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• Unable to install Xdebug

  - by burnt1ce

  I've registered xdebug in php.ini (as per http://xdebug.org/docs/install) but it's not showing up when i run "php -m" or when i get a test page to run "phpinfo()". I've just installed the latest version of XAMPP. Can anyone provide any suggestions in getting xdebug to show up? This is what i get when i run phpinfo(). **PHP Version 5.3.1** System Windows NT ANDREW_LAPTOP 5.1 build 2600 (Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3) i586 Build Date Nov 20 2009 17:20:57 Compiler MSVC6 (Visual C++ 6.0) Architecture x86 Configure Command cscript /nologo configure.js "--enable-snapshot-build" Server API Apache 2.0 Handler Virtual Directory Support enabled Configuration File (php.ini) Path no value Loaded Configuration File C:\xampp\php\php.ini Scan this dir for additional .ini files (none) Additional .ini files parsed (none) PHP API 20090626 PHP Extension 20090626 Zend Extension 220090626 Zend Extension Build API220090626,TS,VC6 PHP Extension Build API20090626,TS,VC6 Debug Build no Thread Safety enabled Zend Memory Manager enabled Zend Multibyte Support disabled IPv6 Support enabled Registered PHP Streams https, ftps, php, file, glob, data, http, ftp, compress.zlib, compress.bzip2, phar, zip Registered Stream Socket Transports tcp, udp, ssl, sslv3, sslv2, tls Registered Stream Filters convert.iconv.*, string.rot13, string.toupper, string.tolower, string.strip_tags, convert.*, consumed, dechunk, zlib.*, bzip2.* This program makes use of the Zend Scripting Language Engine: Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies PHP Credits Configuration apache2handler Apache Version Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1 Apache API Version 20051115 Server Administrator postmaster@localhost Hostname:Port localhost:80 Max Requests Per Child: 0 - Keep Alive: on - Max Per Connection: 100 Timeouts Connection: 300 - Keep-Alive: 5 Virtual Server No Server Root C:/xampp/apache Loaded Modules core mod_win32 mpm_winnt http_core mod_so mod_actions mod_alias mod_asis mod_auth_basic mod_auth_digest mod_authn_default mod_authn_file mod_authz_default mod_authz_groupfile mod_authz_host mod_authz_user mod_cgi mod_dav mod_dav_fs mod_dav_lock mod_dir mod_env mod_headers mod_include mod_info mod_isapi mod_log_config mod_mime mod_negotiation mod_rewrite mod_setenvif mod_ssl mod_status mod_autoindex_color mod_php5 mod_perl mod_apreq2 Directive Local Value Master Value engine 1 1 last_modified 0 0 xbithack 0 0 Apache Environment Variable Value MIBDIRS C:/xampp/php/extras/mibs MYSQL_HOME C:\xampp\mysql\bin OPENSSL_CONF C:/xampp/apache/bin/openssl.cnf PHP_PEAR_SYSCONF_DIR C:\xampp\php PHPRC C:\xampp\php TMP C:\xampp\tmp HTTP_HOST localhost HTTP_CONNECTION keep-alive HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.8 Safari/533.2 HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL max-age=0 HTTP_ACCEPT application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING gzip,deflate,sdch HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE en-US,en;q=0.8 HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 PATH C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\;c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\DivX Shared\;C:\Program Files\WiTopia.Net\bin SystemRoot C:\WINDOWS COMSPEC C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe PATHEXT .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH WINDIR C:\WINDOWS SERVER_SIGNATURE <address>Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1 Server at localhost Port 80</address> SERVER_SOFTWARE Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1 SERVER_NAME localhost SERVER_ADDR 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT 80 REMOTE_ADDR 127.0.0.1 DOCUMENT_ROOT C:/xampp/htdocs SERVER_ADMIN postmaster@localhost SCRIPT_FILENAME C:/xampp/htdocs/test.php REMOTE_PORT 3275 GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1 SERVER_PROTOCOL HTTP/1.1 REQUEST_METHOD GET QUERY_STRING no value REQUEST_URI /test.php SCRIPT_NAME /test.php HTTP Headers Information HTTP Request Headers HTTP Request GET /test.php HTTP/1.1 Host localhost Connection keep-alive User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.8 Safari/533.2 Cache-Control max-age=0 Accept application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language en-US,en;q=0.8 Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 HTTP Response Headers X-Powered-By PHP/5.3.1 Keep-Alive timeout=5, max=80 Connection Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding chunked Content-Type text/html bcmath BCMath support enabled Directive Local Value Master Value bcmath.scale 0 0 bz2 BZip2 Support Enabled Stream Wrapper support compress.bz2:// Stream Filter support bzip2.decompress, bzip2.compress BZip2 Version 1.0.5, 10-Dec-2007 calendar Calendar support enabled com_dotnet COM support enabled DCOM support disabled .Net support enabled Directive Local Value Master Value com.allow_dcom 0 0 com.autoregister_casesensitive 1 1 com.autoregister_typelib 0 0 com.autoregister_verbose 0 0 com.code_page no value no value com.typelib_file no value no value Core PHP Version 5.3.1 Directive Local Value Master Value allow_call_time_pass_reference On On allow_url_fopen On On allow_url_include Off Off always_populate_raw_post_data Off Off arg_separator.input & & arg_separator.output &amp; &amp; asp_tags Off Off auto_append_file no value no value auto_globals_jit On On auto_prepend_file no value no value browscap C:\xampp\php\extras\browscap.ini C:\xampp\php\extras\browscap.ini default_charset no value no value default_mimetype text/html text/html define_syslog_variables Off Off disable_classes no value no value disable_functions no value no value display_errors On On display_startup_errors On On doc_root no value no value docref_ext no value no value docref_root no value no value enable_dl On On error_append_string no value no value error_log no value no value error_prepend_string no value no value error_reporting 22519 22519 exit_on_timeout Off Off expose_php On On extension_dir C:\xampp\php\ext C:\xampp\php\ext file_uploads On On highlight.bg #FFFFFF #FFFFFF highlight.comment #FF8000 #FF8000 highlight.default #0000BB #0000BB highlight.html #000000 #000000 highlight.keyword #007700 #007700 highlight.string #DD0000 #DD0000 html_errors On On ignore_repeated_errors Off Off ignore_repeated_source Off Off ignore_user_abort Off Off implicit_flush Off Off include_path .;C:\xampp\php\PEAR .;C:\xampp\php\PEAR log_errors Off Off log_errors_max_len 1024 1024 magic_quotes_gpc Off Off magic_quotes_runtime Off Off magic_quotes_sybase Off Off mail.add_x_header Off Off mail.force_extra_parameters no value no value mail.log no value no value max_execution_time 60 60 max_file_uploads 20 20 max_input_nesting_level 64 64 max_input_time 60 60 memory_limit 128M 128M open_basedir no value no value output_buffering no value no value output_handler no value no value post_max_size 128M 128M precision 14 14 realpath_cache_size 16K 16K realpath_cache_ttl 120 120 register_argc_argv On On register_globals Off Off register_long_arrays Off Off report_memleaks On On report_zend_debug On On request_order no value no value safe_mode Off Off safe_mode_exec_dir no value no value safe_mode_gid Off Off safe_mode_include_dir no value no value sendmail_from no value no value sendmail_path no value no value serialize_precision 100 100 short_open_tag Off Off SMTP localhost localhost smtp_port 25 25 sql.safe_mode Off Off track_errors Off Off unserialize_callback_func no value no value upload_max_filesize 128M 128M upload_tmp_dir C:\xampp\tmp C:\xampp\tmp user_dir no value no value user_ini.cache_ttl 300 300 user_ini.filename .user.ini .user.ini variables_order GPCS GPCS xmlrpc_error_number 0 0 xmlrpc_errors Off Off y2k_compliance On On zend.enable_gc On On ctype ctype functions enabled date date/time support enabled "Olson" Timezone Database Version 2009.18 Timezone Database internal Default timezone America/New_York Directive Local Value Master Value date.default_latitude 31.7667 31.7667 date.default_longitude 35.2333 35.2333 date.sunrise_zenith 90.583333 90.583333 date.sunset_zenith 90.583333 90.583333 date.timezone America/New_York America/New_York dom DOM/XML enabled DOM/XML API Version 20031129 libxml Version 2.7.6 HTML Support enabled XPath Support enabled XPointer Support enabled Schema Support enabled RelaxNG Support enabled ereg Regex Library System library enabled exif EXIF Support enabled EXIF Version 1.4 $Id: exif.c 287372 2009-08-16 14:32:32Z iliaa $ Supported EXIF Version 0220 Supported filetypes JPEG,TIFF Directive Local Value Master Value exif.decode_jis_intel JIS JIS exif.decode_jis_motorola JIS JIS exif.decode_unicode_intel UCS-2LE UCS-2LE exif.decode_unicode_motorola UCS-2BE UCS-2BE exif.encode_jis no value no value exif.encode_unicode ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15 fileinfo fileinfo support enabled version 1.0.5-dev filter Input Validation and Filtering enabled Revision $Revision: 289434 $ Directive Local Value Master Value filter.default unsafe_raw unsafe_raw filter.default_flags no value no value ftp FTP support enabled gd GD Support enabled GD Version bundled (2.0.34 compatible) FreeType Support enabled FreeType Linkage with freetype FreeType Version 2.3.11 T1Lib Support enabled GIF Read Support enabled GIF Create Support enabled JPEG Support enabled libJPEG Version 7 PNG Support enabled libPNG Version 1.2.40 WBMP Support enabled XBM Support enabled JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support enabled Directive Local Value Master Value gd.jpeg_ignore_warning 0 0 gettext GetText Support enabled hash hash support enabled Hashing Engines md2 md4 md5 sha1 sha224 sha256 sha384 sha512 ripemd128 ripemd160 ripemd256 ripemd320 whirlpool tiger128,3 tiger160,3 tiger192,3 tiger128,4 tiger160,4 tiger192,4 snefru snefru256 gost adler32 crc32 crc32b salsa10 salsa20 haval128,3 haval160,3 haval192,3 haval224,3 haval256,3 haval128,4 haval160,4 haval192,4 haval224,4 haval256,4 haval128,5 haval160,5 haval192,5 haval224,5 haval256,5 iconv iconv support enabled iconv implementation "libiconv" iconv library version 1.13 Directive Local Value Master Value iconv.input_encoding ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1 iconv.internal_encoding ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1 iconv.output_encoding ISO-8859-1 ISO-8859-1 imap IMAP c-Client Version 2007e SSL Support enabled json json support enabled json version 1.2.1 libxml libXML support active libXML Compiled Version 2.7.6 libXML Loaded Version 20706 libXML streams enabled mbstring Multibyte Support enabled Multibyte string engine libmbfl HTTP input encoding translation disabled mbstring extension makes use of "streamable kanji code filter and converter", which is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1. Multibyte (japanese) regex support enabled Multibyte regex (oniguruma) version 4.7.1 Directive Local Value Master Value mbstring.detect_order no value no value mbstring.encoding_translation Off Off mbstring.func_overload 0 0 mbstring.http_input pass pass mbstring.http_output pass pass mbstring.http_output_conv_mimetypes ^(text/|application/xhtml\+xml) ^(text/|application/xhtml\+xml) mbstring.internal_encoding no value no value mbstring.language neutral neutral mbstring.strict_detection Off Off mbstring.substitute_character no value no value mcrypt mcrypt support enabled Version 2.5.8 Api No 20021217 Supported ciphers cast-128 gost rijndael-128 twofish arcfour cast-256 loki97 rijndael-192 saferplus wake blowfish-compat des rijndael-256 serpent xtea blowfish enigma rc2 tripledes Supported modes cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb stream Directive Local Value Master Value mcrypt.algorithms_dir no value no value mcrypt.modes_dir no value no value mhash MHASH support Enabled MHASH API Version Emulated Support ming Ming SWF output library enabled Version 0.4.3 mysql MySQL Support enabled Active Persistent Links 0 Active Links 0 Client API version 5.1.41 Directive Local Value Master Value mysql.allow_local_infile On On mysql.allow_persistent On On mysql.connect_timeout 60 60 mysql.default_host no value no value mysql.default_password no value no value mysql.default_port 3306 3306 mysql.default_socket MySQL MySQL mysql.default_user no value no value mysql.max_links Unlimited Unlimited mysql.max_persistent Unlimited Unlimited mysql.trace_mode Off Off mysqli MysqlI Support enabled Client API library version 5.1.41 Active Persistent Links 0 Inactive Persistent Links 0 Active Links 0 Client API header version 5.1.41 MYSQLI_SOCKET MySQL Directive Local Value Master Value mysqli.allow_local_infile On On mysqli.allow_persistent On On mysqli.default_host no value no value mysqli.default_port 3306 3306 mysqli.default_pw no value no value mysqli.default_socket MySQL MySQL mysqli.default_user no value no value mysqli.max_links Unlimited Unlimited mysqli.max_persistent Unlimited Unlimited mysqli.reconnect Off Off mysqlnd mysqlnd enabled Version mysqlnd 5.0.5-dev - 081106 - $Revision: 289630 $ Command buffer size 4096 Read buffer size 32768 Read timeout 31536000 Collecting statistics Yes Collecting memory statistics No Client statistics bytes_sent 0 bytes_received 0 packets_sent 0 packets_received 0 protocol_overhead_in 0 protocol_overhead_out 0 bytes_received_ok_packet 0 bytes_received_eof_packet 0 bytes_received_rset_header_packet 0 bytes_received_rset_field_meta_packet 0 bytes_received_rset_row_packet 0 bytes_received_prepare_response_packet 0 bytes_received_change_user_packet 0 packets_sent_command 0 packets_received_ok 0 packets_received_eof 0 packets_received_rset_header 0 packets_received_rset_field_meta 0 packets_received_rset_row 0 packets_received_prepare_response 0 packets_received_change_user 0 result_set_queries 0 non_result_set_queries 0 no_index_used 0 bad_index_used 0 slow_queries 0 buffered_sets 0 unbuffered_sets 0 ps_buffered_sets 0 ps_unbuffered_sets 0 flushed_normal_sets 0 flushed_ps_sets 0 ps_prepared_never_executed 0 ps_prepared_once_executed 0 rows_fetched_from_server_normal 0 rows_fetched_from_server_ps 0 rows_buffered_from_client_normal 0 rows_buffered_from_client_ps 0 rows_fetched_from_client_normal_buffered 0 rows_fetched_from_client_normal_unbuffered 0 rows_fetched_from_client_ps_buffered 0 rows_fetched_from_client_ps_unbuffered 0 rows_fetched_from_client_ps_cursor 0 rows_skipped_normal 0 rows_skipped_ps 0 copy_on_write_saved 0 copy_on_write_performed 0 command_buffer_too_small 0 connect_success 0 connect_failure 0 connection_reused 0 reconnect 0 pconnect_success 0 active_connections 0 active_persistent_connections 0 explicit_close 0 implicit_close 0 disconnect_close 0 in_middle_of_command_close 0 explicit_free_result 0 implicit_free_result 0 explicit_stmt_close 0 implicit_stmt_close 0 mem_emalloc_count 0 mem_emalloc_ammount 0 mem_ecalloc_count 0 mem_ecalloc_ammount 0 mem_erealloc_count 0 mem_erealloc_ammount 0 mem_efree_count 0 mem_malloc_count 0 mem_malloc_ammount 0 mem_calloc_count 0 mem_calloc_ammount 0 mem_realloc_count 0 mem_realloc_ammount 0 mem_free_count 0 proto_text_fetched_null 0 proto_text_fetched_bit 0 proto_text_fetched_tinyint 0 proto_text_fetched_short 0 proto_text_fetched_int24 0 proto_text_fetched_int 0 proto_text_fetched_bigint 0 proto_text_fetched_decimal 0 proto_text_fetched_float 0 proto_text_fetched_double 0 proto_text_fetched_date 0 proto_text_fetched_year 0 proto_text_fetched_time 0 proto_text_fetched_datetime 0 proto_text_fetched_timestamp 0 proto_text_fetched_string 0 proto_text_fetched_blob 0 proto_text_fetched_enum 0 proto_text_fetched_set 0 proto_text_fetched_geometry 0 proto_text_fetched_other 0 proto_binary_fetched_null 0 proto_binary_fetched_bit 0 proto_binary_fetched_tinyint 0 proto_binary_fetched_short 0 proto_binary_fetched_int24 0 proto_binary_fetched_int 0 proto_binary_fetched_bigint 0 proto_binary_fetched_decimal 0 proto_binary_fetched_float 0 proto_binary_fetched_double 0 proto_binary_fetched_date 0 proto_binary_fetched_year 0 proto_binary_fetched_time 0 proto_binary_fetched_datetime 0 proto_binary_fetched_timestamp 0 proto_binary_fetched_string 0 proto_binary_fetched_blob 0 proto_binary_fetched_enum 0 proto_binary_fetched_set 0 proto_binary_fetched_geometry 0 proto_binary_fetched_other 0 init_command_executed_count 0 init_command_failed_count 0 odbc ODBC Support enabled Active Persistent Links 0 Active Links 0 ODBC library Win32 Directive Local Value Master Value odbc.allow_persistent On On odbc.check_persistent On On odbc.default_cursortype Static cursor Static cursor odbc.default_db no value no value odbc.default_pw no value no value odbc.default_user no value no value odbc.defaultbinmode return as is return as is odbc.defaultlrl return up to 4096 bytes return up to 4096 bytes odbc.max_links Unlimited Unlimited odbc.max_persistent Unlimited Unlimited openssl OpenSSL support enabled OpenSSL Library Version OpenSSL 0.9.8l 5 Nov 2009 OpenSSL Header Version OpenSSL 0.9.8l 5 Nov 2009 pcre PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) Support enabled PCRE Library Version 8.00 2009-10-19 Directive Local Value Master Value pcre.backtrack_limit 100000 100000 pcre.recursion_limit 100000 100000 pdf PDF Support enabled PDFlib GmbH Version 7.0.4p4 PECL Version 2.1.6 Revision $Revision: 277110 $ PDO PDO support enabled PDO drivers mysql, odbc, sqlite, sqlite2 pdo_mysql PDO Driver for MySQL enabled Client API version 5.1.41 PDO_ODBC PDO Driver for ODBC (Win32) enabled ODBC Connection Pooling Enabled, strict matching pdo_sqlite PDO Driver for SQLite 3.x enabled SQLite Library 3.6.20 Phar Phar: PHP Archive support enabled Phar EXT version 2.0.1 Phar API version 1.1.1 CVS revision $Revision: 286338 $ Phar-based phar archives enabled Tar-based phar archives enabled ZIP-based phar archives enabled gzip compression enabled bzip2 compression enabled Native OpenSSL support enabled Phar based on pear/PHP_Archive, original concept by Davey Shafik. Phar fully realized by Gregory Beaver and Marcus Boerger. Portions of tar implementation Copyright (c) 2003-2009 Tim Kientzle. Directive Local Value Master Value phar.cache_list no value no value phar.readonly On On phar.require_hash On On Reflection Reflection enabled Version $Revision: 287991 $ session Session Support enabled Registered save handlers files user sqlite Registered serializer handlers php php_binary wddx Directive Local Value Master Value session.auto_start Off Off session.bug_compat_42 On On session.bug_compat_warn On On session.cache_expire 180 180 session.cache_limiter nocache nocache session.cookie_domain no value no value session.cookie_httponly Off Off session.cookie_lifetime 0 0 session.cookie_path / / session.cookie_secure Off Off session.entropy_file no value no value session.entropy_length 0 0 session.gc_divisor 100 100 session.gc_maxlifetime 1440 1440 session.gc_probability 1 1 session.hash_bits_per_character 5 5 session.hash_function 0 0 session.name PHPSESSID PHPSESSID session.referer_check no value no value session.save_handler files files session.save_path C:\xampp\tmp C:\xampp\tmp session.serialize_handler php php session.use_cookies On On session.use_only_cookies Off Off session.use_trans_sid 0 0 SimpleXML Simplexml support enabled Revision $Revision: 281953 $ Schema support enabled soap Soap Client enabled Soap Server enabled Directive Local Value Master Value soap.wsdl_cache 1 1 soap.wsdl_cache_dir /tmp /tmp soap.wsdl_cache_enabled 1 1 soap.wsdl_cache_limit 5 5 soap.wsdl_cache_ttl 86400 86400 sockets Sockets Support enabled SPL SPL support enabled Interfaces Countable, OuterIterator, RecursiveIterator, SeekableIterator, SplObserver, SplSubject Classes AppendIterator, ArrayIterator, ArrayObject, BadFunctionCallException, BadMethodCallException, CachingIterator, DirectoryIterator, DomainException, EmptyIterator, FilesystemIterator, FilterIterator, GlobIterator, InfiniteIterator, InvalidArgumentException, IteratorIterator, LengthException, LimitIterator, LogicException, MultipleIterator, NoRewindIterator, OutOfBoundsException, OutOfRangeException, OverflowException, ParentIterator, RangeException, RecursiveArrayIterator, RecursiveCachingIterator, RecursiveDirectoryIterator, RecursiveFilterIterator, RecursiveIteratorIterator, RecursiveRegexIterator, RecursiveTreeIterator, RegexIterator, RuntimeException, SplDoublyLinkedList, SplFileInfo, SplFileObject, SplFixedArray, SplHeap, SplMinHeap, SplMaxHeap, SplObjectStorage, SplPriorityQueue, SplQueue, SplStack, SplTempFileObject, UnderflowException, UnexpectedValueException SQLite SQLite support enabled PECL Module version 2.0-dev $Id: sqlite.c 289598 2009-10-12 22:37:52Z pajoye $ SQLite Library 2.8.17 SQLite Encoding iso8859 Directive Local Value Master Value sqlite.assoc_case 0 0 sqlite3 SQLite3 support enabled SQLite3 module version 0.7-dev SQLite Library 3.6.20 Directive Local Value Master Value sqlite3.extension_dir no value no value standard Dynamic Library Support enabled Internal Sendmail Support for Windows enabled Directive Local Value Master Value assert.active 1 1 assert.bail 0 0 assert.callback no value no value assert.quiet_eval 0 0 assert.warning 1 1 auto_detect_line_endings 0 0 default_socket_timeout 60 60 safe_mode_allowed_env_vars PHP_ PHP_ safe_mode_protected_env_vars LD_LIBRARY_PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH url_rewriter.tags a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=,fieldset= a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=,fieldset= user_agent no value no value tokenizer Tokenizer Support enabled wddx WDDX Support enabled WDDX Session Serializer enabled xml XML Support active XML Namespace Support active libxml2 Version 2.7.6 xmlreader XMLReader enabled xmlrpc core library version xmlrpc-epi v. 0.54 php extension version 0.51 author Dan Libby homepage http://xmlrpc-epi.sourceforge.net open sourced by Epinions.com xmlwriter XMLWriter enabled xsl XSL enabled libxslt Version 1.1.26 libxslt compiled against libxml Version 2.7.6 EXSLT enabled libexslt Version 1.1.26 zip Zip enabled Extension Version $Id: php_zip.c 276389 2009-02-24 23:55:14Z iliaa $ Zip version 1.9.1 Libzip version 0.9.0 zlib ZLib Support enabled Stream Wrapper support compress.zlib:// Stream Filter support zlib.inflate, zlib.deflate Compiled Version 1.2.3 Linked Version 1.2.3 Directive Local Value Master Value zlib.output_compression Off Off zlib.output_compression_level -1 -1 zlib.output_handler no value no value Additional Modules Module Name Environment Variable Value no value ::=::\ no value C:=C:\xampp ALLUSERSPROFILE C:\Documents and Settings\All Users APPDATA C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew\Application Data CHROME_RESTART Google Chrome|Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed. Restart now?|LEFT_TO_RIGHT CHROME_VERSION 5.0.342.8 CLASSPATH .;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\QTJava.zip CommonProgramFiles C:\Program Files\Common Files COMPUTERNAME ANDREW_LAPTOP ComSpec C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe FP_NO_HOST_CHECK NO HOMEDRIVE C: HOMEPATH \Documents and Settings\Andrew LOGONSERVER \\ANDREW_LAPTOP NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2 OS Windows_NT PATH C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\;c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\DivX Shared\;C:\Program Files\WiTopia.Net\bin PATHEXT .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE x86 PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 10, GenuineIntel PROCESSOR_LEVEL 6 PROCESSOR_REVISION 0f0a ProgramFiles C:\Program Files PROMPT $P$G QTJAVA C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\QTJava.zip SESSIONNAME Console sfxcmd "C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew\My Documents\Downloads\xampp-win32-1.7.3.exe" sfxname C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew\My Documents\Downloads\xampp-win32-1.7.3.exe SystemDrive C: SystemRoot C:\WINDOWS TEMP C:\DOCUME~1\Andrew\LOCALS~1\Temp TMP C:\DOCUME~1\Andrew\LOCALS~1\Temp USERDOMAIN ANDREW_LAPTOP USERNAME Andrew USERPROFILE C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew VS100COMNTOOLS C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Tools\ windir C:\WINDOWS AP_PARENT_PID 2216 PHP Variables Variable Value _SERVER["MIBDIRS"] C:/xampp/php/extras/mibs _SERVER["MYSQL_HOME"] C:\xampp\mysql\bin _SERVER["OPENSSL_CONF"] C:/xampp/apache/bin/openssl.cnf _SERVER["PHP_PEAR_SYSCONF_DIR"] C:\xampp\php _SERVER["PHPRC"] C:\xampp\php _SERVER["TMP"] C:\xampp\tmp _SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] localhost _SERVER["HTTP_CONNECTION"] keep-alive _SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.8 Safari/533.2 _SERVER["HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL"] max-age=0 _SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"] application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 _SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING"] gzip,deflate,sdch _SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"] en-US,en;q=0.8 _SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET"] ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 _SERVER["PATH"] C:\Documents and Settings\Andrew\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\;c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\DivX Shared\;C:\Program Files\WiTopia.Net\bin _SERVER["SystemRoot"] C:\WINDOWS _SERVER["COMSPEC"] C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe _SERVER["PATHEXT"] .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH _SERVER["WINDIR"] C:\WINDOWS _SERVER["SERVER_SIGNATURE"] <address>Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1 Server at localhost Port 80</address> _SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"] Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1 _SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] localhost _SERVER["SERVER_ADDR"] 127.0.0.1 _SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] 80 _SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] 127.0.0.1 _SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] C:/xampp/htdocs _SERVER["SERVER_ADMIN"] postmaster@localhost _SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"] C:/xampp/htdocs/test.php _SERVER["REMOTE_PORT"] 3275 _SERVER["GATEWAY_INTERFACE"] CGI/1.1 _SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] HTTP/1.1 _SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] GET _SERVER["QUERY_STRING"] no value _SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] /test.php _SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"] /test.php _SERVER["PHP_SELF"] /test.php _SERVER["REQUEST_TIME"] 1270600868 _SERVER["argv"] Array ( ) _SERVER["argc"] 0 PHP License This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the PHP License as published by the PHP Group and included in the distribution in the file: LICENSE This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. If you did not receive a copy of the PHP license, or have any questions about PHP licensing, please contact [email protected].

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• MySQL 5.5 - Lost connection to MySQL server during query

  - by bully

  I have an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server running at a german hoster (virtualized system). # uname -a Linux ... 3.2.0-27-generic #43-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 6 14:25:57 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux I want to migrate a Web CMS system, called Contao. It's not my first migration, but my first migration having connection issues with mysql. Migration went successfully, I have the same Contao version running (it's more or less just copy / paste). For the database behind, I did: apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin I set a root password and added a user for the CMS which has enough rights on its own database (and only its database) for doing the stuff it has to do. Data import via phpmyadmin worked just fine. I can access the backend of the CMS (which needs to deal with the database already). If I try to access the frontend now, I get the following error: Fatal error: Uncaught exception Exception with message Query error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query (<query statement here, nothing special, just a select>) thrown in /var/www/system/libraries/Database.php on line 686 (Keep in mind: I can access mysql with phpmyadmin and through the backend, working like a charme, it's just the frontend call causing errors). If I spam F5 in my browser I can sometimes even kill the mysql deamon. If I run # mysqld --log-warnings=2 I get this: ... 120921 7:57:31 [Note] mysqld: ready for connections. Version: '5.5.24-0ubuntu0.12.04.1' socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' port: 3306 (Ubuntu) 05:57:37 UTC - mysqld got signal 4 ; This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built, or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware. We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong and this may fail. key_buffer_size=16777216 read_buffer_size=131072 max_used_connections=1 max_threads=151 thread_count=1 connection_count=1 It is possible that mysqld could use up to key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 346679 K bytes of memory Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation. Thread pointer: 0x7f1485db3b20 Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went terribly wrong... stack_bottom = 7f1480041e60 thread_stack 0x30000 mysqld(my_print_stacktrace+0x29)[0x7f1483b96459] mysqld(handle_fatal_signal+0x483)[0x7f1483a5c1d3] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0(+0xfcb0)[0x7f1482797cb0] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6(+0x42e11)[0x7f14821cae11] mysqld(_ZN10SQL_SELECT17test_quick_selectEP3THD6BitmapILj64EEyyb+0x1368)[0x7f1483b26cb8] mysqld(+0x33116a)[0x7f148397916a] mysqld(_ZN4JOIN8optimizeEv+0x558)[0x7f148397d3e8] mysqld(_Z12mysql_selectP3THDPPP4ItemP10TABLE_LISTjR4ListIS1_ES2_jP8st_orderSB_S2_SB_yP13select_resultP18st_select_lex_unitP13st_select_lex+0xdd)[0x7f148397fd7d] mysqld(_Z13handle_selectP3THDP3LEXP13select_resultm+0x17c)[0x7f1483985d2c] mysqld(+0x2f4524)[0x7f148393c524] mysqld(_Z21mysql_execute_commandP3THD+0x293e)[0x7f14839451de] mysqld(_Z11mysql_parseP3THDPcjP12Parser_state+0x10f)[0x7f1483948bef] mysqld(_Z16dispatch_command19enum_server_commandP3THDPcj+0x1365)[0x7f148394a025] mysqld(_Z24do_handle_one_connectionP3THD+0x1bd)[0x7f14839ec7cd] mysqld(handle_one_connection+0x50)[0x7f14839ec830] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0(+0x7e9a)[0x7f148278fe9a] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(clone+0x6d)[0x7f1481eba4bd] Trying to get some variables. Some pointers may be invalid and cause the dump to abort. Query (7f1464004b60): is an invalid pointer Connection ID (thread ID): 1 Status: NOT_KILLED From /var/log/syslog: Sep 21 07:17:01 s16477249 CRON[23855]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Sep 21 07:18:51 s16477249 kernel: [231923.349159] type=1400 audit(1348204731.333:70): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/sbin/mysqld" pid=23946 comm="apparmor_parser" Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[23990]: Upgrading MySQL tables if necessary. Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[23993]: /usr/bin/mysql_upgrade: the '--basedir' option is always ignored Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[23993]: Looking for 'mysql' as: /usr/bin/mysql Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[23993]: Looking for 'mysqlcheck' as: /usr/bin/mysqlcheck Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[23993]: This installation of MySQL is already upgraded to 5.5.24, use --force if you still need to run mysql_upgrade Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[24004]: Checking for insecure root accounts. Sep 21 07:18:53 s16477249 /etc/mysql/debian-start[24009]: Triggering myisam-recover for all MyISAM tables I'm using MyISAM tables all over, nothing with InnoDB there. Starting / stopping mysql is done via sudo service mysql start sudo service mysql stop After using google a little bit, I experimented a little bit with timeouts, correct socket path in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file, but nothing helped. There are some old (from 2008) Gentoo bugs, where re-compiling just solved the problem. I already re-installed mysql via: sudo apt-get remove mysql-server mysql-common sudo apt-get autoremove sudo apt-get install mysql-server without any results. This is the first time I'm running into this problem, and I'm not very experienced with this kind of mysql 'administration'. So mainly, I want to know if anyone of you could help me out please :) Is it a mysql bug? Is something broken in the Ubuntu repositories? Is this one of those misterious 'use-tcp-connection-instead-of-socket-stuff-because-there-are-problems-on-virtualized-machines-with-sockets'-problem? Or am I completly on the wrong way and I just miss-configured something? Remember, phpmyadmin and access to the backend (which uses the database, too) is just fine. Maybe something with Apache? What can I do? Any help is appreciated, so thanks in advance :)

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• Cloud Based Load Testing Using TF Service &amp; VS 2013

  - by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/30/cloud-based-load-testing-using-tf-service-amp-vs-2013.aspx One of the new features announced as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview is ‘Cloud Based Load Testing’. In this blog post I’ll walk you through, What is Cloud Based Load Testing? How have I been using this feature? – Success story! Where can you find more resources on this feature? What is Cloud Based Load Testing? It goes without saying that performance testing your application not only gives you the confidence that the application will work under heavy levels of stress but also gives you the ability to test how scalable the architecture of your application is. It is important to know how much is too much for your application! Working with various clients in the industry I have realized that the biggest barriers in Load Testing & Performance Testing adoption are, High infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing Time taken to procure & set up the test infrastructure Finding use for this infrastructure investment after completion of testing Is cloud the answer? 100% Visual Studio Compatible Scalable and Realistic Start testing in < 2 minutes Intuitive Pay only for what you need Use existing on premise tests on cloud There are a lot of vendors out there offering Cloud Based Load Testing, to name a few, Load Storm Soasta Blaze Meter Blitz And others… The question you may want to ask is, why should you go with Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test offering. If you are a Microsoft shop or already have investments in Microsoft technologies, you’ll see great benefit in the natural integration this offers with existing Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Windows Azure. For example, your existing Web tests authored in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 will run on the cloud without requiring any modifications what so ever. Microsoft’s cloud test rig also supports API based testing, for example, if you are building a WPF application which consumes WCF services, you can write unit tests to invoke the WCF service, these tests can be run on the cloud test rig and loaded with ‘N’ concurrent users for performance testing. If you have your assets already hosted in the Azure and possibly in the same data centre as the Cloud test rig, your Azure app will not incur a usage cost because of the generated traffic since the traffic is coming from the same data centre. The licensing or pricing information on Microsoft’s cloud based Load test service is yet to be announced, but I would expect this to be priced attractively to match the market competition.   The only additional configuration required for running load tests on Microsoft Cloud based Load Tests service is to select the Test run location as Run tests using Visual Studio Team Foundation Service, How have I been using Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test Service? I have been part of the Microsoft Cloud Based Load Test Service advisory council for the last 7 months. This gave the opportunity to see the product shape up from concept to working solution. I was also the first person outside of Microsoft to try this offering out. This gave me the opportunity to test real world application at various clients using the Microsoft Load Test Service and provide real world feedback to the Microsoft product team. One of the most recent systems I tested using the Load Test Service has been an insurance quote generation engine. This insurance quote generation engine is,   hosted in Windows Azure expected to get quote requests from across the globe expected to handle 5 Million quote requests in a day (not clear how this load will be distributed across the day) There was no way, I could simulate such kind of load from on premise without standing up additional hardware. But Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test service allowed me to test my key performance testing scenarios, i.e. Simulate expected Load, Endurance Testing, Threshold Testing and Testing for Latency. Simulating expected load: approach to devising a load pattern My approach to devising a load test pattern has been to run the test scenario with 1 user to figure out the response time. Then work out how many users are required to reach the target load. So, for example, to invoke 1 quote from the quote engine software takes 0.5 seconds. Now if you do the math,   1 quote request by 1 user = 0.5 seconds   quotes generated by 1 user in 24 hour = 1 * (((2 * 60) * 60) * 24) = 172,800   quotes generated by 30 users in 24 hours = 172,800 * 30 =  5,184,000 This was a very simple example, if your application requires more concurrent users to test scenario’s such as caching, etc then you can devise your own load pattern, some examples of load test patterns can be found here.  Endurance Testing To test for endurance, I loaded the quote generation engine with an expected fixed user load and ran the test for very long duration such as over 48 hours and observed the affect of the long running test on the Azure infrastructure. Currently Microsoft Load Test service does not support metrics from the machine under test. I used Azure diagnostics to begin with, but later started using Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to capture the metrics of the machine under test. Threshold Testing To figure out how much user load the application could cope with before falling on its belly, I opted to step load the quote generation engine by incrementing user load with different variations of incremental user load per minute till the application crashed out and forced an IIS reset. Testing for Latency Currently the Microsoft Load Test service does not support generating geographically distributed load, I however, deployed the insurance quote generation engine in different Azure data centres and ran the same set of performance tests to measure for latency. Because I could compare load test results from different runs by exporting the results to excel (this feature is provided out of the box right from Visual Studio 2010) I could see the different in response times. More resources on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test Service A few important links to get you started, Download Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview Getting started guide for load testing using Team Foundation Service Troubleshooting guide for FAQs and known issues Team Foundation Service forum for questions and support Detailed demo and presentation (link to Tech-Ed session recording) Detailed demo and presentation (link to Build session recording) There a few limits on the usage of Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service that you can read about here. If you have any feedback on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service, feel free to share it with the product team via the Visual Studio User Voice forum. I hope you found this useful. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010New ProjectsAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 is a web application developed in ASP.NET 3.5 with Entity Framework, Coolite UI web controls and MySQL database that helps to catalog and ...AssemblyInfo Editor: AssemblyInfo Editor is a small Visual Studio 2010 extension I developed for my personal use mainly for automatically incrementing AssemblyVersion a...CommLine: It's a Command Line Interpreter. At the moment, it's a beta version, so I wait for developers that wanna help meFlowgraph Viewer: The flowgraph viewer enables users to view, build and share flowgraphs for the Crysis-franchise. It's built on Silverlight4, using MEF and Mvvmlight.Hash Calculator: WPF Windows 7 program to compute SHA1 & MD5 hash functions.MediaRSS library for .NET: This is a small set of libraries that allow you to create, read, and write MediaRSS files. By leveraging the syndication model object in .NET this...MEF Visualizer Tool: Helps to see what is going on inside the CompositionContainerone framework for developing asp.net project more elegent、flexible、and testable: if you are familiar with jsf、cdi、scoped javabean and work under asp.net, you may want to support aop and max flexibility and testability , all of ...Picasa Manager: A Silverlight Out Of Browser Application that Helps you manage your PicasaWeb albums in the easyest way possible.SharePhone: Windows Phone 7 library for connecting to SharePoint 2007/2010. Lets you work with SPWeb, SPList, reading/writing strong typed list items, user ...Silverlight Resource Extension: Silverlight Resource Extension. Extension silverlight project for use ResX resources and localize satellite dll.Silverlight Streamgraph: Streamgraph component for SilverlightTFTP Server: Managed TFTP server implementation, written in C#. Supports: - IPv4 and IPv6 - correct retry behavior. - TFTP options: block size, transfer size, a...Virtual UserGroup Video Helpers: This is a project that holds all the tools used by the C4MVC Virtual Usergroup. Tools written in C# and Powershell to automate, Live Meeting, Expr...xBlog: xBlog is a project to build a simple and extensible Blog Engine based on xml and linqXmlCodeEditor: XmlCodeEditor is a Silverlight 4 control based on RichTextControl that creates coloring and intellisense similar to the one in Visual Studio for ed...Zinc Launcher: Zinc Launcher is a simple Windows Media Center plugin that launches Zinc and attempts to manage the windows as seamlessly as possible. In addition ...New ReleasesAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 - v1.0: Arquivos para implantação do sistema Acervo2 Aplicação web Web service Smart ClientAssemblyInfo Editor: Beta 1: Initial release of Assembly Info Editor. At this point, it is feature-complete and is relatively stable. There are undoubtedly some bugs to work o...Box2D.XNA: Box2D.XNA r70 Source Code and Solution: This version is synced to changeset 44697. This represents our official port of the C Box2D up to r70 on the Google Code project. With this versi...Boxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Will now stop Media Center playback before launching BoxeeBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Boxee and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar a...CommLine: Beta Version 0.1: First Beta Of the AppCommLine: Source v0.1 Beta: Source Code C of 0.1 beta versionEncrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.2: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6.2), with general changes and improved randomness for the key generator. It has an installer that...Hash Calculator: HashCalculator: HashCalculator 1.0Hash Calculator: HashCalculator Source code: HashCalculator 1.0Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Hulu and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar ar...Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Hulu Launcher will now stop playback in Media Center before launching Hulu Desktop.Innovative Games: 4.3 - Sprite Effects: Source code download for chapter 4.3 - "Sprite Effects"MediaRSS library for .NET: 0.1: Alpha release. Majority of MediaRSS spec is supported. A small set of unit test / sample code are included. A lightly tested CustomFormatter object...MEF Visualizer Tool: MEF Visualizer Tool 0.1: Help to see what going on in side CompositionContainer Container = new CompositionContainer( new AggregateCatalog( ...Ncqrs Framework - A CQRS framework for .NET: Ncqrs with sample application: This is the first release of the Ncqrs Framework. It contains the Ncqrs source code and a runnable sample application. All the code in this release...Rubik Cube's 3D Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution: Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution: This project is a realization of Silverlight 3.0 Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution. The Solution is available for 3x3x3 cube, other features are...Scrabler: scrabler release 0.6.2.5: fixed a bug that werent executed some scriptsSharePhone: SharePhone: Initial release with basic functionality: Open SharePoint webs and subwebs Retrieve lists on SPWeb objects Read metadata/properties on lists ...SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.1: Fixed a bug that prevented saving list items to SharePointSharePoint Labs: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the first best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab ...Silverlight Resource Extension: ResourceExtension (alpha): Alpha version is not stable. Only for review.Silverlight Streamgraph: Port from processing.org: A port from the processing.org streamgraph. Code-heavy with very little XAML involved at this point.Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.1: What’s New! Added Menu Options 2010 Schedule Access 2007 Runtime There are still many uncompleted items so this is still a conceptual release....Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.2: Fixed the Schedule Import. Need needs to be tested. Click import button and make sure you can get the 2010 Schedule from the internet.thinktecture Starter STS (Community Edition): StarterSTS v1.0 RTW: Version 1.0 RTWTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0 - Now has sliding and absolute expiration on cache entries. Functional Alpha Release - But do not use in productionTwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: TwitterVB-2.3.1: This is mostly a minor release that adds br.st URL shortening to the menu (API key from http://br.st required)Virtu: Virtu 0.8.1: Source Requirements.NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1 Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1, or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition with Service Pa...Visual Studio DSite: Advanced C++ Calculator: An advanced visual c 2008 calculator that can do all your basic operations, plus some advanced mathematical functions. Source Code Only.xnaWebcam: xnaWebcam 0.3: xnaWebcam 0.3 Version 0.3: -ResolutionSet: 400x300 (Default), 800x600, 1024x720 -Settings Window got Icon -Settings Window Changes -DevConsole.cs ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrFacebook Developer ToolkitjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesLINQ to TwitterBlogEngine.NETN2 CMSBase Class LibrariesFarseer Physics Engine

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• Azure &ndash; Part 6 &ndash; Blob Storage Service

  - by Shaun

  When migrate your application onto the Azure one of the biggest concern would be the external files. In the original way we understood and ensure which machine and folder our application (website or web service) is located in. So that we can use the MapPath or some other methods to read and write the external files for example the images, text files or the xml files, etc. But things have been changed when we deploy them on Azure. Azure is not a server, or a single machine, it’s a set of virtual server machine running under the Azure OS. And even worse, your application might be moved between thses machines. So it’s impossible to read or write the external files on Azure. In order to resolve this issue the Windows Azure provides another storage serviec – Blob, for us. Different to the table service, the blob serivce is to be used to store text and binary data rather than the structured data. It provides two types of blobs: Block Blobs and Page Blobs. Block Blobs are optimized for streaming. They are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID and each block can be a maximum of 4 MB in size. Page Blobs are are optimized for random read/write operations and provide the ability to write to a range of bytes in a blob. They are a collection of pages. The maximum size for a page blob is 1 TB.   In the managed library the Azure SDK allows us to communicate with the blobs through these classes CloudBlobClient, CloudBlobContainer, CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob. Similar with the table service managed library, the CloudBlobClient allows us to reach the blob service by passing our storage account information and also responsible for creating the blob container is not exist. Then from the CloudBlobContainer we can save or load the block blobs and page blobs into the CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob classes.   Let’s improve our exmaple in the previous posts – add a service method allows the user to upload the logo image. In the server side I created a method name UploadLogo with 2 parameters: email and image. Then I created the storage account from the config file. I also add the validation to ensure that the email passed in is valid. 1: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 2: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 3:  4: // validation 5: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 6: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 7: .ToList() 8: .Count; 9: if (accountNumber <= 0) 10: { 11: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Cannot find the account with the email {0}.", email)); 12: } Then there are three steps for saving the image into the blob service. First alike the table service I created the container with a unique name and create it if it’s not exist. 1: // create the blob container for account logos if not exist 2: CloudBlobClient blobStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 3: CloudBlobContainer container = blobStorage.GetContainerReference("account-logo"); 4: container.CreateIfNotExist(); Then, since in this example I will just send the blob access URL back to the client so I need to open the read permission on that container. 1: // configure blob container for public access 2: BlobContainerPermissions permissions = container.GetPermissions(); 3: permissions.PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Container; 4: container.SetPermissions(permissions); And at the end I combine the blob resource name from the input file name and Guid, and then save it to the block blob by using the UploadByteArray method. Finally I returned the URL of this blob back to the client side. 1: // save the blob into the blob service 2: string uniqueBlobName = string.Format("{0}_{1}.jpg", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString()); 3: CloudBlockBlob blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(uniqueBlobName); 4: blob.UploadByteArray(image); 5:  6: return blob.Uri.ToString(); Let’s update a bit on the client side application and see the result. Here I just use my simple console application to let the user input the email and the file name of the image. If it’s OK it will show the URL of the blob on the server side so that we can see it through the web browser. Then we can see the logo I’ve just uploaded through the URL here. You may notice that the blob URL was based on the container name and the blob unique name. In the document of the Azure SDK there’s a page for the rule of naming them, but I think the simple rule would be – they must be valid as an URL address. So that you cannot name the container with dot or slash as it will break the ADO.Data Service routing rule. For exmaple if you named the blob container as Account.Logo then it will throw an exception says 400 Bad Request.   Summary In this short entity I covered the simple usage of the blob service to save the images onto Azure. Since the Azure platform does not support the file system we have to migrate our code for reading/writing files to the blob service before deploy it to Azure. In order to reducing this effort Microsoft provided a new approch named Drive, which allows us read and write the NTFS files just likes what we did before. It’s built up on the blob serivce but more properly for files accessing. I will discuss more about it in the next post.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• How to deploy jBPM 3.2.2 console on Oracle 10g iAS

  - by Balint Pato

  Hi! Does anybody have experience regarding deployment of the jBPM Administration Console on Oracle 10g iAS? I successfully deployed it using an .ear, security mappings working, I can even login to the console, Hibernate finds the JNDI datasource but it cannot find the TransactionManager. I see no log, only the exception thrown in the jsf page: Can anybody help me? The hibernate.cfg.xml file now looks like this: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN" "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd"> <hibernate-configuration> <session-factory> <!-- hibernate dialect --> <property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle9Dialect</property> <!-- JDBC connection properties (begin) === <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class">org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</property> <property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:hsqldb:mem:jbpm</property> <property name="hibernate.connection.username">sa</property> <property name="hibernate.connection.password"></property> ==== JDBC connection properties (end) --> <property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class">org.hibernate.cache.HashtableCacheProvider</property> <!-- DataSource properties (begin) --> <property name="hibernate.connection.datasource">java:/JbpmDS</property> <!-- DataSource properties (end) --> <!-- JTA transaction properties (begin) --> <property name="hibernate.transaction.factory_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JTATransactionFactory</property> <!-- <property name="hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JBossTransactionManagerLookup</property>--> <!-- JTA transaction properties (end) --> <!-- CMT transaction properties (begin) === <property name="hibernate.transaction.factory_class">org.hibernate.transaction.CMTTransactionFactory</property> <property name="hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JBossTransactionManagerLookup</property> ==== CMT transaction properties (end) --> <!-- logging properties (begin) --> <property name="hibernate.show_sql">true</property> <property name="hibernate.format_sql">true</property> <property name="hibernate.use_sql_comments">true</property> <--==== logging properties (end) --> <!-- ############################################ --> <!-- # mapping files with external dependencies # --> <!-- ############################################ --> <!-- following mapping file has a dependendy on --> <!-- 'bsh-{version}.jar'. --> <!-- uncomment this if you don't have bsh on your --> <!-- classpath. you won't be able to use the --> <!-- script element in process definition files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/action/Script.hbm.xml"/> <!-- following mapping files have a dependendy on --> <!-- 'jbpm-identity.jar', mapping files --> <!-- of the pluggable jbpm identity component. --> <!-- Uncomment the following 3 lines if you --> <!-- want to use the jBPM identity mgmgt --> <!-- component. --> <!-- identity mappings (begin) --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/identity/User.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/identity/Group.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/identity/Membership.hbm.xml"/> <!-- identity mappings (end) --> <!-- following mapping files have a dependendy on --> <!-- the JCR API --> <!-- jcr mappings (begin) === <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/JcrNodeInstance.hbm.xml"/> ==== jcr mappings (end) --> <!-- ###################### --> <!-- # jbpm mapping files # --> <!-- ###################### --> <!-- hql queries and type defs --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/db/hibernate.queries.hbm.xml" /> <!-- graph.action mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/action/MailAction.hbm.xml"/> <!-- graph.def mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/ProcessDefinition.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/Node.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/Transition.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/Event.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/Action.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/SuperState.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/def/ExceptionHandler.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/instantiation/Delegation.hbm.xml"/> <!-- graph.node mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/StartState.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/EndState.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/ProcessState.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/Decision.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/Fork.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/Join.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/MailNode.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/State.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/node/TaskNode.hbm.xml"/> <!-- context.def mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/def/ContextDefinition.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/def/VariableAccess.hbm.xml"/> <!-- taskmgmt.def mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/def/TaskMgmtDefinition.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/def/Swimlane.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/def/Task.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/def/TaskController.hbm.xml"/> <!-- module.def mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/module/def/ModuleDefinition.hbm.xml"/> <!-- bytes mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/bytes/ByteArray.hbm.xml"/> <!-- file.def mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/file/def/FileDefinition.hbm.xml"/> <!-- scheduler.def mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/scheduler/def/CreateTimerAction.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/scheduler/def/CancelTimerAction.hbm.xml"/> <!-- graph.exe mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/exe/Comment.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/exe/ProcessInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/exe/Token.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/exe/RuntimeAction.hbm.xml"/> <!-- module.exe mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/module/exe/ModuleInstance.hbm.xml"/> <!-- context.exe mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/ContextInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/TokenVariableMap.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/VariableInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/ByteArrayInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/DateInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/DoubleInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/HibernateLongInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/HibernateStringInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/LongInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/NullInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/exe/variableinstance/StringInstance.hbm.xml"/> <!-- job mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/job/Job.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/job/Timer.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/job/ExecuteNodeJob.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/job/ExecuteActionJob.hbm.xml"/> <!-- taskmgmt.exe mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/exe/TaskMgmtInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/exe/TaskInstance.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/exe/PooledActor.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/exe/SwimlaneInstance.hbm.xml"/> <!-- logging mapping files --> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/logging/log/ProcessLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/logging/log/MessageLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/logging/log/CompositeLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/ActionLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/NodeLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/ProcessInstanceCreateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/ProcessInstanceEndLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/ProcessStateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/SignalLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/TokenCreateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/TokenEndLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/graph/log/TransitionLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/VariableLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/VariableCreateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/VariableDeleteLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/VariableUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/ByteArrayUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/DateUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/DoubleUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/HibernateLongUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/HibernateStringUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/LongUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/context/log/variableinstance/StringUpdateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/TaskLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/TaskCreateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/TaskAssignLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/TaskEndLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/SwimlaneLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/SwimlaneCreateLog.hbm.xml"/> <mapping resource="org/jbpm/taskmgmt/log/SwimlaneAssignLog.hbm.xml"/> </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> ---- edit --- I have already tried the hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class to set to the JBoss version (org.hibernate.transaction.JBossTransactionManagerLookup) it did not work...well it's not that suprising...I'll try now: org.hibernate.transaction.OC4JTransactionManagerLookup I tried with CMT instead of JTA, but it didn't work also.

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• TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs.  So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts.  Preparing for Travel   When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need.  Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled.  For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there.  I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around.  Packing  Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the  clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take.  For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide.  For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard.  If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag.  Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water.  At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else.  I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change.  Working While Away  While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well.  I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it.  So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Dynamic Code for type casting Generic Types 'generically' in C#

  - by Rick Strahl

  C# is a strongly typed language and while that's a fundamental feature of the language there are more and more situations where dynamic types make a lot of sense. I've written quite a bit about how I use dynamic for creating new type extensions: Dynamic Types and DynamicObject References in C# Creating a dynamic, extensible C# Expando Object Creating a dynamic DataReader for dynamic Property Access Today I want to point out an example of a much simpler usage for dynamic that I use occasionally to get around potential static typing issues in C# code especially those concerning generic types. TypeCasting Generics Generic types have been around since .NET 2.0 I've run into a number of situations in the past - especially with generic types that don't implement specific interfaces that can be cast to - where I've been unable to properly cast an object when it's passed to a method or assigned to a property. Granted often this can be a sign of bad design, but in at least some situations the code that needs to be integrated is not under my control so I have to make due with what's available or the parent object is too complex or intermingled to be easily refactored to a new usage scenario. Here's an example that I ran into in my own RazorHosting library - so I have really no excuse, but I also don't see another clean way around it in this case. A Generic Example Imagine I've implemented a generic type like this: public class RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase, new() You can now happily instantiate new generic versions of this type with custom template bases or even a non-generic version which is implemented like this: public class RazorEngine : RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase> { public RazorEngine() : base() { } } To instantiate one: var engine = new RazorEngine<MyCustomRazorTemplate>(); Now imagine that the template class receives a reference to the engine when it's instantiated. This code is fired as part of the Engine pipeline when it gets ready to execute the template. It instantiates the template and assigns itself to the template: var template = new TBaseTemplateType() { Engine = this } The problem here is that possibly many variations of RazorEngine<T> can be passed. I can have RazorTemplateBase, RazorFolderHostTemplateBase, CustomRazorTemplateBase etc. as generic parameters and the Engine property has to reflect that somehow. So, how would I cast that? My first inclination was to use an interface on the engine class and then cast to the interface.  Generally that works, but unfortunately here the engine class is generic and has a few members that require the template type in the member signatures. So while I certainly can implement an interface: public interface IRazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> it doesn't really help for passing this generically templated object to the template class - I still can't cast it if multiple differently typed versions of the generic type could be passed. I have the exact same issue in that I can't specify a 'generic' generic parameter, since there's no underlying base type that's common. In light of this I decided on using object and the following syntax for the property (and the same would be true for a method parameter): public class RazorTemplateBase :MarshalByRefObject,IDisposable { public object Engine {get;set; } } Now because the Engine property is a non-typed object, when I need to do something with this value, I still have no way to cast it explicitly. What I really would need is: public RazorEngine<> Engine { get; set; } but that's not possible. Dynamic to the Rescue Luckily with the dynamic type this sort of thing can be mitigated fairly easily. For example here's a method that uses the Engine property and uses the well known class interface by simply casting the plain object reference to dynamic and then firing away on the properties and methods of the base template class that are common to all templates:/// <summary> /// Allows rendering a dynamic template from a string template /// passing in a model. This is like rendering a partial /// but providing the input as a /// </summary> public virtual string RenderTemplate(string template,object model) { if (template == null) return string.Empty; // if there's no template markup if(!template.Contains("@")) return template; // use dynamic to get around generic type casting dynamic engine = Engine; string result = engine.RenderTemplate(template, model); if (result == null) throw new ApplicationException("RenderTemplate failed: " + engine.ErrorMessage); return result; } Prior to .NET 4.0  I would have had to use Reflection for this sort of thing which would have a been a heck of a lot more verbose, but dynamic makes this so much easier and cleaner and in this case at least the overhead is negliable since it's a single dynamic operation on an otherwise very complex operation call. Dynamic as  a Bailout Sometimes this sort of thing often reeks of a design flaw, and I agree that in hindsight this could have been designed differently. But as is often the case this particular scenario wasn't planned for originally and removing the generic signatures from the base type would break a ton of other code in the framework. Given the existing fairly complex engine design, refactoring an interface to remove generic types just to make this particular code work would have been overkill. Instead dynamic provides a nice and simple and relatively clean solution. Now if there were many other places where this occurs I would probably consider reworking the code to make this cleaner but given this isolated instance and relatively low profile operation use of dynamic seems a valid choice for me. This solution really works anywhere where you might end up with an inheritance structure that doesn't have a common base or interface that is sufficient. In the example above I know what I'm getting but there's no common base type that I can cast to. All that said, it's a good idea to think about use of dynamic before you rush in. In many situations there are alternatives that can still work with static typing. Dynamic definitely has some overhead compared to direct static access of objects, so if possible we should definitely stick to static typing. In the example above the application already uses dynamics extensively for dynamic page page templating and passing models around so introducing dynamics here has very little additional overhead. The operation itself also fires of a fairly resource heavy operation where the overhead of a couple of dynamic member accesses are not a performance issue. So, what's your experience with dynamic as a bailout mechanism? © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Using Table-Valued Parameters in SQL Server

  - by Jesse

  I work with stored procedures in SQL Server pretty frequently and have often found myself with a need to pass in a list of values at run-time. Quite often this list contains a set of ids on which the stored procedure needs to operate the size and contents of which are not known at design time. In the past I’ve taken the collection of ids (which are usually integers), converted them to a string representation where each value is separated by a comma and passed that string into a VARCHAR parameter of a stored procedure. The body of the stored procedure would then need to parse that string into a table variable which could be easily consumed with set-based logic within the rest of the stored procedure. This approach works pretty well but the VARCHAR variable has always felt like an un-wanted “middle man” in this scenario. Of course, I could use a BULK INSERT operation to load the list of ids into a temporary table that the stored procedure could use, but that approach seems heavy-handed in situations where the list of values is usually going to contain only a few dozen values. Fortunately SQL Server 2008 introduced the concept of table-valued parameters which effectively eliminates the need for the clumsy middle man VARCHAR parameter. Example: Customer Transaction Summary Report Let’s say we have a report that can summarize the the transactions that we’ve conducted with customers over a period of time. The report returns a pretty simple dataset containing one row per customer with some key metrics about how much business that customer has conducted over the date range for which the report is being run. Sometimes the report is run for a single customer, sometimes it’s run for all customers, and sometimes it’s run for a handful of customers (i.e. a salesman runs it for the customers that fall into his sales territory). This report can be invoked from a website on-demand, or it can be scheduled for periodic delivery to certain users via SQL Server Reporting Services. Because the report can be created from different places and the query to generate the report is complex it’s been packed into a stored procedure that accepts three parameters: @startDate – The beginning of the date range for which the report should be run. @endDate – The end of the date range for which the report should be run. @customerIds – The customer Ids for which the report should be run. Obviously, the @startDate and @endDate parameters are DATETIME variables. The @customerIds parameter, however, needs to contain a list of the identity values (primary key) from the Customers table representing the customers that were selected for this particular run of the report. In prior versions of SQL Server we might have made this parameter a VARCHAR variable, but with SQL Server 2008 we can make it into a table-valued parameter. Defining And Using The Table Type In order to use a table-valued parameter, we first need to tell SQL Server about what the table will look like. We do this by creating a user defined type. For the purposes of this stored procedure we need a very simple type to model a table variable with a single integer column. We can create a generic type called ‘IntegerListTableType’ like this: CREATE TYPE IntegerListTableType AS TABLE (Value INT NOT NULL) Once defined, we can use this new type to define the @customerIds parameter in the signature of our stored procedure. The parameter list for the stored procedure definition might look like: 1: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary 2: @starDate datetime, 3: @endDate datetime, 4: @customerIds IntegerListTableTableType READONLY   Note the ‘READONLY’ statement following the declaration of the @customerIds parameter. SQL Server requires any table-valued parameter be marked as ‘READONLY’ and no DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) statements can be performed on a table-valued parameter within the routine in which it’s used. Aside from the DML restriction, however, you can do pretty much anything with a table-valued parameter as you could with a normal TABLE variable. With the user defined type and stored procedure defined as above, we could invoke like this: 1: DECLARE @cusomterIdList IntegerListTableType 2: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (1) 3: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (2) 4: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (3) 5:  6: EXEC dbo.rpt_CustomerTransationSummary 7: @startDate = '2012-05-01', 8: @endDate = '2012-06-01' 9: @customerIds = @customerIdList   Note that we can simply declare a variable of type ‘IntegerListTableType’ just like any other normal variable and insert values into it just like a TABLE variable. We could also populate the variable with a SELECT … INTO or INSERT … SELECT statement if desired. Using The Table-Valued Parameter With ADO .NET Invoking a stored procedure with a table-valued parameter from ADO .NET is as simple as building a DataTable and passing it in as the Value of a SqlParameter. Here’s some example code for how we would construct the SqlParameter for the @customerIds parameter in our stored procedure: 1: var customerIdsParameter = new SqlParameter(); 2: customerIdParameter.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input; 3: customerIdParameter.TypeName = "IntegerListTableType"; 4: customerIdParameter.Value = selectedCustomerIds.ToIntegerListDataTable("Value");   All we’re doing here is new’ing up an instance of SqlParameter, setting the pamameters direction, specifying the name of the User Defined Type that this parameter uses, and setting its value. We’re assuming here that we have an IEnumerable<int> variable called ‘selectedCustomerIds’ containing all of the customer Ids for which the report should be run. The ‘ToIntegerListDataTable’ method is an extension method of the IEnumerable<int> type that looks like this: 1: public static DataTable ToIntegerListDataTable(this IEnumerable<int> intValues, string columnName) 2: { 3: var intergerListDataTable = new DataTable(); 4: intergerListDataTable.Columns.Add(columnName); 5: foreach(var intValue in intValues) 6: { 7: var nextRow = intergerListDataTable.NewRow(); 8: nextRow[columnName] = intValue; 9: intergerListDataTable.Rows.Add(nextRow); 10: } 11:  12: return intergerListDataTable; 13: }   Since the ‘IntegerListTableType’ has a single int column called ‘Value’, we pass that in for the ‘columnName’ parameter to the extension method. The method creates a new single-columned DataTable using the provided column name then iterates over the items in the IEnumerable<int> instance adding one row for each value. We can then use this SqlParameter instance when invoking the stored procedure just like we would use any other parameter. Advanced Functionality Using passing a list of integers into a stored procedure is a very simple usage scenario for the table-valued parameters feature, but I’ve found that it covers the majority of situations where I’ve needed to pass a collection of data for use in a query at run-time. I should note that BULK INSERT feature still makes sense for passing large amounts of data to SQL Server for processing. MSDN seems to suggest that 1000 rows of data is the tipping point where the overhead of a BULK INSERT operation can pay dividends. I should also note here that table-valued parameters can be used to deal with more complex data structures than single-columned tables of integers. A User Defined Type that backs a table-valued parameter can use things like identities and computed columns. That said, using some of these more advanced features might require the use the SqlDataRecord and SqlMetaData classes instead of a simple DataTable. Erland Sommarskog has a great article on his website that describes when and how to use these classes for table-valued parameters. What About Reporting Services? Earlier in the post I referenced the fact that our example stored procedure would be called from both a web application and a SQL Server Reporting Services report. Unfortunately, using table-valued parameters from SSRS reports can be a bit tricky and warrants its own blog post which I’ll be putting together and posting sometime in the near future.

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• How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  You might think that it’s a complicated process to remove objects from photographs. But really Photoshop makes it quite simple, even when removing all traces of a person from digital photographs. Read on to see just how easy it is. Photoshop was originally created to be an image editing program, and it excels at it. With hardly any Photoshop experience, any beginner can begin removing objects or people from their photos. Have some friends that photobombed an otherwise great pic? Tell them to say their farewells, because here’s how to get rid of them with Photoshop! Tools for Removing Objects Removing an object is not really “magical” work. Your goal is basically to cover up the information you don’t want in an image with information you do want. In this sample image, we want to remove the cigar smoking man, and leave the geisha. Here’s a couple of the tools that can be useful to work with when attempting this kind of task. Clone Stamp and Pattern Stamp Tool: Samples parts of your image from your background, and allows you to paint into your image with your mouse or stylus. Eraser and Brush Tools: Paint flat colors and shapes, and erase cloned layers of image information. Basic, down and dirty photo editing tools. Pen, Quick Selection, Lasso, and Crop tools: Select, isolate, and remove parts of your image with these selection tools. All useful in their own way. Some, like the pen tool, are nightmarishly tough on beginners. Remove a Person with the Clone Stamp Tool (Video) The video above uses the Clone Stamp tool to sample and paint with the background texture. It’s a simple tool to use, although it can be confusing, possibly counter-intuitive. Here’s some pointers, in addition to the video above. Select shortcut key to choose the Clone tool stamp from the Tools Panel. Always create a copy of your background layer before doing heavy edits by right clicking on the background in your Layers Panel and selecting “Duplicate.” Hold with the Clone Tool selected, and click anywhere in your image to sample that area. When you’re sampling an area, your cursor is “Aligned” with your sample area. When you paint, your sample area moves. You can turn the “Aligned” setting off by clicking the in the Options Panel at the top of your screen if you want. Change your brush size and hardness as shown in the video by right-clicking in your image. Use your lasso to copy and paste pieces of your image in order to cover up any parts that seem appropriate. Photoshop Magic with the “Content-Aware Fill” One of the hallmark features of CS5 is the “Content-Aware Fill.” Content aware fill can be an excellent shortcut to removing objects and even people in Photoshop, but it is somewhat limited, and can get confused. Here’s a basic rundown on how it works. Select an object using your Lasso tool, shortcut key . The Lasso works fine as this selection can be rough. Navigate to Edit > Fill, and select “Content-Aware,” as illustrated above, from the pull-down menu. It’s surprisingly simple. After some processing, Photoshop has done the work of removing the object for you. It takes a few moments, and it is not perfect, so be prepared to touch it up with some Copy-Paste, or some Clone stamp action. Content Aware Fill Has Its Limits Keep in mind that the Content Aware Fill is meant to be used with other techniques in mind. It doesn’t always perform perfectly, but can give you a great starting point. Take this image for instance. It is actually plausible to hide this figure and make this image look like he was never there at all. With a selection made with the Lasso tool, navigate to Edit > Fill and select “Content Aware” again. The result is surprisingly good, but as you can see, worthy of some touch up. With a result like this one, you’ll have to get your hands dirty with copy-paste to create believable lines in the background. With many photographs, Content Aware Fill will simply get confused and give you results you won’t be happy with. Additional Touch Up for Bad Background Textures with the Pattern Stamp Tool For the perfectionist, cleaning up the lumpy looking textures that the Clone Stamp can leave is fairly simple using the Pattern Stamp Tool. Sample an piece of your image with your Marquee Tool, shortcut key . Navigate to Edit > Define Pattern to create a new Pattern from your selection. Click OK to continue. Click and hold down on the Clone Stamp tool in your Tools Panel until you can select the Pattern Stamp Tool. Pick your new pattern from the Options at the top of your screen, in the Options Panel. Then simply right click in your image in order to pick as soft a brush as possible to paint with. Paint into your image until your background is as smooth as you want it to be, making your painted out object more and more invisible. If you get lines from your repeated texture, experiment turning the on and off and paint over them. In addition to this, simple use of the Crop Tool, shortcut , can recompose an image, making it look as if it never had another object in it at all. Combine these techniques to find a method that works best for your images. Have questions or comments concerning Graphics, Photos, Filetypes, or Photoshop? Send your questions to [email protected], and they may be featured in a future How-To Geek Graphics article. Image Credits: Geisha Kyoto Gion by Todd Laracuenta via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons. Moai Rano raraku by Aurbina, in Public Domain. Chris Young visits Wrigley by TonyTheTiger, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide CyanogenMod Updates; Rolls out Android 2.3 to the Less Fortunate MyPaint is an Open-Source Graphics App for Digital Painters Can the Birds and Pigs Really Be Friends in the End? [Angry Birds Video] Add the 2D Version of the New Unity Interface to Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 MightyMintyBoost Is a 3-in-1 Gadget Charger Watson Ties Against Human Jeopardy Opponents

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• How big can my SharePoint 2010 installation be?

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). 3 years ago, I had published “How big can my SharePoint 2007 installation be?” Well, SharePoint 2010 has significant under the covers improvements. So, how big can your SharePoint 2010 installation be? There are three kinds of limits you should know about Hard limits that cannot be exceeded by design. Configurable that are, well configurable – but the default values are set for a pretty good reason, so if you need to tweak, plan and understand before you tweak. Soft limits, you can exceed them, but it is not recommended that you do. Before you read any of the limits, read these two important disclaimers - 1. The limit depends on what you’re doing. So, don’t take the below as gospel, the reality depends on your situation. 2. There are many additional considerations in planning your SharePoint solution scalability and performance, besides just the below. So with those in mind, here goes.   Hard Limits - Zones per web app 5 RBS NAS performance Time to first byte of any response from NAS must be less than 20 milliseconds List row size 8000 bytes driven by how SP stores list items internally Max file size 2GB (default is 50MB, configurable). RBS does not increase this limit. Search metadata properties 10,000 per item crawled (pretty damn high, you’ll never need to worry about it). Max # of concurrent in-memory enterprise content types 5000 per web server, per tenant Max # of external system connections 500 per web server PerformancePoint services using Excel services as a datasource No single query can fetch more than 1 million excel cells Office Web Apps Renders One doc per second, per CPU core, per Application server, limited to a maximum of 8 cores.   Configurable Limits - Row Size Limit 6, configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxListItemRowStorage property List view lookup 8 join operations per query Max number of list items that a single operation can process at one time in normal hours 5000 Configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperation   Also you get a warning at 3000, which is configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperationWarningLevel   In addition, throttle overrides can be requested, throttle overrides can be disabled, and time windows can be set when throttle is disabled. Max number of list items for administrators that a single operation can process at one time in normal hours 20000 Configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperationOverride Enumerating subsites 2000 Word and Powerpoint co-authoring simultaneous editors 10 (Hard limit is 99). # of webparts on a page 25 Search Crawl DBs per search service app 10 Items per crawl db 25 million Search Keywords 200 per site collection. There is a max limit of 5000, which can then be modified by editing the web.config/client.config. Concurrent # of workflows on a content db 15. Workflows running in the timer service are not counted in this limit. Further workflows are queued. Can be configured via the Set-SPFarmConfig powershell commandlet. Number of events picked by the workflow timer job and delivered to workflows 100. You can increase this limit by running additional instances of the workflow timer service. Visio services file size 50MB Visio web drawing recalculation timeout 120 seconds Configurable via – Powershell commandlet Set-SPVisioPerformance Visio services minimum and maximum cache age for data connected diagrams 0 to 24 hours. Default is 60 minutes. Configurable via – Powershell commandlet Set-SPVisioPerformance   Soft Limits - Content Databases 300 per web app Application Pools 10 per web server Managed Paths 20 per web app Content Database Size 200GB per Content DB Size of 1 site collection 100GB # of sites in a site collection 250,000 Documents in a library 30 Million, with nesting. Depends heavily on type and usage and size of documents. Items 30 million. Depends heavily on usage of items. SPGroups one SPUser can be in 5000 Users in a site collection 2 million, depends on UI, nesting, containers and underlying user store AD Principals in a SPGroup 5000 SPGroups in a site collection 10000 Search Service Instances 20 Indexed Items in Search 100 million Crawl Log entries 100 million Search Alerts 1 million per search application Search Crawled Properties 1/2 million URL removals in search 100 removals per operation User Profiles 2 million per service application Social Tags 500 million per social database Comment on the article ....

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• Getting to grips with the stack in nasm

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I spent a good part of my day getting to grips with the stack and nasm. After looking at my notes on nasm I think this is one area for the course I am doing they could focus more on… So here are some snippets I have put together that have helped me understand a little bit about the stack… Simplest example of the stack You will probably see examples like the following in circulation… these demonstrate the simplest use of the stack… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main main: push 42h push 43h push 44h mov ah,2h ;set to display characters pop dx    ;get the first value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 2nd value int 21h   ;and display it pop dx    ;get 3rd value int 21h   ;and display it int 20h The output from above code would be… DCB Decoupling code using “call” and “ret” This is great, but it oversimplifies what I want to use the stack for… I do not know if this goes against the grain of assembly programmers or not, but I want to write loosely coupled assembly code – and I want to use the stack as a mechanism for passing values into my decoupled code. In nasm we have the call and return instructions, which provides a mechanism for decoupling code, for example the following could be done… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h mov dx,41h int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: call displayChar int 20h   This would output the following to the console A So, it would seem that call and ret allow us to jump to segments of our code and then return back to the calling position – a form of segmenting the code into what we would called in higher order languages “functions” or “methods”. The only issue is, in higher order languages there is a way to pass parameters into the functions and return results. Because of the primitive nature of the call and ret instructions, this does not seem to be obvious. We could of course use the registers to pass values into the subroutine and set values coming out, but the problem with this is we… Have a limited number of registers Are threading our code with tight coupling (it would be hard to migrate methods outside of their intended use in a particular program to another one) With that in mind, I turn to the stack to provide a loosely coupled way of calling subroutines… First attempt with the Stack Initially I thought this would be simple… we could use code that looks as follows to achieve what I want… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov ah,2h pop dx int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h   However running this application does not give the desired result, I want an ‘A’ to be returned, and I am getting something totally different (you will to). Reading up on the call and ret instructions a discovery is made… they are pushing and popping things onto and off the stack as well… When the call instruction is executed, the current value of IP (the address of the instruction to follow) is pushed onto the stack, when ret is called, the last value on the stack is popped off into the IP register. In effect what the above code is doing is as follows with the stack… push 41h push current value of ip pop current value of ip to dx pop 41h to ip This is not what I want, I need to access the 41h that I pushed onto the stack, but the call value (which is necessary) is putting something in my way. So, what to do? Remember we have other registers we can use as well as a thing called indirect addressing… So, after some reading around, I came up with the following approach using indirect addressing… org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h call displayChar int 20h In essence, what I have done here is used a trick with the stack pointer… it goes as follows… Push 41 onto the stack Make the call to the function, which will push the IP register onto the stack and then jump to the displayChar label Move the value in the stack point to the bp register (sp currently points at IP register) Move the at the location of bp minus 2 bytes to dx (this is now the value 41h) display it, execute the ret instruction, which pops the ip value off the stack and goes back to the calling point This approach is still very raw, some further reading around shows that I should be pushing the value of bp onto the stack before replacing it with sp, but it is the starting thread to getting loosely coupled subroutines. Let’s see if you get what the following output would be? org 0x100 bits 16 jmp main ;---------------------------------------- displayChar: mov bp,sp mov ah,2h mov dx,[bp+4] int 21h mov dx,[bp+2] int 21h ret ;---------------------------------------- main: push 41h push 42h call displayChar int 20h The output is… AB Where to from here? If by any luck some assembly programmer comes along and see this code and notices that I have made some fundamental flaw in my logic… I would like to know, so please leave a comment… appreciate any feedback!

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Using &lsquo;default&rsquo; to Get Default Values

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Today’s little wonder is another of those small items that can help a lot in certain situations, especially when writing generics.  In particular, it is useful in determining what the default value of a given type would be. The Problem: what’s the default value for a generic type? There comes a time when you’re writing generic code where you may want to set an item of a given generic type.  Seems simple enough, right?  We’ll let’s see! Let’s say we want to query a Dictionary<TKey, TValue> for a given key and get back the value, but if the key doesn’t exist, we’d like a default value instead of throwing an exception. So, for example, we might have a the following dictionary defined: 1: var lookup = new Dictionary<int, string> 2: { 3: { 1, "Apple" }, 4: { 2, "Orange" }, 5: { 3, "Banana" }, 6: { 4, "Pear" }, 7: { 9, "Peach" } 8: }; And using those definitions, perhaps we want to do something like this: 1: // assume a default 2: string value = "Unknown"; 3:  4: // if the item exists in dictionary, get its value 5: if (lookup.ContainsKey(5)) 6: { 7: value = lookup[5]; 8: } But that’s inefficient, because then we’re double-hashing (once for ContainsKey() and once for the indexer).  Well, to avoid the double-hashing, we could use TryGetValue() instead: 1: string value; 2:  3: // if key exists, value will be put in value, if not default it 4: if (!lookup.TryGetValue(5, out value)) 5: { 6: value = "Unknown"; 7: } But the “flow” of using of TryGetValue() can get clunky at times when you just want to assign either the value or a default to a variable.  Essentially it’s 3-ish lines (depending on formatting) for 1 assignment.  So perhaps instead we’d like to write an extension method to support a cleaner interface that will return a default if the item isn’t found: 1: public static class DictionaryExtensions 2: { 3: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 4: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound) 5: { 6: TValue value; 7:  8: // value will be the result or the default for TValue 9: if (!dict.TryGetValue(key, out value)) 10: { 11: value = defaultIfNotFound; 12: } 13:  14: return value; 15: } 16: } 17:  So this creates an extension method on Dictionary<TKey, TValue> that will attempt to get a value using the given key, and will return the defaultIfNotFound as a stand-in if the key does not exist. This code compiles, fine, but what if we would like to go one step further and allow them to specify a default if not found, or accept the default for the type?  Obviously, we could overload the method to take the default or not, but that would be duplicated code and a bit heavy for just specifying a default.  It seems reasonable that we could set the not found value to be either the default for the type, or the specified value. So what if we defaulted the type to null? 1: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 2: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = null) // ... No, this won’t work, because only reference types (and Nullable<T> wrapped types due to syntactical sugar) can be assigned to null.  So what about a calling parameterless constructor? 1: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 2: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = new TValue()) // ... No, this won’t work either for several reasons.  First, we’d expect a reference type to return null, not an “empty” instance.  Secondly, not all reference types have a parameter-less constructor (string for example does not).  And finally, a constructor cannot be determined at compile-time, while default values can. The Solution: default(T) – returns the default value for type T Many of us know the default keyword for its uses in switch statements as the default case.  But it has another use as well: it can return us the default value for a given type.  And since it generates the same defaults that default field initialization uses, it can be determined at compile-time as well. For example: 1: var x = default(int); // x is 0 2:  3: var y = default(bool); // y is false 4:  5: var z = default(string); // z is null 6:  7: var t = default(TimeSpan); // t is a TimeSpan with Ticks == 0 8:  9: var n = default(int?); // n is a Nullable<int> with HasValue == false Notice that for numeric types the default is 0, and for reference types the default is null.  In addition, for struct types, the value is a default-constructed struct – which simply means a struct where every field has their default value (hence 0 Ticks for TimeSpan, etc.). So using this, we could modify our code to this: 1: public static class DictionaryExtensions 2: { 3: public static TValue GetValueOrDefault<TKey, TValue>(this Dictionary<TKey, TValue> dict, 4: TKey key, TValue defaultIfNotFound = default(TValue)) 5: { 6: TValue value; 7:  8: // value will be the result or the default for TValue 9: if (!dict.TryGetValue(key, out value)) 10: { 11: value = defaultIfNotFound; 12: } 13:  14: return value; 15: } 16: } Now, if defaultIfNotFound is unspecified, it will use default(TValue) which will be the default value for whatever value type the dictionary holds.  So let’s consider how we could use this: 1: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(1); // returns “Apple” 2:  3: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(5); // returns null 4:  5: lookup.GetValueOrDefault(5, “Unknown”); // returns “Unknown” 6:  Again, do not confuse a parameter-less constructor with the default value for a type.  Remember that the default value for any type is the compile-time default for any instance of that type (0 for numeric, false for bool, null for reference types, and struct will all default fields for struct).  Consider the difference: 1: // both zero 2: int i1 = default(int); 3: int i2 = new int(); 4:  5: // both “zeroed” structs 6: var dt1 = default(DateTime); 7: var dt2 = new DateTime(); 8:  9: // sb1 is null, sb2 is an “empty” string builder 10: var sb1 = default(StringBuilder()); 11: var sb2 = new StringBuilder(); So in the above code, notice that the value types all resolve the same whether using default or parameter-less construction.  This is because a value type is never null (even Nullable<T> wrapped types are never “null” in a reference sense), they will just by default contain fields with all default values. However, for reference types, the default is null and not a constructed instance.  Also it should be noted that not all classes have parameter-less constructors (string, for instance, doesn’t have one – and doesn’t need one). Summary Whenever you need to get the default value for a type, especially a generic type, consider using the default keyword.  This handy word will give you the default value for the given type at compile-time, which can then be used for initialization, optional parameters, etc. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,default

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• Building KPIs to monitor your business Its not really about the Technology

  When I have discussions with people about Business Intelligence, one of the questions the inevitably come up is about building KPIs and how to accomplish that. From a technical level the concept of a KPI is very simple, almost too simple in that it is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. The key to that iceberg is not really the tip, but the mass of the iceberg that is hidden beneath the surface upon which the tip sits. The analogy of the iceberg is not meant to indicate that the foundation of the KPI is overly difficult or complex. The disparity in size in meant to indicate that the larger thing that needs to be defined is not the technical tip, but the underlying business definition of what the KPI means. From a technical perspective the KPI consists of primarily the following items: Actual Value This is the actual value data point that is being measured. An example would be something like the amount of sales. Target Value This is the target goal for the KPI. This is a number that can be measured against Actual Value. An example would be $10,000 in monthly sales. Target Indicator Range This is the definition of ranges that define what type of indicator the user will see comparing the Actual Value to the Target Value. Most often this is defined by stoplight, but can be any indicator that is going to show a status in a quick fashion to the user. Typically this would be something like: Red Light = Actual Value more than 5% below target; Yellow Light = Within 5% of target either direction; Green Light = More than 5% higher than Target Value Status\Trend Indicator This is an optional attribute of a KPI that is typically used to show some kind of trend. The vast majority of these indicators are used to show some type of progress against a previous period. As an example, the status indicator might be used to show how the monthly sales compare to last month. With this type of indicator there needs to be not only a definition of what the ranges are for your status indictor, but then also what value the number needs to be compared against. So now we have an idea of what data points a KPI consists of from a technical perspective lets talk a bit about tools. As you can see technically there is not a whole lot to them and the choice of technology is not as important as the definition of the KPIs, which we will get to in a minute. There are many different types of tools in the Microsoft BI stack that you can use to expose your KPI to the business. These include Performance Point, SharePoint, Excel, and SQL Reporting Services. There are pluses and minuses to each technology and the right technology is based a lot on your goals and how you want to deliver the information to the users. Additionally, there are other non-Microsoft tools that can be used to expose KPI indicators to your business users. Regardless of the technology used as your front end, the heavy lifting of KPI is in the business definition of the values and benchmarks for that KPI. The discussion about KPIs is very dependent on the history of an organization and how much they are exposed to the attributes of a KPI. Often times when discussing KPIs with a business contact who has not been exposed to KPIs the discussion tends to also be a session educating the business user about what a KPI is and what goes into the definition of a KPI. The majority of times the business user has an idea of what their actual values are and they have been tracking those numbers for some time, generally in Excel and all manually. So they will know the amount of sales last month along with sales two years ago in the same month. Where the conversation tends to get stuck is when you start discussing what the target value should be. The actual value is answering the What and How much questions. When you are talking about the Target values you are asking the question Is this number good or bad. Typically, the user will know whether or not the value is good or bad, but most of the time they are not able to quantify what is good or bad. Their response is usually something like I just know. Because they have been watching the sales quantity for years now, they can tell you that a 5% decrease in sales this month might actually be a good thing, maybe because the salespeople are all waiting until next month when the new versions come out. It can sometimes be very hard to break the business people of this habit. One of the fears generally is that the status indicator is not subjective. Thus, in the scenario above, the business user is going to be fearful that their boss, just looking at a negative red indicator, is going to haul them out to the woodshed for a bad month. But, on the flip side, if all you are displaying is the amount of sales, only a person with knowledge of last month sales and the target amount for this month would have any idea if $10,000 in sales is good or not. Here is where a key point about KPIs needs to be communicated to both the business user and any user who might be viewing the results of that KPI. The KPI is just one tool that is used to report on business performance. The KPI is meant as a quick indicator of one business statistic. It is not meant to tell the entire story. It does not answer the question Why. Its primary purpose is to objectively and quickly expose an area of the business that might warrant more review. There is always going to be the need to do further analysis on any potential negative or neutral KPI. So, hopefully, once you have convinced your business user to come up with some target numbers and ranges for status indicators, you then need to take the next step and help them answer the Why question. The main question here to ask is, Okay, you see the indicator and you need to discover why the number is what is, where do you go?. The answer is usually a combination of sources. A sales manager might have some of the following items at their disposal (Marketing report showing a decrease in the promotional discounts for the month, Pricing Report showing the reduction of prices of older models, an Inventory Report showing the discontinuation of a particular product line, or a memo showing the ending of a large affiliate partnership. The answers to the question Why are never as simple as a single indicator value. Bring able to quickly get to this information is all about designing how a user accesses the KPIs and then also how easily they can get to the additional information they need. This is where a Dashboard mentality can come in handy. For example, the business user can have a dashboard that shows their KPIs, but also has links to some of the common reports that they run regarding Sales Data. The users boss may have the same KPIs on their dashboard, but instead of links to individual reports they are going to have a link to a status report that was created by the user that pulls together all the data about the KPI in a summary format the users boss can review. So some of the key things to think about when building or evaluating KPIs for your organization: Technology should not be the driving factor KPIs are of little value without some indicator for whether a value is good, bad or neutral. KPIs only give an answer to the Is this number good\bad? question Make sure the ability to drill into the Why of a KPI is close at hand and relevant to the user who is viewing the KPI. The KPI is a key business tool when defined properly to help monitor business performance across the enterprise in an objective and consistent manner. At times it might feel like the process of defining the business aspects of a KPI can sometimes be arduous, the payoff in the end can far outweigh the costs. Some of the benefits of going through this process are a better understanding of the key metrics for an organization and the measure of those metrics and a consistent snapshot of business performance that can be utilized across the organization. And I think that these are benefits to any organization regardless of the technology or the implementation.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Dlink DWA-556 Access point fails to start on 2.6.35-25 while 2.6.35-24 works. How can I do this with >2.6.35-24?

  - by Azendale

  I'm using hostapd to run an access point with a Dlink DWA-556 wireless N card. However, I can no longer get it to start when I use kernels greater than 2.6.35-24. Here's a log where I ran the uname -a&&hostapd -c <configfile> on the different kernel versions. Linux erikbandersen 2.6.35-24-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 2 02:41:37 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux Configuration file: hostapd.conf ctrl_interface_group=0 Opening raw packet socket for ifindex 248 BSS count 1, BSSID mask ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (0 bits) SIOCGIWRANGE: WE(compiled)=22 WE(source)=21 enc_capa=0xf nl80211: Added 802.11b mode based on 802.11g information HT40: control channel: 2 secondary channel: 6 RATE[0] rate=10 flags=0x2 RATE[1] rate=20 flags=0x6 RATE[2] rate=55 flags=0x6 RATE[3] rate=110 flags=0x6 RATE[4] rate=60 flags=0x0 RATE[5] rate=90 flags=0x0 RATE[6] rate=120 flags=0x0 RATE[7] rate=180 flags=0x0 RATE[8] rate=240 flags=0x0 RATE[9] rate=360 flags=0x0 RATE[10] rate=480 flags=0x0 RATE[11] rate=540 flags=0x0 Passive scanning not supported Mode: IEEE 802.11g Channel: 2 Frequency: 2417 MHz Flushing old station entries Deauthenticate all stations Using interface wlan1 with hwaddr 1c:bd:b9:d5:e8:3c and ssid 'erikbandersen.com/freewifi' wlan1: Setup of interface done. MGMT (TX callback) ACK Malformed netlink message: len=436 left=256 plen=420 256 extra bytes in the end of netlink message MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb mgmt::auth authentication: STA=3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f auth_alg=0 auth_transaction=1 status_code=0 wep=0 New STA wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: authentication OK (open system) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-AUTHENTICATE.indication(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f, OPEN_SYSTEM) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DELETEKEYS.request(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) authentication reply: STA=3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f auth_alg=0 auth_transaction=2 resp=0 (IE len=0) MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::auth cb wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: authenticated mgmt::assoc_req association request: STA=3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f capab_info=0x421 listen_interval=10 Validating WMM IE: OUI 00:50:f2 OUI type 2 OUI sub-type 0 version 1 QoS info 0x0 HT: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f HT Capabilities Info: 0x102c handle_assoc STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f - no greenfield, num of non-gf stations 1 handle_assoc STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f - 20 MHz HT, num of 20MHz HT STAs 1 hostapd_ht_operation_update current operation mode=0x0 hostapd_ht_operation_update new operation mode=0x7 changes=2 new AID 1 wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: association OK (aid 1) MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::assoc_resp cb wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f IEEE 802.11: associated (aid 1) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-ASSOCIATE.indication(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DELETEKEYS.request(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f RADIUS: starting accounting session 4DAC8224-00000000 MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::action cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb MGMT (TX callback) ACK mgmt::proberesp cb Signal 2 received - terminating wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DEAUTHENTICATE.indication(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f, 1) wlan1: STA 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f MLME: MLME-DELETEKEYS.request(3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f) Removing station 3c:4a:92:0e:41:2f hostapd_ht_operation_update current operation mode=0x7 hostapd_ht_operation_update new operation mode=0x0 changes=2 Flushing old station entries Deauthenticate all stations . Linux erikbandersen 2.6.35-25-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 21 17:40:44 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux Configuration file: hostapd.conf ctrl_interface_group=0 Opening raw packet socket for ifindex 248 BSS count 1, BSSID mask ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (0 bits) SIOCGIWRANGE: WE(compiled)=22 WE(source)=21 enc_capa=0xf nl80211: Added 802.11b mode based on 802.11g information Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=1 freq=2412 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=2 freq=2417 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=3 freq=2422 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=4 freq=2427 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=5 freq=2432 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=6 freq=2437 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=7 freq=2442 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=8 freq=2447 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=9 freq=2452 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=10 freq=2457 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=1 chan=11 freq=2462 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=1 freq=2412 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=2 freq=2417 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=3 freq=2422 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=4 freq=2427 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=5 freq=2432 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=6 freq=2437 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=7 freq=2442 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=8 freq=2447 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=9 freq=2452 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=10 freq=2457 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm Allowed channel: mode=0 chan=11 freq=2462 MHz max_tx_power=27 dBm HT40: control channel: 2 secondary channel: 6 RATE[0] rate=10 flags=0x2 RATE[1] rate=20 flags=0x6 RATE[2] rate=55 flags=0x6 RATE[3] rate=110 flags=0x6 RATE[4] rate=60 flags=0x0 RATE[5] rate=90 flags=0x0 RATE[6] rate=120 flags=0x0 RATE[7] rate=180 flags=0x0 RATE[8] rate=240 flags=0x0 RATE[9] rate=360 flags=0x0 RATE[10] rate=480 flags=0x0 RATE[11] rate=540 flags=0x0 Passive scanning not supported Mode: IEEE 802.11g Channel: 2 Frequency: 2417 MHz Could not set channel for kernel driver wlan1: Unable to setup interface. My wireless card is listed as 02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5008 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) by lspci. Am I doing it wrong and there's a new way of doing it? I'm holding off upgrading to Natty because of this. What changed between the versions that would cause this? Should I report it as a bug?

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• C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

  - by James Michael Hare

  So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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• The Data Scientist

  - by BuckWoody

  A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term itself in that definition is redundant. There is no science that I know of that does not work with analyzing lots of data. But the term seems to refer to more than the common practices of looking at data visually, putting it in a spreadsheet or report, or even using simple coding to examine data sets. The term Data Scientist (as far as I can make out this early in it’s use) is someone who has a strong understanding of data sources, relevance (statistical and otherwise) and processing methods as well as front-end displays of large sets of complicated data. Some - but not all - Business Intelligence professionals have these skills. In other cases, senior developers, database architects or others fill these needs, but in my experience, many lack the strong mathematical skills needed to make these choices properly. I’ve divided the knowledge base for someone that would wear this title into three large segments. It remains to be seen if a given Data Scientist would be responsible for knowing all these areas or would specialize. There are pretty high requirements on the math side, specifically in graduate-degree level statistics, but in my experience a company will only have a few of these folks, so they are expected to know quite a bit in each of these areas. Persistence The first area is finding, cleaning and storing the data. In some cases, no cleaning is done prior to storage - it’s just identified and the cleansing is done in a later step. This area is where the professional would be able to tell if a particular data set should be stored in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), across a set of key/value pair storage (NoSQL) or in a file system like HDFS (part of the Hadoop landscape) or other methods. Or do you examine the stream of data without storing it in another system at all? This is an important decision - it’s a foundation choice that deals not only with a lot of expense of purchasing systems or even using Cloud Computing (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS) to source it, but also the skillsets and other resources needed to care and feed the system for a long time. The Data Scientist sets something into motion that will probably outlast his or her career at a company or organization. Often these choices are made by senior developers, database administrators or architects in a company. But sometimes each of these has a certain bias towards making a decision one way or another. The Data Scientist would examine these choices in light of the data itself, starting perhaps even before the business requirements are created. The business may not even be aware of all the strategic and tactical data sources that they have access to. Processing Once the decision is made to store the data, the next set of decisions are based around how to process the data. An RDBMS scales well to a certain level, and provides a high degree of ACID compliance as well as offering a well-known set-based language to work with this data. In other cases, scale should be spread among multiple nodes (as in the case of Hadoop landscapes or NoSQL offerings) or even across a Cloud provider like Windows Azure Table Storage. In fact, in many cases - most of the ones I’m dealing with lately - the data should be split among multiple types of processing environments. This is a newer idea. Many data professionals simply pick a methodology (RDBMS with Star Schemas, NoSQL, etc.) and put all data there, regardless of its shape, processing needs and so on. A Data Scientist is familiar not only with the various processing methods, but how they work, so that they can choose the right one for a given need. This is a huge time commitment, hence the need for a dedicated title like this one. Presentation This is where the need for a Data Scientist is most often already being filled, sometimes with more or less success. The latest Business Intelligence systems are quite good at allowing you to create amazing graphics - but it’s the data behind the graphics that are the most important component of truly effective displays. This is where the mathematics requirement of the Data Scientist title is the most unforgiving. In fact, someone without a good foundation in statistics is not a good candidate for creating reports. Even a basic level of statistics can be dangerous. Anyone who works in analyzing data will tell you that there are multiple errors possible when data just seems right - and basic statistics bears out that you’re on the right track - that are only solvable when you understanding why the statistical formula works the way it does. And there are lots of ways of presenting data. Sometimes all you need is a “yes” or “no” answer that can only come after heavy analysis work. In that case, a simple e-mail might be all the reporting you need. In others, complex relationships and multiple components require a deep understanding of the various graphical methods of presenting data. Knowing which kind of chart, color, graphic or shape conveys a particular datum best is essential knowledge for the Data Scientist. Why I’m excited I love this area of study. I like math, stats, and computing technologies, but it goes beyond that. I love what data can do - how it can help an organization. I’ve been fortunate enough in my professional career these past two decades to work with lots of folks who perform this role at companies from aerospace to medical firms, from manufacturing to retail. Interestingly, the size of the company really isn’t germane here. I worked with one very small bio-tech (cryogenics) company that worked deeply with analysis of complex interrelated data. So  watch this space. No, I’m not leaving Azure or distributed computing or Microsoft. In fact, I think I’m perfectly situated to investigate this role further. We have a huge set of tools, from RDBMS to Hadoop to allow me to explore. And I’m happy to share what I learn along the way.

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• Is RTD Stateless or Stateful?

  - by [email protected]

  Yes.   A stateless service is one where each request is an independent transaction that can be processed by any of the servers in a cluster.  A stateful service is one where state is kept in a server's memory from transaction to transaction, thus necessitating the proper routing of requests to the right server. The main advantage of stateless systems is simplicity of design. The main advantage of stateful systems is performance. I'm often asked whether RTD is a stateless or stateful service, so I wanted to clarify this issue in depth so that RTD's architecture will be properly understood. The short answer is: "RTD can be configured as a stateless or stateful service." The performance difference between stateless and stateful systems can be very significant, and while in a call center implementation it may be reasonable to use a pure stateless configuration, a web implementation that produces thousands of requests per second is practically impossible with a stateless configuration. RTD's performance is orders of magnitude better than most competing systems. RTD was architected from the ground up to achieve this performance. Features like automatic and dynamic compression of prediction models, automatic translation of metadata to machine code, lack of interpreted languages, and separation of model building from decisioning contribute to achieving this performance level. Because  of this focus on performance we decided to have RTD's default configuration work in a stateful manner. By being stateful RTD requests are typically handled in a few milliseconds when repeated requests come to the same session. Now, those readers that have participated in implementations of RTD know that RTD's architecture is also focused on reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with features like automatic model building, automatic time windows, automatic maintenance of database tables, automatic evaluation of data mining models, automatic management of models partitioned by channel, geography, etcetera, and hot swapping of configurations. How do you reconcile the need for a low TCO and the need for performance? How do you get the performance of a stateful system with the simplicity of a stateless system? The answer is that you make the system behave like a stateless system to the exterior, but you let it automatically take advantage of situations where being stateful is better. For example, one of the advantages of stateless systems is that you can route a message to any server in a cluster, without worrying about sending it to the same server that was handling the session in previous messages. With an RTD stateful configuration you can still route the message to any server in the cluster, so from the point of view of the configuration of other systems, it is the same as a stateless service. The difference though comes in performance, because if the message arrives to the right server, RTD can serve it without any external access to the session's state, thus tremendously reducing processing time. In typical implementations it is not rare to have high percentages of messages routed directly to the right server, while those that are not, are easily handled by forwarding the messages to the right server. This architecture usually provides the best of both worlds with performance and simplicity of configuration.   Configuring RTD as a pure stateless service A pure stateless configuration requires session data to be persisted at the end of handling each and every message and reloading that data at the beginning of handling any new message. This is of course, the root of the inefficiency of these configurations. This is also the reason why many "stateless" implementations actually do keep state to take advantage of a request coming back to the same server. Nevertheless, if the implementation requires a pure stateless decision service, this is easy to configure in RTD. The way to do it is: Mark every Integration Point to Close the session at the end of processing the message In the Session entity persist the session data on closing the session In the session entity check if a persisted version exists and load it An excellent solution for persisting the session data is Oracle Coherence, which provides a high performance, distributed cache that minimizes the performance impact of persisting and reloading the session. Alternatively, the session can be persisted to a local database. An interesting feature of the RTD stateless configuration is that it can cope with serializing concurrent requests for the same session. For example, if a web page produces two requests to the decision service, these requests could come concurrently to the decision services and be handled by different servers. Most stateless implementation would have the two requests step onto each other when saving the state, or fail one of the messages. When properly configured, RTD will make one message wait for the other before processing.   A Word on Context Using the context of a customer interaction typically significantly increases lift. For example, offer success in a call center could double if the context of the call is taken into account. For this reason, it is important to utilize the contextual information in decision making. To make the contextual information available throughout a session it needs to be persisted. When there is a well defined owner for the information then there is no problem because in case of a session restart, the information can be easily retrieved. If there is no official owner of the information, then RTD can be configured to persist this information.   Once again, RTD provides flexibility to ensure high performance when it is adequate to allow for some loss of state in the rare cases of server failure. For example, in a heavy use web site that serves 1000 pages per second the navigation history may be stored in the in memory session. In such sites it is typical that there is no OLTP that stores all the navigation events, therefore if an RTD server were to fail, it would be possible for the navigation to that point to be lost (note that a new session would be immediately established in one of the other servers). In most cases the loss of this navigation information would be acceptable as it would happen rarely. If it is desired to save this information, RTD would persist it every time the visitor navigates to a new page. Note that this practice is preferred whether RTD is configured in a stateless or stateful manner.  

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• 11415 compile errors FTW?!

  - by Koning Baard

  Hello. This is something I've really never seen but, I downloaded the source code of the sine wave example at http://www.audiosynth.com/sinewavedemo.html . It is in an old Project Builder Project format, and I want to compile it with Xcode (GCC). However, Xcode gives me 11415 compile errors. The first few are (all in the precompilation of AppKit.h): /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:31:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:31: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:33:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:33: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:35:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:35: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:36:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:36: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:37:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:37: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:38:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:38: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:40:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:40: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:42:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:42: error: expected identifier or '(' before '@' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:48:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:48: error: expected identifier or '(' before '@' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:54:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:54: error: expected identifier or '(' before '@' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:59:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:59: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:61:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:61: error: expected identifier or '(' before '@' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:69:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:69: error: expected identifier or '(' before '+' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:71:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSObject.h:71: error: expected identifier or '(' before '+' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:39:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:39: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:40:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:40: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:41:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:41: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:42:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:42: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:43:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:43: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:44:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:44: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:45:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:45: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:46:0 /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Headers/NSValue.h:46: error: expected identifier or '(' before '-' token Some of the code is: HAL.c /* * HAL.c * Sinewave * * Created by james on Fri Apr 27 2001. * Copyright (c) 2001 __CompanyName__. All rights reserved. * */ #include "HAL.h" #include "math.h" appGlobals gAppGlobals; OSStatus appIOProc (AudioDeviceID inDevice, const AudioTimeStamp* inNow, const AudioBufferList* inInputData, const AudioTimeStamp* inInputTime, AudioBufferList* outOutputData, const AudioTimeStamp* inOutputTime, void* device); #define FailIf(cond, handler) \ if (cond) { \ goto handler; \ } #define FailWithAction(cond, action, handler) \ if (cond) { \ { action; } \ goto handler; \ } // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // HAL Sample Code ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ //#define noErr 0 //#define false 0 OSStatus SetupHAL (appGlobalsPtr globals) { OSStatus err = noErr; UInt32 count, bufferSize; AudioDeviceID device = kAudioDeviceUnknown; AudioStreamBasicDescription format; // get the default output device for the HAL count = sizeof(globals->device); // it is required to pass the size of the data to be returned err = AudioHardwareGetProperty(kAudioHardwarePropertyDefaultOutputDevice, &count, (void *) &device); fprintf(stderr, "kAudioHardwarePropertyDefaultOutputDevice %d\n", err); if (err != noErr) goto Bail; // get the buffersize that the default device uses for IO count = sizeof(globals->deviceBufferSize); // it is required to pass the size of the data to be returned err = AudioDeviceGetProperty(device, 0, false, kAudioDevicePropertyBufferSize, &count, &bufferSize); fprintf(stderr, "kAudioDevicePropertyBufferSize %d %d\n", err, bufferSize); if (err != noErr) goto Bail; // get a description of the data format used by the default device count = sizeof(globals->deviceFormat); // it is required to pass the size of the data to be returned err = AudioDeviceGetProperty(device, 0, false, kAudioDevicePropertyStreamFormat, &count, &format); fprintf(stderr, "kAudioDevicePropertyStreamFormat %d\n", err); fprintf(stderr, "sampleRate %g\n", format.mSampleRate); fprintf(stderr, "mFormatFlags %08X\n", format.mFormatFlags); fprintf(stderr, "mBytesPerPacket %d\n", format.mBytesPerPacket); fprintf(stderr, "mFramesPerPacket %d\n", format.mFramesPerPacket); fprintf(stderr, "mChannelsPerFrame %d\n", format.mChannelsPerFrame); fprintf(stderr, "mBytesPerFrame %d\n", format.mBytesPerFrame); fprintf(stderr, "mBitsPerChannel %d\n", format.mBitsPerChannel); if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) goto Bail; FailWithAction(format.mFormatID != kAudioFormatLinearPCM, err = paramErr, Bail); // bail if the format is not linear pcm // everything is ok so fill in these globals globals->device = device; globals->deviceBufferSize = bufferSize; globals->deviceFormat = format; Bail: return (err); } /* struct AudioStreamBasicDescription { Float64 mSampleRate; // the native sample rate of the audio stream UInt32 mFormatID; // the specific encoding type of audio stream UInt32 mFormatFlags; // flags specific to each format UInt32 mBytesPerPacket; // the number of bytes in a packet UInt32 mFramesPerPacket; // the number of frames in each packet UInt32 mBytesPerFrame; // the number of bytes in a frame UInt32 mChannelsPerFrame; // the number of channels in each frame UInt32 mBitsPerChannel; // the number of bits in each channel }; typedef struct AudioStreamBasicDescription AudioStreamBasicDescription; */ // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // This is a simple playThru ioProc. It simply places the data in the input buffer back into the output buffer. // Watch out for feedback from Speakers to Microphone OSStatus appIOProc (AudioDeviceID inDevice, const AudioTimeStamp* inNow, const AudioBufferList* inInputData, const AudioTimeStamp* inInputTime, AudioBufferList* outOutputData, const AudioTimeStamp* inOutputTime, void* appGlobals) { appGlobalsPtr globals = appGlobals; int i; double phase = gAppGlobals.phase; double amp = gAppGlobals.amp; double pan = gAppGlobals.pan; double freq = gAppGlobals.freq * 2. * 3.14159265359 / globals->deviceFormat.mSampleRate; int numSamples = globals->deviceBufferSize / globals->deviceFormat.mBytesPerFrame; // assume floats for now.... float *out = outOutputData->mBuffers[0].mData; for (i=0; i<numSamples; ++i) { float wave = sin(phase) * amp; phase = phase + freq; *out++ = wave * (1.0-pan); *out++ = wave * pan; } gAppGlobals.phase = phase; return (kAudioHardwareNoError); } // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OSStatus StartPlayingThruHAL(appGlobalsPtr globals) { OSStatus err = kAudioHardwareNoError; if (globals->soundPlaying) return 0; globals->phase = 0.0; err = AudioDeviceAddIOProc(globals->device, appIOProc, (void *) globals); // setup our device with an IO proc if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) goto Bail; err = AudioDeviceStart(globals->device, appIOProc); // start playing sound through the device if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) goto Bail; globals->soundPlaying = true; // set the playing status global to true Bail: return (err); } // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OSStatus StopPlayingThruHAL(appGlobalsPtr globals) { OSStatus err = kAudioHardwareNoError; if (!globals->soundPlaying) return 0; err = AudioDeviceStop(globals->device, appIOProc); // stop playing sound through the device if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) goto Bail; err = AudioDeviceRemoveIOProc(globals->device, appIOProc); // remove the IO proc from the device if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) goto Bail; globals->soundPlaying = false; // set the playing status global to false Bail: return (err); } Sinewave.m // // a very simple Cocoa CoreAudio app // by James McCartney [email protected] www.audiosynth.com // // Sinewave - this class implements a sine oscillator with dezippered control of frequency, pan and amplitude // #import "Sinewave.h" // define a C struct from the Obj-C object so audio callback can access data typedef struct { @defs(Sinewave); } sinewavedef; // this is the audio processing callback. OSStatus appIOProc (AudioDeviceID inDevice, const AudioTimeStamp* inNow, const AudioBufferList* inInputData, const AudioTimeStamp* inInputTime, AudioBufferList* outOutputData, const AudioTimeStamp* inOutputTime, void* defptr) { sinewavedef* def = defptr; // get access to Sinewave's data int i; // load instance vars into registers double phase = def->phase; double amp = def->amp; double pan = def->pan; double freq = def->freq; double ampz = def->ampz; double panz = def->panz; double freqz = def->freqz; int numSamples = def->deviceBufferSize / def->deviceFormat.mBytesPerFrame; // assume floats for now.... float *out = outOutputData->mBuffers[0].mData; for (i=0; i<numSamples; ++i) { float wave = sin(phase) * ampz; // generate sine wave phase = phase + freqz; // increment phase // write output *out++ = wave * (1.0-panz); // left channel *out++ = wave * panz; // right channel // de-zipper controls panz = 0.001 * pan + 0.999 * panz; ampz = 0.001 * amp + 0.999 * ampz; freqz = 0.001 * freq + 0.999 * freqz; } // save registers back to object def->phase = phase; def->freqz = freqz; def->ampz = ampz; def->panz = panz; return kAudioHardwareNoError; } @implementation Sinewave - (void) setup { OSStatus err = kAudioHardwareNoError; UInt32 count; device = kAudioDeviceUnknown; initialized = NO; // get the default output device for the HAL count = sizeof(device); // it is required to pass the size of the data to be returned err = AudioHardwareGetProperty(kAudioHardwarePropertyDefaultOutputDevice, &count, (void *) &device); if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) { fprintf(stderr, "get kAudioHardwarePropertyDefaultOutputDevice error %ld\n", err); return; } // get the buffersize that the default device uses for IO count = sizeof(deviceBufferSize); // it is required to pass the size of the data to be returned err = AudioDeviceGetProperty(device, 0, false, kAudioDevicePropertyBufferSize, &count, &deviceBufferSize); if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) { fprintf(stderr, "get kAudioDevicePropertyBufferSize error %ld\n", err); return; } fprintf(stderr, "deviceBufferSize = %ld\n", deviceBufferSize); // get a description of the data format used by the default device count = sizeof(deviceFormat); // it is required to pass the size of the data to be returned err = AudioDeviceGetProperty(device, 0, false, kAudioDevicePropertyStreamFormat, &count, &deviceFormat); if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) { fprintf(stderr, "get kAudioDevicePropertyStreamFormat error %ld\n", err); return; } if (deviceFormat.mFormatID != kAudioFormatLinearPCM) { fprintf(stderr, "mFormatID != kAudioFormatLinearPCM\n"); return; } if (!(deviceFormat.mFormatFlags & kLinearPCMFormatFlagIsFloat)) { fprintf(stderr, "Sorry, currently only works with float format....\n"); return; } initialized = YES; fprintf(stderr, "mSampleRate = %g\n", deviceFormat.mSampleRate); fprintf(stderr, "mFormatFlags = %08lX\n", deviceFormat.mFormatFlags); fprintf(stderr, "mBytesPerPacket = %ld\n", deviceFormat.mBytesPerPacket); fprintf(stderr, "mFramesPerPacket = %ld\n", deviceFormat.mFramesPerPacket); fprintf(stderr, "mChannelsPerFrame = %ld\n", deviceFormat.mChannelsPerFrame); fprintf(stderr, "mBytesPerFrame = %ld\n", deviceFormat.mBytesPerFrame); fprintf(stderr, "mBitsPerChannel = %ld\n", deviceFormat.mBitsPerChannel); } - (void)setAmpVal:(double)val { amp = val; } - (void)setFreqVal:(double)val { freq = val * 2. * 3.14159265359 / deviceFormat.mSampleRate; } - (void)setPanVal:(double)val { pan = val; } - (BOOL)start { OSStatus err = kAudioHardwareNoError; sinewavedef *def; if (!initialized) return false; if (soundPlaying) return false; // initialize phase and de-zipper filters. phase = 0.0; freqz = freq; ampz = amp; panz = pan; def = (sinewavedef *)self; err = AudioDeviceAddIOProc(device, appIOProc, (void *) def); // setup our device with an IO proc if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) return false; err = AudioDeviceStart(device, appIOProc); // start playing sound through the device if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) return false; soundPlaying = true; // set the playing status global to true return true; } - (BOOL)stop { OSStatus err = kAudioHardwareNoError; if (!initialized) return false; if (!soundPlaying) return false; err = AudioDeviceStop(device, appIOProc); // stop playing sound through the device if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) return false; err = AudioDeviceRemoveIOProc(device, appIOProc); // remove the IO proc from the device if (err != kAudioHardwareNoError) return false; soundPlaying = false; // set the playing status global to false return true; } @end Can anyone help me compiling this example? I'd really appriciate it. Thanks

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• Refactoring a Single Rails Model with large methods & long join queries trying to do everything

  - by Kelseydh

  I have a working Ruby on Rails Model that I suspect is inefficient, hard to maintain, and full of unnecessary SQL join queries. I want to optimize and refactor this Model (Quiz.rb) to comply with Rails best practices, but I'm not sure how I should do it. The Rails app is a game that has Missions with many Stages. Users complete Stages by answering Questions that have correct or incorrect Answers. When a User tries to complete a stage by answering questions, the User gets a Quiz entry with many Attempts. Each Attempt records an Answer submitted for that Question within the Stage. A user completes a stage or mission by getting every Attempt correct, and their progress is tracked by adding a new entry to the UserMission & UserStage join tables. All of these features work, but unfortunately the Quiz.rb Model has been twisted to handle almost all of it exclusively. The callbacks began at 'Quiz.rb', and because I wasn't sure how to leave the Quiz Model during a multi-model update, I resorted to using Rails Console to have the @quiz instance variable via self.some_method do all the heavy lifting to retrieve every data value for the game's business logic; resulting in large extended join queries that "dance" all around the Database schema. The Quiz.rb Model that Smells: class Quiz < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user has_many :attempts, dependent: :destroy before_save :check_answer before_save :update_user_mission_and_stage accepts_nested_attributes_for :attempts, :reject_if => lambda { |a| a[:answer_id].blank? }, :allow_destroy => true #Checks every answer within each quiz, adding +1 for each correct answer #within a stage quiz, and -1 for each incorrect answer def check_answer stage_score = 0 self.attempts.each do |attempt| if attempt.answer.correct? == true stage_score += 1 elsif attempt.answer.correct == false stage_score - 1 end end stage_score end def winner return true end def update_user_mission_and_stage ####### #Step 1: Checks if UserMission exists, finds or creates one. #if no UserMission for the current mission exists, creates a new UserMission if self.user_has_mission? == false @user_mission = UserMission.new(user_id: self.user.id, mission_id: self.current_stage.mission_id, available: true) @user_mission.save else @user_mission = self.find_user_mission end ####### #Step 2: Checks if current UserStage exists, stops if true to prevent duplicate entry if self.user_has_stage? @user_mission.save return true else ####### ##Step 3: if step 2 returns false: ##Initiates UserStage creation instructions #checks for winner (winner actions need to be defined) if they complete last stage of last mission for a given orientation if self.passed? && self.is_last_stage? && self.is_last_mission? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission self.winner #NOTE: The rest are the same, but specify conditions that are available to add badges or other actions upon those conditions occurring: ##if user completes first stage of a mission elsif self.passed? && self.is_first_stage? && self.is_first_mission? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission #creates user badge for finishing first stage of first mission self.user.add_badge(5) self.user.activity_logs.create(description: "granted first-stage badge", type_event: "badge", value: "first-stage") #If user completes last stage of a given mission, creates a new UserMission elsif self.passed? && self.is_last_stage? && self.is_first_mission? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission #creates user badge for finishing first mission self.user.add_badge(6) self.user.activity_logs.create(description: "granted first-mission badge", type_event: "badge", value: "first-mission") elsif self.passed? create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission else self.passed? == false return true end end end #Creates a new UserStage record in the database for a successful Quiz question passing def create_user_stage_and_update_user_mission @nu_stage = @user_mission.user_stages.new(user_id: self.user.id, stage_id: self.current_stage.id) @nu_stage.save @user_mission.save self.user.add_points(50) end #Boolean that defines passing a stage as answering every question in that stage correct def passed? self.check_answer >= self.number_of_questions end #Returns the number of questions asked for that stage's quiz def number_of_questions self.attempts.first.answer.question.stage.questions.count end #Returns the current_stage for the Quiz, routing through 1st attempt in that Quiz def current_stage self.attempts.first.answer.question.stage end #Gives back the position of the stage relative to its mission. def stage_position self.attempts.first.answer.question.stage.position end #will find the user_mission for the current user and stage if it exists def find_user_mission self.user.user_missions.find_by_mission_id(self.current_stage.mission_id) end #Returns true if quiz was for the last stage within that mission #helpful for triggering actions related to a user completing a mission def is_last_stage? self.stage_position == self.current_stage.mission.stages.last.position end #Returns true if quiz was for the first stage within that mission #helpful for triggering actions related to a user completing a mission def is_first_stage? self.stage_position == self.current_stage.mission.stages_ordered.first.position end #Returns true if current user has a UserMission for the current stage def user_has_mission? self.user.missions.ids.include?(self.current_stage.mission.id) end #Returns true if current user has a UserStage for the current stage def user_has_stage? self.user.stages.include?(self.current_stage) end #Returns true if current user is on the last mission based on position within a given orientation def is_first_mission? self.user.missions.first.orientation.missions.by_position.first.position == self.current_stage.mission.position end #Returns true if current user is on the first stage & mission of a given orientation def is_last_mission? self.user.missions.first.orientation.missions.by_position.last.position == self.current_stage.mission.position end end My Question Currently my Rails server takes roughly 500ms to 1 sec to process single @quiz.save action. I am confident that the slowness here is due to sloppy code, not bad Database ERD design. What does a better solution look like? And specifically: Should I use join queries to retrieve values like I did here, or is it better to instantiate new objects within the model instead? Or am I missing a better solution? How should update_user_mission_and_stage be refactored to follow best practices? Relevant Code for Reference: quizzes_controller.rb w/ Controller Route Initiating Callback: class QuizzesController < ApplicationController before_action :find_stage_and_mission before_action :find_orientation before_action :find_question def show end def create @user = current_user @quiz = current_user.quizzes.new(quiz_params) if @quiz.save if @quiz.passed? if @mission.next_mission.nil? && @stage.next_stage.nil? redirect_to root_path, notice: "Congratulations, you have finished the last mission!" elsif @stage.next_stage.nil? redirect_to [@mission.next_mission, @mission.first_stage], notice: "Correct! Time for Mission #{@mission.next_mission.position}", info: "Starting next mission" else redirect_to [@mission, @stage.next_stage], notice: "Answer Correct! You passed the stage!" end else redirect_to [@mission, @stage], alert: "You didn't get every question right, please try again." end else redirect_to [@mission, @stage], alert: "Sorry. We were unable to save your answer. Please contact the admministrator." end @questions = @stage.questions.all end private def find_stage_and_mission @stage = Stage.find(params[:stage_id]) @mission = @stage.mission end def find_question @question = @stage.questions.find_by_id params[:id] end def quiz_params params.require(:quiz).permit(:user_id, :attempt_id, {attempts_attributes: [:id, :quiz_id, :answer_id]}) end def find_orientation @orientation = @mission.orientation @missions = @orientation.missions.by_position end end Overview of Relevant ERD Database Relationships: Mission - Stage - Question - Answer - Attempt <- Quiz <- User Mission - UserMission <- User Stage - UserStage <- User Other Models: Mission.rb class Mission < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :orientation has_many :stages has_many :user_missions, dependent: :destroy has_many :users, through: :user_missions #SCOPES scope :by_position, -> {order(position: :asc)} def stages_ordered stages.order(:position) end def next_mission self.orientation.missions.find_by_position(self.position.next) end def first_stage next_mission.stages_ordered.first end end Stage.rb: class Stage < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :mission has_many :questions, dependent: :destroy has_many :user_stages, dependent: :destroy has_many :users, through: :user_stages accepts_nested_attributes_for :questions, reject_if: :all_blank, allow_destroy: true def next_stage self.mission.stages.find_by_position(self.position.next) end end Question.rb class Question < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :stage has_many :answers, dependent: :destroy accepts_nested_attributes_for :answers, :reject_if => lambda { |a| a[:body].blank? }, :allow_destroy => true end Answer.rb: class Answer < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :question has_many :attempts, dependent: :destroy end Attempt.rb: class Attempt < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :answer belongs_to :quiz end User.rb: class User < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :school has_many :activity_logs has_many :user_missions, dependent: :destroy has_many :missions, through: :user_missions has_many :user_stages, dependent: :destroy has_many :stages, through: :user_stages has_many :orientations, through: :school has_many :quizzes, dependent: :destroy has_many :attempts, through: :quizzes def latest_stage_position self.user_missions.last.user_stages.last.stage.position end end UserMission.rb class UserMission < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :mission has_many :user_stages, dependent: :destroy end UserStage.rb class UserStage < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :stage belongs_to :user_mission end

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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• Expectations + Rewards = Innovation

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  “Innovation” is a heavy word. We regard those that embrace it as “Innovators”. We describe organizations as being “Innovative”. We hold those associated with the word in high regard, even though its dictionary definition is very simple: Introducing something new. What our culture has done is wrapped Innovation in white robes and a gold crown. Innovation is rarely just introducing something new. Innovations and innovators are typically associated with other terms: groundbreaking, genius, industry-changing, creative, leading. Being a true innovator and creating innovations are a big deal, and something companies try to strive for…or at least say they strive for. There’s huge value in being recognized as an innovator in an industry, since the idea is that innovation equates to increased profitability. IBM ran an ad a few years back that showed what their view of innovation is: “The point of innovation is to make actual money.” If the money aspect makes you feel uneasy, consider it another way: the point of innovation is to <insert payoff here>. Companies that innovate will be more successful. Non-profits that innovate can better serve their target clients. Governments that innovate can better provide services to their citizens. True innovation is not easy to come by though. As with anything in business, how well an organization will innovate is reliant on the employees it retains, the expectations placed on those employees, and the rewards available to them. In a previous blog post I talked about one formula: Right Employees + Happy Employees = Productive Employees I want to introduce a new one, that builds upon the previous one: Expectations + Rewards = Innovation  The level of innovation your organization will realize is directly associated with the expectations you place on your staff and the rewards you make available to them. Expectations We may feel uncomfortable with the idea of placing expectations on our staff, mainly because expectation has somewhat of a negative or cold connotation to it: “I expect you to act this way or else!” The problem is in the or-else part…we focus on the negative aspects of failing to meet expectations instead of looking at the positive side. “I expect you to act this way because it will produce <insert benefit here>”. Expectations should not be set to punish but instead be set to ensure quality. At a recent conference I spoke with some Microsoft employees who told me that you have five years from starting with the company to reach a “Senior” level. If you don’t, then you’re let go. The expectation Microsoft placed on their staff is that they should be working towards improving themselves, taking more responsibility, and thus ensure that there is a constant level of quality in the workforce. Rewards Let me be clear: a paycheck is not a reward. A paycheck is simply the employer’s responsibility in the employee/employer relationship. A paycheck will never be the key motivator to drive innovation. Offering employees something over and above their required compensation can spur them to greater performance and achievement. Working in the food service industry, this tactic was used again and again: whoever has the highest sales over lunch will receive a free lunch/gift certificate/entry into a draw/etc. There was something to strive for, to try beyond the baseline of what our serving jobs were. It was through this that innovative sales techniques would be tried and honed, with key servers being top sellers time and time again. At a code camp I spoke at, I was amazed to see that all the employees from one company receive $100 Visa gift cards as a thank you for taking time to speak. Again, offering something over and above that can give that extra push for employees. Rewards work. But what about the fairness angle? In the restaurant example I gave, there were servers that would never win the competition. They just weren’t good enough at selling and never seemed to get better. So should those that did work at performing better and produce more sales for the restaurant not get rewarded because those who weren’t working at performing better might get upset? Of course not! Organizations succeed because of their top performers and those that strive to join their ranks. The Expectation/Reward Graph While the Expectations + Rewards = Innovation formula may seem like a simple mathematics formula, there’s much more going under the hood. In fact there are three different outcomes that could occur based on what you put in as values for Expectations and Rewards. Consider the graph below and the descriptions that follow: Disgruntled – High Expectation, Low Reward I worked at a company where the mantra was “Company First, Because We Pay You”. Even today I still hear stories of how this sentiment continues to be perpetuated: They provide you a paycheck and a means to live, therefore you should always put them as your top priority. Of course, this is a huge imbalance in the expectation/reward equation. Why would anyone willingly meet high expectations of availability, workload, deadlines, etc. when there is no reward other than a paycheck to show for it? Remember: paychecks are not rewards! Instead, you see employees be disgruntled which not only affects the level of production but also the level of quality within an organization. It also means that you see higher turnover. Complacent – Low Expectation, Low Reward Complacency is a systemic problem that typically exists throughout all levels of an organization. With no real expectations or rewards, nobody needs to excel. In fact, those that do try to innovate, improve, or introduce new things into the organization might be shunned or pushed out by the rest of the staff who are just doing things the same way they’ve always done it. The bigger issue for the organization with low/low values is that at best they’ll never grow beyond their current size (and may shrink actually), and at worst will cease to exist. Entitled – Low Expectation, High Reward It’s one thing to say you have the best people and reward them as such, but its another thing to actually have the best people and reward them as such. Organizations with Entitled employees are the former: their organization provides them with all types of comforts, benefits, and perks. But there’s no requirement before the rewards are dolled out, and there’s no short-list of who receives the rewards. Everyone in the company is treated the same and is given equal share of the spoils. Entitlement is actually almost identical with Complacency with one notable difference: just try to introduce higher expectations into an entitled organization! Entitled employees have been spoiled for so long that they can’t fathom having rewards taken from them, or having to achieve specific levels of performance before attaining them. Those running the organization also buy in to the Entitled sentiment, feeling that they must persist the same level of comforts to appease their staff…even though the quality of the employee pool may be suspect. Innovative – High Expectation, High Reward Finally we have the Innovative organization which places high expectations but also provides high rewards. This organization gets it: if you truly want the best employees you need to apply equal doses of pressure and praise. Realize that I’m not suggesting crazy overtime or un-realistic working conditions. I do not agree with the “Glengary-Glenross” method of encouragement. But as anyone who follows sports can tell you, the teams that win are the ones where the coaches push their players to be their best; to achieve new levels of performance that they didn’t know they could receive. And the result for the players is more money, fame, and opportunity. It’s in this environment that organizations can focus on innovation – true innovation that builds the business and allows everyone involved to truly benefit. In Closing Organizations love to use the word “Innovation” and its derivatives, but very few actually do innovate. For many, the term has just become another marketing buzzword to lump in with all the other business terms that get overused. But for those organizations that truly get the value of innovation, they will be the ones surging forward while other companies simply fade into the background. And they will be the organizations that expect more from their employees, and give them their just rewards.

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• Mobile BI Comes of Age

  - by rich.clayton(at)oracle.com

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

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• Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

  From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others...  General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon!  Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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