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  • How to share two keyboard on the same laptop, french iso layout and usa ansi layout keyboard with usb?

    - by reyman64
    I recently buy a "noppoo choc mini" with this specific ANSI US-INTERNATIONAL pc84 layout. This specific keyboard have only 84 key , a 60% (compact tenkeyless) reduced layout My problem is simple, there is no keyboard layout into Ubuntu 12.04 which correspond to this usa normal ansi layout ... so it's the same problem with reduced version and only 84 key .. I search a template of normal ANSI US-INTERNATIONAL for xmodmap/xkb, and after i can try to manually map the other key. I search on google, and i don't find any other user which have same problem, so it's seem i have not the good keywoard to search this information.. Edit 1 : Here you can see there is probably a bug in ubuntu, because the layout for USA with dead key is not correct ! I have this : http://minus.com/lEdKMrsNAwkVA And other users have this for the same layout : http://i.stack.imgur.com/p52XG.png EDIT 2 It seems after a "sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration" : french standard keyboard pc105 + precision M65 keyboard from dell laptop Now i can see the good us layout in parameters, but i cannot have the iso layout for french usage... EDIT 3 Ok, after reboot i understand the probleme, i explain. I have one laptop with integrated french keyboard, and i want to use my usb keyboard which use a usa ANSI layout. It seem it's impossible in ubuntu and "dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration" to share two different physical layout (ANSI and EU ISO) on the same computer ... EDIT4 Ok, it seems i can switch the physical layout (ISO <- ANSI) with this command in terminal : setxkbmap -layout us setxkbmap -layout us -variant alt-intl an setxkbmap -layout fr It's very complicated qnd it seem ubuntu 12.04 have big problem with keyboard manager ... because all works great with these two commands, without ANY change into the system parameters keyboard !!! Second bug ? The image of the layout for fr is buggy, the layout is not ISO, but i can press on the letter "< " at the left of right shift without any problem ! You can see the image here (french alternative with ANSI layout ? it's crazy ?) : http: //minus.com/lXsDJwoeyWAfF Can you help me on this point ? I'm lost with xkb, and manual mapping is very complicated ... Thanks a lot, SR

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  • Code refactoring with Visual Studio 2010 Part-1

    - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama
    Visual studio 2010 is a Great IDE(Integrated Development Environment) and we all are using it in day by day for our coding purpose. There are many great features provided by Visual Studio 2010 and Today I am going to show one of great feature called for code refactoring. This feature is one of the most unappreciated features of Visual Studio 2010 as lots of people still not using that and doing stuff manfully. So to explain feature let’s create a simple console application which will print first name and last name like following. And following is code for that. using System; namespace CodeRefractoring { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string firstName = "Jalpesh"; string lastName = "Vadgama"; Console.WriteLine(string.Format("FirstName:{0}",firstName)); Console.WriteLine(string.Format("LastName:{0}", lastName)); Console.ReadLine(); } } } So as you can see this is a very basic console application and let’s run it to see output. So now lets explore our first feature called extract method in visual studio you can also do that via refractor menu like following. Just select the code for which you want to extract method and then click refractor menu and then click extract method. Now I am selecting three lines of code and clicking on refactor –> Extract Method just like following. Once you click menu a dialog box will appear like following. As you can I have highlighted two thing first is Method Name where I put Print as Method Name and another one Preview method signature where its smart enough to extract parameter also as We have just selected three lines with  console.writeline.  One you click ok it will extract the method and you code will be like this. using System; namespace CodeRefractoring { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string firstName = "Jalpesh"; string lastName = "Vadgama"; Print(firstName, lastName); } private static void Print(string firstName, string lastName) { Console.WriteLine(string.Format("FirstName:{0}", firstName)); Console.WriteLine(string.Format("LastName:{0}", lastName)); Console.ReadLine(); } } } So as you can see in above code its has created a static method called Print and also passed parameter for as firstname and lastname. Isn’t that great!!!. It has also created static print method as I am calling it from static void main.  Hope you liked it.. Stay tuned for more..Till that Happy programming.

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  • The Jack LaLanne School of Sysadmins

    - by rickramsey
    Two of my childhood heroes were Tarzan and Jack LaLanne. Tarzan was an obvious choice: what boy wouldn't want to spend his days bungee jumping through the jungle with his own pack of gorillas? Jack Lalanne had a disturbing habit of wearing stretch pants, but he was so damn fit for an old guy that you couldn't help but be impressed. Especially back then, when nobody knew what a dumb bell was, much less Cross-Fit. Here's what he did to celebrate his 70th birthday. Sooner or later we all face a choice in our careers: surrender to the life of a has-been like Bruce Sprinsteen's baseball player or become an unstoppable sysadmin like Jack Lalanne. If you'd rather keep on fighting like Jack, give these resources a look. Brian Bream's blog provides specific suggestions for keeping your skills up to date. The video interviews describe the types of technologies that are challenging what you used to know. Blog: The Old School Sysadmin - A Dying Breed? by Brian Bream "The sysadmin role has been far too dependent on performing repetitive tasks and working in a reactionary mode ... the sysadmin must grow a much larger skill set to be successful. Don’t grow vertically in one technology, grow horizontally amongst many technologies." Just one of the suggestions Brian Bream provides in this excellent blog post. Video: Freeing the Sysadmin From Repetitive Tasks Interview with Marshall Choy Marshall Choy, Director of Optimized Solutions at Oracle was once a sysadmin. And a Solaris engineer. He explains what optimized solutions are, how they are developed and tested, how they handle patching, and how these vertically integrated systems impact the job and duties of a sysadmin. Video: The Oracle Database Appliance Interview with Bob Thome Bob Thome, Senior Director of Product Management, explains what makes the Database Appliance simple, reliable, and affordable, and how it could change the economies and processes of the data center. Video: Why Pinellas County Chose Oracle Exalytics Interview with Gautham Gautham (pronounced like Batman's Gotham) recently led an effort to refresh the Pinellas County hardware systems. He'll explain what they were looking for, why they chose Oracle Exalytics, how they became convinced it was the right decision, and how it changed the way they managed their data center. Video: DTrace for System Administrators Interview with Brendan Gregg This video interview will give you an idea of some of the value-add tasks you can perform when you are freed from the reactive mode that Brian Bream describes in his blog. Brendan Gregg describes the best ways for sysadmins to tune deployed applications to get more performance out of them in their particular computing environment photograph of Ford Mustang GT 500 taken at Gateway Museum copyright by Rick Ramsey -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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  • IT Admin for Thrill Seekers

    - by Tony Davis
    A developer suggested to me recently that the life of the DBA was, surely, a dull one. My first reaction was indignation, but quickly followed by the thought that for many people excitement isn't necessarily the most desirable aspect of their job. It's true that some aspects of the DBA role seem guaranteed to quieten the pulse; in the days of tape backups, time must have slowed to eternity for the person whose job it was to oversee this process, placing tapes into secure containers, ensuring correct labeling, and.sorry, I drifted off there for a second. On the other hand, if you follow the adventures of the likes of Brent Ozar or Tom LaRock, you'd be forgiven for thinking that much of a database guy's time is spent, metaphorically, diving through plate glass windows in tight fitting underwear in order to extract grateful occupants from burning database applications. Alas it isn't true of the majority, but it isn't as dull as some people imagine, and is a helter-skelter ride compared with some other IT roles. Every IT department has people who toil away in shadowy corners doing quiet but mysterious tasks. When you ask them to explain what they do, you almost immediately want them to stop, but you hear enough to appreciate that these tasks are often absolutely vital to the smooth functioning of an IT organization. Compared with them, the DBAs are prima donnas. Here are a few nominations: Installation engineer - install all of the company's laptops and workstations, and software, deal with licensing, shipping and data entry.many organizations, especially those subject to tight regulation, would simply grind to a halt without their efforts. Localization engineer - Not quite software engineering, not quite translation, the job is to rebuild a product in a different language and make sure everything still works. QA Tester - firstly, I should say that the testers at Red Gate seem to me some of the most-fulfilled in the company. I refer here to the QA Tester whose job is more-or-less entirely to read a script, click some buttons and make sure the actual and expected values match. Configuration manager - for example, someone whose main job is to configure build environments so that devs can access their source code; assuredly necessary for the smooth functioning and productivity of the team, and hopefully well-paid. So what other sort of job in IT should one choose if the work of a DBA proves to be too exciting? Or are these roles secretly more exciting than many imagine? I invite you all to put forward your own suggestions. Cheers, Tony.

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  • Interpolation using a sprite's previous frame and current frame

    - by user22241
    Overview I'm currently using a method which has been pointed out to me is extrapolation rather than interolation. As a result, I'm also now looking into the possibility of using another method which is based on a sprite's position at it's last (rendered) frame and it's current one. Assuming an interpolation value of 0.5 this is, (visually), how I understand it should affect my sprite's position.... This is how I'm obtaining an inerpolation value: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // Set/re-set loop back to 0 to start counting again loops=0; while(System.currentTimeMillis() > nextGameTick && loops < maxFrameskip) { SceneManager.getInstance().getCurrentScene().updateLogic(); nextGameTick += skipTicks; timeCorrection += (1000d / ticksPerSecond) % 1; nextGameTick += timeCorrection; timeCorrection %= 1; loops++; tics++; } interpolation = (float)(System.currentTimeMillis() + skipTicks - nextGameTick) / (float)skipTicks; render(interpolation); } I am then applying it like so (in my rendering call): render(float interpolation) { spriteScreenX = (spriteScreenX - spritePreviousX) * interpolation + spritePreviousX; spritePreviousX = spriteScreenX; // update and store this for next time } Results This unfortunately does nothing to smooth the movement of my sprite. It's pretty much the same as without the interpolation code. I can't get my head around how this is supposed to work and I honestly can't find any decent resources which explain this in any detail. My understanding of extrapolation is that when we arrive at the rendering call, we calculate the time between the last update call and the render call, and then adjust the sprite's position to reflect this time (moving the sprite forward) - And yet, this (Interpolation) is moving the sprite back, so how can this produce smooth results? Any advise on this would be very much appreciated. Edit I've implemented the code from OriginalDaemon's answer like so: @Override public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { newTime = System.currentTimeMillis()*0.001; frameTime = newTime - currentTime; if ( frameTime > (dt*25)) frameTime = (dt*25); currentTime = newTime; accumulator += frameTime; while ( accumulator >= dt ) { SceneManager.getInstance().getCurrentScene().updateLogic(); previousState = currentState; t += dt; accumulator -= dt; } interpolation = (float) (accumulator / dt); render(); } Interpolation values are now being produced between 0 and 1 as expected (similar to how they were in my original loop) - however, the results are the same as my original loop (my original loop allowed frames to skip if they took too long to draw which I think this loop is also doing). I appear to have made a mistake in my previous logging, it is logging as I would expect it to (interpolated position does appear to be inbetween the previous and current positions) - however, the sprites are most definitely choppy when the render() skipping happens.

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  • How can I save my university's Computer Science & Engineering department? [closed]

    - by Blake
    I'm currently pursuing a B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, and we're having a bit of a problem right now... The state recently passed a budget plan that cuts funding for higher education in Florida. The dean of UF's College of Engineering decided that the best way for us to absorb the blow is by executing the following plan: All of the Computer Engineering Degree programs, BS, MS and PhD, would be moved from the Computer & Information Science and Engineering Dept. to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. along with most of the advising staff. Roughly half of the faculty would be offered the opportunity to move to Electrical/Computer Eng., Biomedical Eng., or Industrial/Systems Eng. Staff positions in CISE which are currently supporting research and graduate programs would be eliminated. The activities currently covered by TAs would be reassigned to faculty and the TA budget for CISE would be eliminated. Any faculty member who wishes to stay in CISE may do so, but with a revised assignment focused on teaching and advising. In short: our department (at least as we know it) is being decimated. Computer & Information Sciences & Engineering (one of 9 departments in the College of Engineering) is taking more than 50% of the cuts. If you're interested in reading the full proposal, you can access it here. A vast, VAST majority of the students and faculty in the department are vehemently opposed to this plan, however the dean is already taking measures to implement it. This is the only proposal on the table right now, and she has not entertained our requests for alternatives. She sees it as an obvious (albeit drastic) solution to our budget problem, citing that many other universities have combined Computer and Electrical Engineering departments. I'll bet those universities didn't have to eliminate an established department to get there, though. The budget goes into effect July 1, 2012 (this is non-negotiable), and the dean's proposal is currently set to be finalized some time next week. We don't have much time! My question to everyone here is this: Are we overreacting to this plan, or are we justified? And could you explain why or why not? It's obvious that CISE students will resist any cuts to our department, but I'm curious to see what other people in the field have to say. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. I will select the answer that saves our department. Just kidding, I'll pick the one that best explains why this is a good or bad decision for the dean to make. Please note that anything you say can and will be used to further our cause (and we might track you down if you provide a compelling argument against us).

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  • How do you structure computer science University notes?

    - by Sai Perchard
    I am completing a year of postgraduate study in CS next semester. I am finishing a law degree this year, and I will use this to briefly explain what I mean when I refer to the 'structure' of University notes. My preferred structure for authoring law notes: Word Two columns 0.5cm margins (top, right, bottom, middle, left) Body text (10pt, regular), 3 levels of headings (14/12/10pt, bold), 3 levels of bulleted lists Color A background for cases Color B background for legislation I find that it's crucial to have a good structure from the outset. My key advice to a law student would be to ensure styles allows cases and legislation to be easily identified from supporting text, and not to include too much detail regarding the facts of cases. More than 3 levels of headings is too deep. More than 3 levels of a bulleted list is too deep. In terms of CS, I am interested in similar advice; for example, any strategies that have been successfully employed regarding structure, and general advice regarding note taking. Has latex proved better than Word? Code would presumably need to be stylistically differentiated, and use a monospaced font - perhaps code could be written in TextMate so that it could be copied to retain syntax highlighting? (Are notes even that useful in a CS degree? I am tempted to simply use a textbook. They are crucial in law.) I understand that different people may employ varying techniques and that people will have personal preferences, however I am interested in what these different techniques are. Update Thank you for the responses so far. To clarify, I am not suggesting that the approach should be comparable to that I employ for law. I could have been clearer. The consensus so far seems to be - just learn it. Structure of notes/notes themselves are not generally relevant. This is what I was alluding to when I said I was just tempted to use a textbook. Re the comment that said textbooks are generally useless - I strongly disagree. Sure, perhaps the recommended textbook is useless. But if I'm going to learn a programming language, I will (1) identify what I believe to be the best textbook, and (2) read it. I was unsure if the combination of theory with code meant that lecture notes may be a more efficient way to study for an exam. I imagine that would depend on the subject. A subject specifically on a programming language, reading a textbook and coding would be my preferred approach. But I was unsure if, given a subject containing substantive theory that may not be covered in a single textbook, people may have preferences regarding note taking and structure.

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  • Transfer websites and domains to new server

    - by Albert
    We have currently around 40 websites and 80+ domains/sub-domains in a shared 1&1 hosting package, and we just acquired a managed dedicated server with 1&1 as well. Now it's time to start transferring everything over to the new server. Transferring just the websites and databases wouldn't be a problem, it would take time but it's pretty straight forward. The problem comes when transferring the domains, let me explain why. Many of the websites we have are accessible via sub-domains of a parent domain. Ideally, we would like to transfer the sites one by one, in order to check for each one that everything works fine in the new server. However, since we also need to transfer the domain so it's managed in the new server, once we do that means that all the websites using that domain need to be already in the new server before transferring that domain, thus not allowing the "one by one" philosophy. Another issue is the downtime when transferring the domain, from the moment it stops working in the hosting package and becomes active in the new server. I believe there's nothing we can do here. So my question is if there's any way we can do the "one by one" transferring of the websites (and their corresponding sub-domains) in the circumstances described above. One idea I had would be: 1. Let's say we have website A, which is accessible using subdomain.mydomain.com (and there are many other websites accessible via other sub-domains of mydomain.com) 2. Transfer the files of website A to the new server 3. Point a test domain in the new server to the website A's folder (the new server comes with a "test" domain) 4. Test if website A works with that "test" domain 5. In the old hosting, somehow point the real sub-domain (subdomain.mydomain.com) to the new location of website A, in a way that user always see the same URL as always 6. Repeat 2-5 for every website belonging to the same domain 7. Once all are working in the new server, do the actual transfer of the domain to the new server, and then re-create all the sub-domains and point them to their corresponding website That way, users wouldn't notice that there's been a change (except for a small down time of the websites when doing the domain transfer). The part I'm not sure about is point 5 of the above. Is there any way to do that? I mean do it in a way that users see the original domain all the time in their browser, even for internal pages (so not only for the "home page", which would be sub-domain.mydomain.com, but also for example for the contact page, which would be sub-domain.mydomain.com/contact.php). Is there any way to do this? Or are we SOL and we're going to have to transfer all at the same time?

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  • Best Platform/Engine for turn based Client/Server Android game

    - by Paradine
    I'm currently designing a turn based game for tablets. Initially for Android with porting to iOS later considered in design. I'm having trouble narrowing down the available technologies to even know where to spend my research time. I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to achieve someone may be able to suggest a platform and/or engine. I've looked into some of the open source Engines ( http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers ) and some appear to handle much of what I might require - although with a higher focus on graphics than i need. Mages looks interesting although development appears to have ceased. If I could somehow leverage GoogleApps that would be excellent. Here is what I am trying to achieve: PvP turn based strategy game over internet - minimal animation and bandwidth required Players match up online using MetaGame system MatchID created on Resolution Server and Game starts Clients have 30 second countdown to select MoveString Clients sends small secure timestamped and MatchIDed MoveString to Resolution server Resolution server looks up Move String for each player, Resolves and Updates Players status in MatchID on Server Resolution server updates Client Views Repeat until victory conditions met - MatchID Closed, Rewards earned in MetaGame There will also need to be a full social and account system and metagame backend - but this could be running on separate system(s) Tablet in Offline mode would be catalog browsing and perhaps single player AI - bum I'm focusing on the Resolution Server at this point I'm not even certain if I would be looking at an Android App or a WebApp at this stage! I want a custom GUI so I guess an app - but maybe as I have little animation a WebApp might also work. Probably some combination of both. There will be very small overhead in data between client server - essentially a small text string every 30 seconds sent to the Resolution server which looks up the Effect and applies it to the Opponents string and determines some results to apply to the match. The client view is updated minimally with the results (only 5 in game Integers tracked) - perhaps triggering small animations/popups on the client to show the end result. e.g Explosion. If you have suggestions for a good technology or platform to best achieving the Resolution Server I'd love to hear. Also if you have experience with open source Engines - and could narrow down which (if any ) might be most suitable that would be a big help. Thanks in advance

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  • C# XNA Normals Question

    - by Wade
    Hello all! I have been working on some simple XNA proof of concept for a game idea I have as well as just to further my learning in XNA. However, i seem to be stuck on these dreaded normals, and using the BasicEffect with default lighting i can't seem to tell if my normals are being calculated correctly, hence the question. I'm mainly drawing cubes at the moment, I'm using a triangle list and a VertexBuffer to get the job done. The north face of my cube has two polygons and 6 vectors: Vector3 startPosition = new Vector3(0,0,0); corners[0] = startPosition; // This is the start position. Block size is 5. corners[1] = new Vector3(startPosition.X, startPosition.Y + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Z); corners[2] = new Vector3(startPosition.X + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Y, startPosition.Z); corners[3] = new Vector3(startPosition.X + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Y + BLOCK_SIZE, startPosition.Z); verts[0] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[0], normals[0], textCoordBR); verts[1] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[1], normals[0], textCoordTR); verts[2] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[2], normals[0], textCoordBL); verts[3] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[3], normals[0], textCoordTL); verts[4] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[2], normals[0], textCoordBL); verts[5] = new VertexPositionNormalTexture(corners[1], normals[0], textCoordTR); Using those coordinates I want to generate the normal for the north face, I have no clue how to get the average of all those vectors and create a normal for the two polygons that it makes. Here is what i tried: normals[0] = Vector3.Cross(corners[1], corners[2]); normals[0].Normalize(); It seems like its correct, but then using the same thing for other sides of the cube the lighting effect seems weird, and not cohesive with where i think the light source is coming from, not really sure with the BasicEffect. Am I doing this right? Can anyone explain in lay mans terms how normals are calculated. Any help is much appreciated. Note: I tried going through Riemers and such to figure it out with no luck, it seems no one really goes over the math well enough. Thanks!

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  • SQLAuthority News – I am Presenting 2 Sessions at TechEd India

    - by pinaldave
    TechED is the event which I am always excited about. It is one of the largest technology in India. Microsoft Tech Ed India 2011 is the premier technical education and networking event for tech professionals interested in learning, connecting and exploring a broad set of current and soon-to-be released Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms and services. I am going to speak at the TechED on two very interesting and advanced subjects. Venue: The LaLiT Ashok Kumara Krupa High Grounds Bangalore – 560001, Karnataka, India Sessions Date: March 25, 2011 Understanding SQL Server Behavioral Pattern – SQL Server Extended Events Date and Time: March 25, 2011 12:00 PM to 01:00 PM History repeats itself! SQL Server 2008 has introduced a very powerful, yet very minimal reoccurring feature called Extended Events. This advanced session will teach experienced administrators’ capabilities that were not possible before. From T-SQL error to CPU bottleneck, error login to deadlocks –Extended Event can detect it for you. Understanding the pattern of events can prevent future mistakes. SQL Server Waits and Queues – Your Gateway to Perf. Troubleshooting Date and Time: March 25, 2011 04:15 PM to 05:15 PM Just like a horoscope, SQL Server Waits and Queues can reveal your past, explain your present and predict your future. SQL Server Performance Tuning uses the Waits and Queues as a proven method to identify the best opportunities to improve performance. A glance at Wait Types can tell where there is a bottleneck. Learn how to identify bottlenecks and potential resolutions in this fast paced, advanced performance tuning session. My session will be on the third day of the event and I am very sure that everybody will be in groove to learn new interesting subjects. I will have few give-away during and at the end of the session. I will not tell you what I will have but it will be for sure something you will love to have. Please make a point and reserve above time slots to attend my session. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Extended Events

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • How one decision can turn web services to hell

    - by DigiMortal
    In this posting I will show you how one stupid decision may turn developers life to hell. There is a project where bunch of complex applications exchange data frequently and it is very hard to change something without additional expenses. Well, one analyst thought that string is silver bullet of web services. Read what happened. Bad bad mistake In the early stages of integration project there was analyst who also established architecture and technical design for web services. There was one very bad mistake this analyst made: All data must be converted to strings before exchange! Yes, that’s correct, this was the requirement. All integers, decimals and dates are coming in and going out as strings. There was also explanation for this requirement: This way we can avoid data type conversion errors! Well, this guy works somewhere else already and I hope he works in some burger restaurant – far away from computers. Consequences If you first look at this requirement it may seem like little annoying piece of crap you can easily survive. But let’s see the real consequences one stupid decision can cause: hell load of data conversions are done by receiving applications and SSIS packages, SSIS packages are not error prone and they depend heavily on strings they get from different services, there are more than one format per type that is used in different services, for larger amounts of data all these conversion tasks slow down the work of integration packages, practically all developers have been in hurry with some SSIS import tasks and some fields that are not used in different calculations in SSAS cube are imported without data conversions (by example, some prices are strings in format “1.021 $”). The most painful problem for developers is the part of data conversions because they don’t expect that there is such a stupid requirement stated and therefore they are not able to estimate the time their tasks take on these web services. Also developers must be prepared for cases when suddenly some service sends data that is not in acceptable format and they must solve the problems ASAP. This puts unexpected load on developers and they are not very happy with it because they can’t understand why they have to live with this horror if it is possible to fix. What to do if you see something like this? Well, explain the problem to customer and demand special tasks to project schedule to get this mess solved before going on with new developments. It is cheaper to solve the problems now that later.

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  • Mathemagics - 3 consecutive number

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Three Consecutive numbers When I was young and handsome (OK, OK, just young), my father used to challenge us with riddles and tricks involving Logic, Math and general knowledge. Most of the time, at least after reaching the ripe age of 10, I would see thru his tricks in no time. This one is a bit more subtle. I had to think about it for close to an hour and then when I had the ‘AHA!’ effect, I could not understand why it had taken me so long. So here it is. You select a volunteer from the audience (or a shill, but that would be cheating!) and ask him to select three consecutive numbers, all of them 1 or 2 digits. So {1, 2, 3} would be good, albeit trivial set, as would {8, 9, 10} or {97, 98, 99} but not {99, 99, 100} (why?!). Now, using a calculator – and these days almost every phone has a built in calculator – he is to perform these steps: 1.      Select a single digit 2.      Multiply it by 3 and write it down 3.      Add the 3 consecutive numbers 4.      Add the number from step 2 5.      Multiply the sum by 67 6.      Now tell me the last 2 digits of the result and also the number you wrote down in step 2 I will tell you which numbers you selected. How do I do this? I’ll give you the mechanical answer, but because I like you to have the pleasure of an ‘AHA!’ effect, I will not really explain the ‘why’. So let’s you selected 30, 31, and 32 and also that your 3 multiple was 24, so here is what you get 30 + 31 + 32 = 93 93 + 24 = 117 117 x 67 = 7839, last 2 digits are 39, so you say “the last 2 digits are 39, and the other number is 24.” Now, I divide 24 by 3 getting 8. I subtract 8 from 39 and get 31. I then subtract 1 from this getting 30, and say: “You selected 30, 31, and 32.” This is the ‘how’. I leave the ‘why’ to you! That’s all folks! PS do you really want to know why? Post a feedback below. When 11 people or more will have asked for it, I’ll add a link to the full explanation.

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  • Why do I get this file loading exception when trying to draw sprites with libgdx?

    - by BluFire
    I'm having trouble with the "Drawing Images" section on the libgdx tutorial. I set up the documents completely and I typed the code as follows: public class Game implements ApplicationListener { public static final String LOG = Game.class.getSimpleName(); private FPSLogger fpsLogger; private SpriteBatch batch; private Texture texture; private Sprite sprite; private TextureRegion region; //removed irrelevant code for this question... @Override public void render() { texture = new Texture(Gdx.files.internal("android.png")); region = new TextureRegion(texture, 20, 20, 50, 50); sprite = new Sprite(texture, 20, 20, 50, 50); sprite.setPosition(10, 10); sprite.setRotation(45); Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0f, 1f, 0f, 1f); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); batch.begin(); batch.draw(texture,10,10); batch.draw(region,10,10); sprite.draw(batch); batch.end(); // output the current FPS fpsLogger.log(); } } I went through the tutorial on the website but when I run the code I get errors: Exception in thread "LWJGL Application" com.badlogic.gdx.utils.GdxRuntimeException: Couldn't load file: android.png at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Pixmap.<init>(Pixmap.java:137) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.glutils.FileTextureData.prepare(FileTextureData.java:55) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.load(Texture.java:175) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.create(Texture.java:159) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.<init>(Texture.java:133) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture.<init>(Texture.java:122) at com.game.Game.render(Game.java:46) at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication.mainLoop (LwjglApplication.java:163) at com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run(LwjglApplication.java:113) Caused by: com.badlogic.gdx.utils.GdxRuntimeException: File not found: android.png (Internal) at com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle.read(FileHandle.java:108) at com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle.length(FileHandle.java:364) at com.badlogic.gdx.files.FileHandle.readBytes(FileHandle.java:156) at com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Pixmap.<init>(Pixmap.java:134) ... 8 more I set the android.png in my assests folder in my android project linking it to the desktop one, I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. What is making these errors? FIX. Weird ending.this was the plus where the sprite is suppose to look like. The top right corner of the next image should look like, the bottom left is what turned out in the code. I'm think it was because of the texture region but I'm not 100%. Can somebody explain why it is really warped? I thought the changes I made in the coding will just change position/rotation, rather then a change in the image.

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  • OTN Latinoamérica Tour 2012

    - by Dana Singleterry
    Better late than never. Sorry for the delay on getting this content up for all of you and thanks again for your attendance. A number of excellent questions came out of the sessions I delivered and herein I'm providing you with the content, in pdf format, for those sessions. I'm also providing pointers to Forms to ADF integration/migration as well as some details around OAF as used in E-Business Suite and ADF. Here's the sessions delivered by location. Click on any of the links to download the session content in pdf format. Montevideo Uruguay: Is Oracle ADF Simpler than Oracle Forms? Understanding the Fusion Development Platform Building Web Data Dashboards Without Coding Buenos Aires, Argentina: Is Oracle ADF Simpler than Oracle Forms? Developing Cross Device Mobile Applications Sao Paulo, Brazil Understanding the Fusion Development Platform Is Oracle ADF Simpler than Oracle Forms? A brief note on Form Integration & Migration: Does your organization have an Oracle Forms application that you'd like to migrate to ADF? Or, perhaps you're an Oracle Forms Developer and want to modernize your application development skills? If so, you've come to the right place! This section will strive to answer common questions that arise as you move from Forms to ADF. Our Oracle Forms Statement of Direction points out that Oracle is committed to the long-term support of Oracle Forms and Reports. However, many customers feel they are outgrowing their Forms applications. Users are demanding more sophisticated and interactive users interfaces. Executives are requiring SOA-enabled applications that integrate with peripheral services. Development leads are encouraging a more modern approach to application development, including adherence to design patterns like MVC. So even as Oracle still supports Forms, the list of reasons to move off of it is becoming more compelling and is only gaining further momentum by the fact that Oracle's own Fusion Applications are using ADF. Developers and organizations looking to align with both the technology stack and look-and-feel of Fusion Applications are choosing ADF, and thus reaping the benefits of years of best practices in enterprise application development that are baked into the ADF framework. So, if you decide to migrate off of Forms for any of these reasons, ADF is the way to go. Grant Ronald has published a video of our position on the subject, along with an ODTUG article explaining our direction. These materials explain that there are other migration tools/frameworks/paths, but the best choice is usually to follow Gartner's recommendation that if you are going to migrate off of Oracle Forms, ADF is the least risky and least costly migration path. Please visit the Oracle Forms page here. For details around OAF as used in E-Business Suite (EBS) and when to use ADF with EBS you can review the following blogs from Shay Shmeltzer. To ADF or to OAF? or Can I use ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite?

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  • Best Platform/Engine for turn based Client/Server Android game

    - by Paradine
    I'm currently designing a turn based game for tablets. Initially for Android with porting to iOS later considered in design. I'm having trouble narrowing down the available technologies to even know where to spend my research time. I am hoping that if I explain what I am trying to achieve someone may be able to suggest a platform and/or engine. I've looked into some of the open source Engines ( http://www.cuteandroid.com/ten-open-source-android-2d-or-3d-game-engine-for-android-developers ) and some appear to handle much of what I might require - although with a higher focus on graphics than i need. Mages looks interesting although development appears to have ceased. If I could somehow leverage GoogleApps that would be excellent. Here is what I am trying to achieve: PvP turn based strategy game over internet - minimal animation and bandwidth required Players match up online using MetaGame system MatchID created on Resolution Server and Game starts Clients have 30 second countdown to select MoveString Clients sends small secure timestamped and MatchIDed MoveString to Resolution server Resolution server looks up Move String for each player, Resolves and Updates Players status in MatchID on Server Resolution server updates Client Views Repeat until victory conditions met - MatchID Closed, Rewards earned in MetaGame There will also need to be a full social and account system and metagame backend - but this could be running on separate system(s) Tablet in Offline mode would be catalog browsing and perhaps single player AI - bum I'm focusing on the Resolution Server at this point I'm not even certain if I would be looking at an Android App or a WebApp at this stage! I want a custom GUI so I guess an app - but maybe as I have little animation a WebApp might also work. Probably some combination of both. There will be very small overhead in data between client server - essentially a small text string every 30 seconds sent to the Resolution server which looks up the Effect and applies it to the Opponents string and determines some results to apply to the match. The client view is updated minimally with the results (only 5 in game Integers tracked) - perhaps triggering small animations/popups on the client to show the end result. e.g Explosion. If you have suggestions for a good technology or platform to best achieving the Resolution Server I'd love to hear. Also if you have experience with open source Engines - and could narrow down which (if any ) might be most suitable that would be a big help. Thanks in advance

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  • Attach to Process in Visual Studio

    - by Daniel Moth
    One option for achieving step 1 in the Live Debugging process is attaching to an already running instance of the process that hosts your code, and this is a good place for me to talk about debug engines. You can attach to a process by selecting the "Debug" menu and then the "Attach To Process…" menu in Visual Studio 11 (Ctrl+Alt+P with my keyboard bindings), and you should see something like this screenshot: I am not going to explain this UI, besides being fairly intuitive, there is good documentation on MSDN for the Attach dialog. I do want to focus on the row of controls that starts with the "Attach to:" label and ends with the "Select..." button. Between them is the readonly textbox that indicates the debug engine that will be used for the selected process if you click the "Attach" button. If you haven't encountered that term before, read on MSDN about debug engines. Notice that the "Type" column shows the Code Type(s) that can be detected for the process. Typically each debug engine knows how to debug a specific code type (the two terms tend to be used interchangeably). If you click on a different process in the list with a different code type, the debug engine used will be different. However note that this is the automatic behavior. If you believe you know best, or more typically you want to choose the debug engine for a process using more than one code type, you can do so by clicking the "Select..." button, which should yield a "Select Code Type" dialog like this one: In this dialog you can switch to the debug engine you want to use by checking the box in front of your desired one, then hit "OK", then hit "Attach" to use it. Notice that the dialog suggests that you can select more than one. Not all combinations work (you'll get an error if you select two incompatible debug engines), but some do. Also notice in the list of debug engines one of the new players in Visual Studio 11, the GPU debug engine - I will be covering that on the C++ AMP team blog (and no, it cannot be combined with any others in this release). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

    - by J Swaroop
    Cross-posting Dain Hansen's excellent recap of the Big Data/Fast Data announcement during OOW: For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details.

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  • How to convince my boss that quality is a good thing to have in code?

    - by Kristof Claes
    My boss came to me today to ask me if we could implement a certain feature in 1.5 days. I had a look at it and told him that 2 to 3 days would be more realistic. He then asked me: "And what if we do it quick and dirty?" I asked him to explain what he meant with "quick and dirty". It turns out, he wants us to write code as quickly as humanly possible by (for example) copying bits and pieces from other projects, putting all code in the code-behind of the WebForms pages, stop caring about DRY and SOLID and assuming that the code and functionalities will never ever have to be modified or changed. What's even worse, he doesn't want us do it for just this one feature, but for all the code we write. We can make more profit when we do things quick and dirty. Clients don't want to pay for you taking into account that something might change in the future. The profits for us are in delivering code as quick as possible. As long as the application does what it needs to do, the quality of the code doesn't matter. They never see the code. I have tried to convince him that this is a bad way to think as the manager of a software company, but he just wouldn't listen to my arguments: Developer motivation: I explained that it is hard to keep developers motivated when they are constantly under pressure of unrealistic deadlines and budget to write sloppy code very quickly. Readability: When a project gets passed on to another developer, cleaner and better structured code will be easier to read and understand. Maintainability: It is easier, safer and less time consuming to adapt, extend or change well written code. Testability: It is usually easier to test and find bugs in clean code. My co-workers are as baffled as I am by my boss' standpoint, but we can't seem to get to him. He keeps on saying that by making things more quickly, we can sell more projects, ask a lower price for them while still making a bigger profit. And in the end these projects pay the developer's salaries. What more can I say to make him see he is wrong? I want to buy him copies of Peopleware and The Mythical Man-Month, but I have a feeling they won't change his mind either. A lot of you will probably say something like "Run! Get out of there now!" or "I'd quit!", but that's not really an option since .NET web development jobs are rather rare in the region where I live...

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  • How can I convince cowboy programmers to use source control?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    UPDATE I work on a small team of devs, 4 guys. They have all used source control. Most of them can't stand source control and instead choose not to use it. I strongly believe source control is a necessary part of professional development. Several issues make it very difficult to convince them to use source control: The team is not used to using TFS. I've had 2 training sessions, but was only allotted 1 hour which is insufficient. Team members directly modify code on the server. This keeps code out of sync. Requiring comparison just to be sure you are working with the latest code. And complex merge problems arise Time estimates offered by developers exclude time required to fix any of these problems. So, if I say nono it will take 10x longer...I have to constantly explain these issues and risk myself because now management may perceive me as "slow". The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging requires knowledge of the project at hand and, therefore, developer cooperation which I am not able to obtain. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying server code, bypassing TFS saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming. Multiply this by the 10+ projects we manage. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremely difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • An update on using Rosetta Stone: Studio now isn't very useful and is not great value as an add-on option

    - by Greg Low
    I had a surprisingly large number of responses from my previous posting about learning Chinese. An update for those considering Rosetta Stone (www.rosettastone.com) for Chinese, Spanish or any other language that they offer:I had to renew my "Studio" subscription today and it's now a much worse deal than it was.It's now $75 for 6 months for Studio sessions. Online classes used to be 45 mins. Recently they reduced them to 20 mins. Given how often people have connection issues, etc. that 20 mins can disappear very quickly.They've also reduced the number you can attend. You used to be able to have 2 scheduled at any point in time. Now they limit you to 2 "group sessions" per month during the period. (You can pay for additional private sessions). The combination of these two changes now makes it much less useful. Two x 20 min sessions per month is an almost meaningless amount of practice. They also now automatically change you to auto-renew when you subscribe. They tell you where to remove this auto-renewal but the first 4 or 5 times that I went into that screen, no such option appeared. Later, an option did appear and I used it.Overall, things just aren't what they used to be at Rosetta Stone. It's now pretty hard to recommend the Studio option where it was a no-brainer before.FURTHER UPDATE: <sigh>Even after I renewed, I could not even connect to their "new" service. Although the system processed the renewal, it still tells me it's expired. My online chat person "Siva S" tells me that the problem is that I've purchased all 5 levels of the program. I can't wait till they explain to me how making an extra purchase from them stops me from logging on. Siva told me that they had "renewed" the program. I'd have to speak to Customer Care; they aren't available and then disconnected himself. Impressive (not).Their website is now full of issues too. It insists that my billing address is in the USA, even though it pretends to accept changes to it.Overall, it's gone from something that could be recommended (with some limitations) to now being an app to avoid. That's a pity as I liked much of it before.

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  • Finding the lowest average Hamming distance when the order of the strings matter

    - by user1049697
    I have a sequence of binary strings that I want to find a match for among a set of longer sequences of binary strings. A match means that the compared sequence gives the lowest average Hamming distance when all elements in the shorter sequence have been matched against a sequence in one of the longer sets. Let me try to explain with an example. I have a set of video frames that have been hashed using a perceptual hashing algorithm so that the video frames that look the same has roughly the same hash. I want to match a short video clip against a set of longer videos, to see if the clip is contained in one of these. This means that I need to find out where the sequence of the hashed frames in the short video has the lowest average Hamming distance when compared with the long videos. The short video is the sub strings Sub1, Sub2 and Sub3, and I want to match them against the hashes of the long videos in Src. The clue here is that the strings need to match in the specific order that they are given in, e.g. that Sub1 always has to match the element before Sub2, and Sub2 always has to match the element before Sub3. In this example it would map thusly: Sub1-Src3, Sub2-Src4 and Sub3-Src5. So the question is this: is there an algorithm for finding the lowest average Hamming distance when the order of the elements compared matter? The naïve approach to compare the substring sequence to every source string won't cut it of course, so I need something that preferably can match a (much) shorter sub string to a set of million of elements. I have looked at MVP-trees, BK-trees and similar, but everything seems to only take into account one binary string and not a sequence of them. Sub1: 100111011111011101 Sub2: 110111000010010100 Sub3: 111111010110101101 Src1: 001011010001010110 Src2: 010111101000111001 Src3: 101111001110011101 Src4: 010111100011010101 Src5: 001111010110111101 Src6: 101011111111010101 I have added a calculation of the examples below. (The Hamming distances aren't correct, but it doesn't matter) **Run 1.** dist(Sub1, Src1) = 8 dist(Sub2, Src2) = 10 dist(Sub3, Src3) = 12 average = 10 **Run 2.** dist(Sub1, Src2) = 10 dist(Sub2, Src3) = 12 dist(Sub3, Src4) = 10 average = 11 **Run 3.** dist(Sub1, Src3) = 7 dist(Sub2, Src4) = 6 dist(Sub3, Src5) = 10 average = 8 **Run 4.** dist(Sub1, Src3) = 10 dist(Sub2, Src4) = 4 dist(Sub3, Src5) = 2 average = 5 So the winner here is sequence 4 with an average distance of 5.

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  • What are the software design essentials? [closed]

    - by Craig Schwarze
    I've decided to create a 1 page "cheat sheet" of essential software design principles for my programmers. It doesn't explain the principles in any great depth, but is simply there as a reference and a reminder. Here's what I've come up with - I would welcome your comments. What have I left out? What have I explained poorly? What is there that shouldn't be? Basic Design Principles The Principle of Least Surprise – your solution should be obvious, predictable and consistent. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) - the simplest solution is usually the best one. You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI) - create a solution for the current problem rather than what might happen in the future. Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) - rigorously remove duplication from your design and code. Advanced Design Principles Program to an interface, not an implementation – Don’t declare variables to be of a particular concrete class. Rather, declare them to an interface, and instantiate them using a creational pattern. Favour composition over inheritance – Don’t overuse inheritance. In most cases, rich behaviour is best added by instantiating objects, rather than inheriting from classes. Strive for loosely coupled designs – Minimise the interdependencies between objects. They should be able to interact with minimal knowledge of each other via small, tightly defined interfaces. Principle of Least Knowledge – Also called the “Law of Demeter”, and is colloquially summarised as “Only talk to your friends”. Specifically, a method in an object should only invoke methods on the object itself, objects passed as a parameter to the method, any object the method creates, any components of the object. SOLID Design Principles Single Responsibility Principle – Each class should have one well defined purpose, and only one reason to change. This reduces the fragility of your code, and makes it much more maintainable. Open/Close Principle – A class should be open to extension, but closed to modification. In practice, this means extracting the code that is most likely to change to another class, and then injecting it as required via an appropriate pattern. Liskov Substitution Principle – Subtypes must be substitutable for their base types. Essentially, get your inheritance right. In the classic example, type square should not inherit from type rectangle, as they have different properties (you can independently set the sides of a rectangle). Instead, both should inherit from type shape. Interface Segregation Principle – Clients should not be forced to depend upon methods they do not use. Don’t have fat interfaces, rather split them up into smaller, behaviour centric interfaces. Dependency Inversion Principle – There are two parts to this principle: High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions. Abstractions should not depend on details. Details should depend on abstractions. In modern development, this is often handled by an IoC (Inversion of Control) container.

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