by the cloud vendors, no more will you need to adapt client code to each of the proprietary interfaces from these multiple vendors. Unlike a de facto standard where typically one vendor has change control over the interface, and everyone else has to reverse engineer the inner workings of it, CIMI is a de jure standard that is under change control of a standards body. One reason the standard took two years to create is that we factored in use cases, requirements and contributed APIs from multiple vendors. These vendors have products shipping today and as a result CIMI has a strong foundation in real world experience. What does CIMI allow? CIMI is both a model for the resources (computing, storage networking) in the cloud as well as a RESTful protocol binding to HTTP. This means that to create a Machine (guest VM) for example, the client creates a “document” that represents the Machine resource and sends it to the server using HTTP. CIMI allows the resources to be encoded in either JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or the eXentsible Markup Language (XML). CIMI provides a model for the resources that can be mapped to any existing cloud infrastructure offering on the market. There are some features in CIMI that may not be supported by every cloud, but CIMI also supports the discovery of which features are implemented. This means that you can still have a client that works across multiple clouds and is able to take full advantage of the features in each of them. Isn’t it too early for a standard? A key feature of a successful standard is that it allows for compatible extensions to occur within the core framework of the interface itself. CIMI’s feature discovery (through metadata) is used to convey to the client that additional features that may be vendor specific have been implemented. As multiple vendors implement such features, they become candidates to add the future versions of CIMI. Thus innovation can continue in the cloud space without being slowed down by a lowest common denominator type of specification. Since CIMI was developed in the open by dozens of stakeholders who are already implementing infrastructure clouds, I expect to CIMI being adopted by these same companies and others over the next year or two. Cloud Customers who can see the benefit of this standard should start to ask their cloud vendors to show a CIMI implementation in their roadmap.  For more information on CIMI and the DMTF's other cloud efforts, go to: http://dmtf.org/cloud

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• You probably have enough

  - by BuckWoody

  This a decidedly non-technical post, and even a little preachy. I post it here because you, the technical professional, are the perfect audience for it. I have enough stuff. I never think so, of course, but I do. I don’t consider myself rich, but if you have a comfortable place to sleep,  enough food to eat and you can plan for your future, you are rich. And when we are rich enough to have “enough” stuff, that usually means we have too much stuff. Stuff costs money that could be put to better use, stuff needs painting, cleaning, fueling, feeding, storage and caring for. Stuff is a burden. So I decided a few years back that I had enough stuff. We gave away a lot of things, and we don’t buy any new (meaning we didn’t have one before)  things – only replacement things. We’d rather “do something” than “have something”. But even so, when birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas rolled around, we got more stuff. So I asked all of my friends and relatives to do something for me.   I ask folks that want to give me a gift (for whatever reason) to donate the price they would have paid for the gift to a charity they care about. This does a few things: They have to find a charity to care about The fact that I made it through a calendar year now actually means something Someone else gets the help they need Everybody feels better No, I’m not saying these things so you’ll think I’m a wonderful person - the reason I’m posting this here is that as a technical professional you probably have enough stuff like I do. So I ask you to try this out. Try it for one birthday, or one Holiday, or even for a year. I can promise this: it will change your life, the life of the person who gives the gift, and the person’s life who receives it. If you do try it, I’d love to have a comment here on your thoughts.

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• Oredev 2012: Summary and source code

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This week, I had the pleasure to be invited to talk at Oredev, a really cool conference taking place in Malmo, Sweden. The whole event is awesome, including a very special dinner on Monday including sauna and swimming in a 6 degrees cold Baltic sea, and a reception with dinner at the town hall, including the mayor himself. Considering Malmo is a town of 300'000 inhabitants, it is a pretty nice occasion and the historical building itself is really worth seeing. For those interested, I placed my pictures on my Flickr account. I had a workshop on Tuesday morning about Windows 8 development with XAML/C#, and then a session on Wednesday about MVVM in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8, of course using MVVM Light. I was very nervous because I reworked some of my demos as recently as this morning, in the wake of the Build conference last week and the release of both the Windows Phone SDK and MVVM Light V4.1. Everything went well however, and if I judge by the people I talked t after the talk, and Twitter, everything went pretty well. Before my talk on Tuesday, I had the pleasure to see a talk by Iris Classon (@irisclasson) on the challenges of being a "n00b" and a woman in software development. I especially appreciated her research and conclusions on the lack of women I our industry, a topic that is dear to my heart (because I want the best possible future for my two daughters, and also because I really enjoy working with women on projects, and getting a different insight on the art of software development. I really want to thank the excellent organization committee for their hard work and their fantastic welcome to Malmo. In particular Emily Holweck did a wonderful job and was super helpful throughout the preparation and the conference itself. I made a few pictures during my stay, all with the new Nokia Lumia 920, and hope you will enjoy them too. The source code and the slides… The source code is available for download from Skydrive. You will find the following: Windows 8 workshop slides. MVVM Applied slides Source code package with Win8Demo: The demo I built during the 4 hours workshop, with some light MVVM, web services (JSON), GridView, Design time data (Blend / Visual Studio designer), Bing maps integration, location sensor, Search pane integration. SemanticZoomSample: a sample I put together to demonstrate the SemanticZoom control, with two GridViews and of course full design time data for Blend work. Due to time constraints, I was not able to show this demo during the workshop, but I publish it anyway, hoping it will be useful to someone. PictureUploader: The demo I built during my 50 minutes session about MVVM Applied in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Code sharing, design time data, MVVM Light are used in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 apps. And in video… You can also see the video of my MVVM talk thanks to the good services of the Oredev team! MVVM Applied in Windows Phone and Windows 8 from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• SQL Saturday 194 - Exeter

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Many kudos goes to Jonathan and Annette Allen and the others on the team for confirming SQL Saturday 194 in Exeter on the 8th and 9th of March.  The event home page is here http://www.sqlsaturday.com/194/eventhome.aspx and I delighted that myself and Dave Morrison will be presenting a full day pre-con on the 8th on favourite subjects “TSQL and Internals”. Here is the full abstract : TSQL and internals - When faced with performance issues there are many lines of attack. Tuning the engine itself can get you so far, however for maximum effect you need to understand how the engine and how it translates SQL statements into performable actions. This is not a simple task, it is a massive task to deal with a multi-table join and the number of permutations can be immense. To back up this knowledge, we can create better performing TSQL and understand the impact that is has upon the engine and recognize the pitfalls and gotcha’s that exist in SQLServer. Ultimately, there is no ‘best way’ to perform a single task only many variations of ‘it depends’ , but now we can pick the most appropriate option for the required dataload. Over the years, there have been many myths and misconceptions have grown around the product, some have basis in older versions and some are just wrong. Continuing to build on the knowledge given so far these issue will be explored and broken down and proved or disproved. Finally we will look to the future and explore SQL Server 2012 and the new functionality that that brings and some of the common uses that we will be able to address. After completion of this days pre-con, attendees will have a more complete knowledge of execution plans, and how they relate to the physical and logical actions that SQLServer will be executing on their behalf. The attendees will also have a more rounded and fuller knowledge of TSQL and the implications of incorrectly defining a query. Dave is a fountain of knowledge on execution plans and optimizer internals and ,though i may flatter myself, I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to TSQL and such matters.  I hope that if you cant join us, then there are other pre-cons available from other experts in their fields that may ‘float you boat’ too.  The pre-con page is http://sqlsouthwest.co.uk/SQLSaturday_precon.htm Also, excitingly, this pre-con day is sponsored by Fusion-IO which is a great boon for the day. If you want a more of this then i am offering a 2 day TSQL course starting on the 19th of March. More details on this are available here

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• Is IE9 a modern browser?

  - by anirudha

  Is IE9 a modern browser? i show you a post who compare IE as well as they compare chrome. Is IE9 a modern browser? well Are you thing that they make something bettter then thing another that what Firefox and chrome do whenever Microsoft do this. that's point that Microsoft always blast IE because they make version upon version not upon update like Firefox make 3.6.14 after 3.6.13 and chrome give update soon as possible but IE not come soon. they will thing for making 10 instead of giving update on 9. well what they tell us new. they make fool public everytime i believe they make fool public as same as today they maked for version 9 they show developer tool in 9 have three new tabs or pael are this enough. whenever  in chrome and firefox their is many plugin who make development easier IE still have a developer tool who not have enough power like Firebug in Firefox. they show performance but forget luna user [window xp] and their IE never runs on other plateform but chrome and firefox can. no customization in IE whenever chrome and firefox have uncountable plugin and addons. show features now in IE who already implemented in firefox very early. well their is no rule that static goes right every time not sure that IE and Firefox both are right in their language. their is no one predict what thing goes better in future. so well keep a thing in mind never wasted time and also thing to make task easier even you need to use sollution opensource or closesoure inside or outside MS does not matter. well everyone tell you much more then they do even IE and some other. they never tell you this thing not in IE but in another can be found they never tell you use other whenever you need a thing and never can be found in their software. you need to more beware of IE because they make them commorcial not really for public if really then why they stop wxp user to use them as well firefox and chrome never force. because they need a thing that force more then more copy of windows sale. so they thing to add a thing in window 8. the IE9 they thing to make before that they thing to make  this for windows 8. they always force user to purchase this for this. this for this. and this trick sell their software. well outside MS Mozilla and Chrome all behave better with user and their feedback. they respect user their privacy and feedback. if you not believe that how much problem you found in IE and they got solved soon as in chrome and firefox bug kill soon. because IE not opensource we need to  boycutt them secondly their is no customization then they make user task easier even with twitter and facebook.

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