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• Should I convert data arrays to objects in PHP in a CouchDB/Ajax app?

  - by karlthorwald

  I find myself converting between array and object all the time in PHP application that uses couchDB and Ajax. Of course I am also converting objects to JSON and back (for sometimes couchdb but mostly Ajax), but this is not so much disturbing my workflow. At the present I have php objects that are returned by the CouchDB modules I use and on the other hand I have the old habbit to return arrays like array("error"="not found","data"=$dataObj) from my functions. This leads to a mixed occurence of real php objects and nested arrays and I cast with (object) or (array) if necessary. The worst thing is that I know more or less by heart what a function returns, but not what type (array or object), so I often run into type errors. My plan is now to always cast arrays to objects before returning from a function. Of course this implies a lot of refactoring. Is this the right way to go? What about the conversion overhead? Other ideas or tips?

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• Abort early in a fold

  - by Heptic

  What's the best way to terminate a fold early? As a simplified example, imagine I want to sum up the numbers in an Iterable, but if I encounter something I'm not expecting (say an odd number) I might want to terminate. This is a first approximation def sumEvenNumbers(nums: Iterable[Int]): Option[Int] = { nums.foldLeft (Some(0): Option[Int]) { case (None, _) => None case (Some(s), n) if n % 2 == 0 => Some(s + n) case (Some(_), _) => None } } However, this solution is pretty ugly (as in, if I did a .foreach and a return -- it'd be much cleaner and clearer) and worst of all, it traverses the entire iterable even if it encounters a non-even number. So what would be the best way to write a fold like this, that terminates early? Should I just go and write this recursively, or is there a more accepted way?

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• Would you tell your prospective boss your SO username?

  - by Sebi

  Today I met a friend who is also using stackoverflow. He had a job interview today at a small business and during the interview, the prospective boss asked him how he assures that he's alawys up-to-date concerning technical questions and what he's doing to seek for a solution for a problem he can't solve by its own. Besides some magazines, journals, books and blogs my friend also mentioned stackoverflow. The prospective boss seems very interested about that and asked him if he could tell him his username. It appears that was the most difficult during the whole interview ;) Would you tell your prospective boss your username? An the pro side one can mention that the boss sees that you're very involved in your business and community but on the other hand it is a really private thing and you cant post anymore in thread like "what was the worst working environment?" My friend circumnaviagted this question by a rather lame answer (more or less: i use autologin, thats why i have to check the username later at home, ill maybe send you an email)

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• Reflection alternative for switch on enum in order to select namespace/class

  - by Am

  Hi, I have an interface named IHarvester. There are 3 implementations of that interface, each under their own namespace: Google Yahoo Bing A HarvesterManager uses the given harvester. It knows the interface and all 3 implementations. I want some way of letting the class user say in which harvester it wants to use. And in the code select that implementation, without a switch-case implementation. Can reflection save my day? Here is the code bits: // repeat for each harvester namespace Harvester.Google { public abstract class Fetcher : BaseHarvester, IInfoHarvester {...} } public enum HarvestingSource { Google, Yahoo, Bing, } class HarvesterManager { public HarvestingSource PreferedSource {get;set;} public HarvestSomthing() { switch (PreferedSource) .... // awful... } } Thanks. I will give my 2 cents of why I want to change this. There several people writing harvesters, I want them to focus only on building more harvesters, without ever needing to update the enum, or at worst, update only the enum.

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• If you could remove one feature of php to help newbies what would it be?

  - by Chris

  If you could remove one feature from PHP so as to discourage, prevent or otherwise help stop newer programmers develop bad habits or practices, or, to stop them falling into traps that might hinder their development skills what would it be and why? Now, before the votes to close it's not as open-ended as you might think. I'm not asking purely what is the worst feature or what feature would you really like to remove purely arbitrarily. Yes, there may not be one correct answer but I suspect there will be many similar answers which will provide me with a good idea of things I might be doing wrong, even inadvertently.

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• Sort vector<int>(n) in O(n) time using O(m) space?

  - by Adam

  I have a vector<unsigned int> vec of size n. Each element in vec is in the range [0, m], no duplicates, and I want to sort vec. Is it possible to do better than O(n log n) time if you're allowed to use O(m) space? In the average case m is much larger than n, in the worst case m == n. Ideally I want something O(n). I get the feeling that there's a bucket sort-ish way to do this: unsigned int aux[m]; aux[vec[i]] = i; Somehow extract the permutation and permute vec. I'm stuck on how to do 3. In my application m is on the order of 16k. However this sort is in the inner loops and accounts for a significant portion of my runtime.

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• How to break up a table holding 100mil+ number of records?

  - by Chiao

  We're currently storing answers for 52 predefined questions for our clients in our matchmaking site. we have over 30million unique users summing up for worst case of a 52x30million rows. Of these 52 questions, 11 are required and always answered. Our previous solution was to open an answer table for each question. This solution distributed our answer rows for faster insert/delete/update. But it also caused us an unconventional programming such as dynamically opening a table each time a question is added/updated, or removing an answer table if it was to be destroyed permanently. We want to come up with a better solution for our third version but could't get very far yet. Any ideas to accomplish this in any other, perhaps a more conventional, way?

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• SQLAuthority News – MS Access Database is the Way to Go – April 1st Humor

  - by pinaldave

  First of all, today is April 1- April Fool’s Day, so I have written this post for some light entertainment. My friend has just sent me an email about why a person should go for Access Database. For a short background, I used to be an MS Access user once (I will not call myself MS Access DBA), and I must say I had a good time with Database at that time. As time passed by, I moved from MS Access to SQL Server. Well, as for my friend’s email, his reasons considering MS Access usage really made me laugh. MS Access may have a few points where it totally makes sense to use it. However, in the email that I received, there was not a single reason which was valid.  In fact, I thought it is an April 1st joke- just delivered a little earlier. Let us see some of the reasons from that email. Thanks to Mahesh Bhesania for sending this email to me. MS Access comes with lots of free stuff, e.g. MS Excel MS Access is the most preferred desktop database system MS Access can import data from MS Excel and SQL Server MS Access provides a real time database MS Access has a free IDE-to-VB Script MS Access fits well in your hard drive I actually think that the above points are either incorrect beliefs of some users, or someone just wrote them to give some laughter with such inaccurate data. And, for the same reason I decided to browse the Internet and do some research on MS Access database to verify my thoughts. While searching on this subject, I found the following two interesting statements from the site: Microsoft Access Database, Why Choose It? Other software manufacturers are more likely to provide interfaces to MS Access than any other desktop database system Microsoft Access consulting rates are typically lower for Access consultants compared to Oracle or SQL Server consultants The second one is may be the worst reason for you to switch to MS Access if you are already an SQL Server consultant. With this cartoon, have you ever felt like you were one of these chickens at some point in time? I guess that the moment might have just happened before the minute we say “I guess we were on the same page?” Does this mean we are IN the same table, or ON the same table?! (I accept bad joke!) It is All Fools’ Day after all, so just laugh! If you have something funny but non-offensive to share, just  leave your comment here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com), Cartoon source unknown. Filed under: Software Development, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: MS ACCESS

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• Desktop Fun: Triple Monitor Wallpaper Collection Series 1

  - by Asian Angel

  Triple monitor setups provide spacious amounts of screen real-estate but can be extremely frustrating to find good wallpapers for. Today we present the first in a series of wallpaper collections to help decorate your triple monitor setup with lots of wallpaper goodness. Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution. Special Note: The screen resolution sizes available for each of these wallpapers has been included to help you match them up to your individual settings as easily as possible. All images shown here are thumbnail screenshots of the largest size available for download. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, and 4800*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4800*1200, and 5040*1050. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, 5760*1200, and 7680*1600. Available in the following resolutions: 3840*960, 3840*1024, 4096*1024, 4320*900, 4800*1200, 5040*1050, and 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 5760*1200. Available in the following resolutions: 5760*1200. More Triple Monitor Goodness Beautiful 3 Screen Multi-Monitor Space Wallpaper Span the same wallpaper across multiple monitors or use a different wallpaper for each. Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop in Windows 7, Vista or XP For more wallpapers be certain to see our great collections in the Desktop Fun section. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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• Agile isn’t always Agile

  - by BuckWoody

  I want to make a disclaimer before I dive into this topic – At Microsoft we use all kinds of development methodologies, and I’ve worked in lots of other shops using lots of methodologies. This is one of those “religious” topics like which programming language or database is best, and is bound to generate some heat. But this isn’t pointed towards one particular event or company. But I really don’t like Agile. In particular, I really don’t like Scrum. Let me explain. Agile is a methodology for developing software that emphasizes adapting to change more so than the traditional “waterfall” method of developing software. Within Agile is a process called a “scrum” meeting. The pitch goes that in this quick, stand-up meeting the people involved in the development project (which should include the DBA, but very often doesn’t) go around the room stating what they are working on, when that will be finished and what is keeping them from getting finished (“blockers”, these are called). Sounds all very non-threatening – we’re just “enabling” the developers to work more efficiently. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Except it doesn’t work. In my experience (and yours might be VERY different) this just turns into a micro-management environment, where devs have to defend their daily work. Of all the work environments I hate the most, micro-management environments are THE worst. I don’t like workign in them, and I don’t like creating them. The other issue I have with Scrum is that it makes your whole team task-focused. Everyone wants to make sure that they are not the “long pole” in the meeting (meaning that they aren’t the one that gets all the attention) so they only focus on safe, quick tasks. And although you have all of the boxes checked, the project does not go well at all – even when it does finish. Before you comment (and please do comment) I fully realize that Agile <> Scrum. But in my experience, it sometimes turns into that. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Do unit tests sometimes break encapsulation?

  - by user1288851

  I very often hear the following: "If you want to test private methods, you'd better put that in another class and expose it." While sometimes that's the case and we have a hiding concept inside our class, other times you end up with classes that have the same attributes (or, worst, every attribute of one class become a argument on a method in the other class) and exposes functionality that is, in fact, implementation detail. Specially on TDD, when you refactor a class with public methods out of a previous tested class, that class is now part of your interface, but has no tests to it (since you refactored it, and is a implementation detail). Now, I may be not finding an obvious better answer, but if my answer is the "correct", that means that sometimes writting unit tests can break encapsulation, and divide the same responsibility into different classes. A simple example would be testing a setter method when a getter is not actually needed for anything in the real code. Please when aswering don't provide simple answers to specific cases I may have written. Rather, try to explain more of the generic case and theoretical approach. And this is neither language specific. Thanks in advance. EDIT: The answer given by Matthew Flynn was really insightful, but didn't quite answer the question. Altough he made the fair point that you either don't test private methods or extract them because they really are other concern and responsibility (or at least that was what I could understand from his answer), I think there are situations where unit testing private methods is useful. My primary example is when you have a class that has one responsibility but the output (or input) that it gives (takes) is just to complex. For example, a hashing function. There's no good way to break a hashing function apart and mantain cohesion and encapsulation. However, testing a hashing function can be really tough, since you would need to calculate by hand (you can't use code calculation to test code calculation!) the hashing, and test multiple cases where the hash changes. In that way (and this may be a question worth of its own topic) I think private method testing is the best way to handle it. Now, I'm not sure if I should ask another question, or ask it here, but are there any better way to test such complex output (input)? OBS: Please, if you think I should ask another question on that topic, leave a comment. :)

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• Do I need to match hardware on a Mac to my PC to get the same user experience?

  - by Darth

  I've been playing around with the thought of moving from a PC to a Mac. if you don't want to read this, skip to the "upgrade options" My current setup Most of my time I spent moving back and forth between Linux and Windows. During the last upgrade to Vista, I got myself pc with Core 2 Quad, 8GB of RAM and GeForce 9800GTX+. Currently I'm running dual boot between Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows Vista x64. Most of my work, around 80%, I can do on Ubuntu, which is mostly Ruby/Java programming. If that was all I needed, Ubuntu would be really great. However, I also do quite a lot of Photography and Design, which forces me to use Adobe software (not only Photoshop). I also work with Wacom Intuos4 tablet, which doesn't really have great support on Linux machines. I've tried virtualization both ways (Linux in Win and Win in Linux), but neither was anywhere near satisfying. These are those of many many reasons I want to move to OS X. Upgrade options This is how I see my upgrade options: Mac Mini - cheapest solution, but worst performance iMac - more expensive, better performing with second LCD for free Mac Pro - could match my current PC performance, currently outside of the price range When I compare the Mac hardware vs my current PC, it will be always worse, unless I decide to pump in a lot of money. The question that comes to my head, do I need to match my current PC hardware to get the same user experience with a Mac? If I look at it from the Vista point of view, 2GB RAM is as low as it gets, 4GB is usable ... and the 8GB runs very smoothly. PC HW != Mac HW? If I bought the Mac Mini for roughly the same price I paid for my PC (Core 2 Quad with 8GB RAM), I'd get Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM. But I don't want to run Vista on it, so I can't compare the hardware directly. Say that I want to do the same things on the Mac Mini as I do on my PC, eg. open up 50 tabs in Google Chrome and start working with a large PSD in Photoshop (couple hundred MB), would running on Mac OS X compensate for the lower hardware performance? My point is, that if I'm about to upgrade, I wouldn't like to upgrade to hardware that runs a lot slower. Good analogy for this is Vista vs Ubuntu, where you can run Ubuntu smoothly on a low end laptop, but in Vista, you'd be happy to open a browser. Does the same principle apply to OS X?

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• On Turning 30&hellip;

  - by MOSSLover

  I know I am not a wise old sage like some people in the community.  I just turned 30 however I feel like all my years looking back have changed me.  My collective experiences and thoughts have given me a different perspective on life recently.  Seven months ago my head was in a gutter and since then a lot of things have happened.  I was always the weird kid in the corner reading Star Trek books.  When I was in elementary school I thought that kids would throw me birthday parties out of pity because I was the poor kid who everyone hated.  I am no longer that person.  I realized that during the worst possible period between my 29th and 30th year when I hit rock bottom.  You all know the insane story as I’ve told it two billion times over.  Honestly it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life time, because many things would not have happened.  My friends came through for me at every given moment people from all over were checking up on me all over the world.  I fell and I landed on a bunch of people it was awesome.  I landed on family and friends who I thought I was never close enough to talk about these things.  They helped me realize I had a ton of unfulfilled dreams.  I got to move to New York City one of the greatest cities in the universe.  I got to do whatever I wanted without judgment from anyone.  I got to meet some great people at a few meetup groups in the past few months.  I got to meet an awesome person that I have been dating for 3 months.  I am trying to run for the 8 billionth time and keep up with it.  I got to go to Europe and next week for the first time New Orleans.  I got renewed for MVP for 2012.  I am grateful for all the people and things in my life.  I understand that sometimes when things seem bad you can always seek friends and family.  They will always help me.  I have to learn to lean on people sometimes just how they occasionally lean on me.  That is the biggest thing I have learned from the decade of 20 to 30.  I hope that 30 to 40 will be the best decade.  I hope that I can continue to grow.  I will catch you all later. Technorati Tags: Turning 30,Wisdom

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• Fair Comments

  - by Tony Davis

  To what extent is good code self-documenting? In one of the most entertaining sessions I saw at the recent PASS summit, Jeremiah Peschka (blog | twitter) got a laugh out of a sleepy post-lunch audience with the following remark: "Some developers say good code is self-documenting; I say, get off my team" I silently applauded the sentiment. It's not that all comments are useful, but that I mistrust the basic premise that "my code is so clearly written, it doesn't need any comments". I've read many pieces describing the road to self-documenting code, and my problem with most of them is that they feed the myth that comments in code are a sign of weakness. They aren't; in fact, used correctly I'd say they are essential. Regardless of how far intelligent naming can get you in describing what the code does, or how well any accompanying unit tests can explain to your fellow developers why it works that way, it's no excuse not to document fully the public interfaces to your code. Maybe I just mixed with the wrong crowd while learning my favorite language, but when I open a stored procedure I lose the will even to read it unless I see a big Phil Factor- or Jeff Moden-style header summarizing in plain English what the code does, how it fits in to the broader application, and a usage example. This public interface describes the high-level process and should explain the role of the code, clearly, for fellow developers, language non-experts, and even any non-technical stake holders in the project. When you step into the body of the code, the low-level details, then I agree that the rules are somewhat different; especially when code is subject to frequent refactoring that can quickly render comments redundant or misleading. At their worst, here, inline comments are sticking plaster to cover up the scars caused by poor naming conventions, failure in clarity when mapping a complex domain into code, or just by not entirely understanding the problem (/ this is the clever part). If you design and refactor your code carefully so that it is as simple as possible, your functions do one thing only, you avoid having two completely different algorithms in the same piece of code, and your functions, classes and variables are intelligently named, then, yes, the need for inline comments should be minimal. And yet, even given this, I'd still argue that many languages (T-SQL certainly being one) just don't lend themselves to readability when performing even moderately-complex tasks. If the algorithm is complex, I still like to see the occasional helpful comment. Please, therefore, be as liberal as you see fit in the detail of the comments you apply to this editorial, for like code it is bound to increase its' clarity and usefulness. Cheers, Tony.

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• Hey You! Stop Using the Apply Button and Just Click OK! [Geek Rants]

  - by The Geek

  As a computer geek, I often find myself helping people, and watching them change settings on their PC… and they almost always click the Apply button, and then the OK button. Why? Whenever you encounter a dialog box in Windows, there are the standard OK, Cancel, Apply buttons—but you don’t actually have to click the Apply button first. The OK button does the same thing, saves the settings, and then closes the dialog box… saving you an extra click. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourself. Only the worst possible application won’t behave that way, and you probably don’t want to use that type of application to begin with. The only exception to this rule is a multiple tab dialog box, on a badly written application. Sometimes… your settings on one tab won’t stick unless you click Apply. Note that in this particular case, you can make changes in any one of the tabs, and they will carry through without having to click Apply, because this dialog window is well written. We’re just using the screenshot as an example of a multiple tab setting interface. So now that you know better, you can tell us… do you always use the Apply button first? Have you ever found an instance where it behaves differently? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Got Awesome Skills? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?Customize Your Windows Vista Logon ScreenUse Outlook Rules to Prevent "Oh No!" After Sending EmailsGot Awesome Geek Skills? The How-To Geek is Looking for WritersQuick Firefox UI Tweaks TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems

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• What is Database Continuous Integration?

  - by SQLDev

  Although not everyone is practicing continuous integration, many have at least heard of the concept. A recent poll on www.simple-talk.com indicates that 40% of respondents are employing the technique. It is widely accepted that the earlier issues are identified in the development process, the lower the cost to the development process. The worst case scenario, of course, is for the bug to be found by the customer following the product release. A number of Agile development best practices have evolved to combat this problem early in the development process, including pair programming, code inspections and unit testing. Continuous integration is one such Agile concept that tackles the problem at the point of committing a change to source control. This can alternatively be run on a regular schedule. This triggers a sequence of events that compiles the code and performs a variety of tests. Often the continuous integration process is regarded as a build validation test, and if issues were to be identified at this stage, the testers would simply not 'waste their time ' and touch the build at all. Such a ‘broken build’ will trigger an alert and the development team’s number one priority should be to resolve the issue. How application code is compiled and tested as part of continuous integration is well understood. However, this isn’t so clear for databases. Indeed, before I cover the mechanics of implementation, we need to decide what we mean by database continuous integration. For me, database continuous integration can be implemented as one or more of the following: 1)      Your application code is being compiled and tested. You therefore need a database to be maintained at the corresponding version. 2)      Just as a valid application should compile, so should the database. It should therefore be possible to build a new database from scratch. 3)     Likewise, it should be possible to generate an upgrade script to take your already deployed databases to the latest version. I will be covering these in further detail in future blogs. In the meantime, more information can be found in the whitepaper linked off www.red-gate.com/ci If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment to this blog post.

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• What is Database Continuous Integration?

  - by David Atkinson

  Although not everyone is practicing continuous integration, many have at least heard of the concept. A recent poll on www.simple-talk.com indicates that 40% of respondents are employing the technique. It is widely accepted that the earlier issues are identified in the development process, the lower the cost to the development process. The worst case scenario, of course, is for the bug to be found by the customer following the product release. A number of Agile development best practices have evolved to combat this problem early in the development process, including pair programming, code inspections and unit testing. Continuous integration is one such Agile concept that tackles the problem at the point of committing a change to source control. This can alternatively be run on a regular schedule. This triggers a sequence of events that compiles the code and performs a variety of tests. Often the continuous integration process is regarded as a build validation test, and if issues were to be identified at this stage, the testers would simply not 'waste their time ' and touch the build at all. Such a ‘broken build’ will trigger an alert and the development team’s number one priority should be to resolve the issue. How application code is compiled and tested as part of continuous integration is well understood. However, this isn’t so clear for databases. Indeed, before I cover the mechanics of implementation, we need to decide what we mean by database continuous integration. For me, database continuous integration can be implemented as one or more of the following: 1)      Your application code is being compiled and tested. You therefore need a database to be maintained at the corresponding version. 2)      Just as a valid application should compile, so should the database. It should therefore be possible to build a new database from scratch. 3)     Likewise, it should be possible to generate an upgrade script to take your already deployed databases to the latest version. I will be covering these in further detail in future blogs. In the meantime, more information can be found in the whitepaper linked off www.red-gate.com/ci If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly or post a comment to this blog post.

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• The First Annual Crappy Code Games

  - by Testas

  SQLBits announced some super-exciting news! A tie-up with our platinum sponsor, Fusion-io. Together we'll be running a series of events called "The Crappy Code Games" where SQL Server developers will compete to write the worst-performing code and win some very cool prizes including:   •        Gold: A hands-on, high performance flying day for two at Ultimate High plus Fusion-io flight jackets•        Silver: One day racing experience at Palmer Sports where you will drive seven different high performance cars•        Bronze: Pure Tech Racing 10 person package at PTR’s F1 racing facility includes FI tees, food and drinks. …plus iPods, Windows Mobile phones, X-box 360s, t-shirts and much more. There will be two qualifying events in Manchester on March 17th and London on March 31st, and the third qualifier as well as the grand finale will be held in the evening of Thursday April 7th at SQLBits. And if that isn’t cool enough, Fusion-io's Chief Scientist Steve Wozniak (yes, that Steve Wozniak, tech industry legend and co-founder of Apple) will be on hand in Brighton to hand out the prizes! If you'd like to take part you'll need to register, and since places are limited we recommend you do so right away. For more details and to register, go to http://www.crappycodegames.com/ The Games: In conjunction with SQL Bits, dbA-thletes (that’s you) will compete  head-to-head in one of three separate qualifying events to be held in Manchester, London and Brighton.  Four separate SQL  rounds make up the evening’s Games, and will challenge you to write code that pushes the boundaries of SQL performance.  The four events are: ?  The High Jump: Generate the highest I/O per second ?  The 100 m dash: Cumulative highest number of I/O’s in 60 seconds ?  The SSIS-athon: Load one billion row fact table in the shortest time ?  The Marathon: Generate the highest MB per second in 60 seconds

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• Appropriate response when client empowered with CMS destroys content to his own will

  - by dukeofgaming

  So, I just recently closed a website project that pretty much was The Oatmeals' Design Hell, but with content. The client loved the site at the beginning but started getting other people involved and mercilessly bombarding us with their opinions. We served a carefully thought content strategy (which the client approved) and extremely curated copywriting that took us four months after at least 5 requirement changes (new content, new objectives for the business, changed offerings, new mindfaps, etc.) that required us to rewrite the content about 3 times. The client never gave timely feedback even though we kept the process open for him and his people to see (content being developed transparently in Google Docs). Near the end of the project he still wanted to make changes but wanted us to finish already (there are not enough words in the world to even try to make sense of this). So I explained to him the obvious implications of the never-ending requirement changes and advised him to take the time to gather his thoughts with his own team and see the new content introduced as a new content maintenance project. He happily accepted, but on the day of training/delivery things went very wrong and we have no idea why. The client didn't even allow the site to be out for a week with the content we developed for him and quickly replaced us with a Joomla savvy intern so that he completely destroy the content with shallow, unstructured, tasteless and plain wordsmithing (and I'm not even being visceral). Worst insult of all, he revoked our access from his server and the deployed CMS not even having passed 10 minutes of being given his administrator account (we realized the day after that he did it in our own office, the nerve!). Everybody involved in the team is enraged and insulted. I never want to see this happen again. So, to try to make sense of this situation and avoid it in the future with new clients I have two concrete questions: Is there even an appropriate course of action with a client like this?, or is he just not worth the trouble of analyzing (blindly hoping this never repeats again). In the exercise to try and blame ourselves instead of the client and take this as a lesson of... something, how should we set expectations for new clients about the working terms, process and final product so that they are discouraged from mauling the content to their own contempt once they get the codes to the nukes (access to the CMS)?

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• What Is Nuclear Meltdown?

  - by Gopinath

  Japan was first hit by a massive earth quake, then a ruthless tsunami washed away thousands of homes and now they fear the worst – meltdown of nuclear power stations in the quake hit year. Nuclear meltdowns are horrifying – remember the Chernobyl incident in Russia? The Chernobyl reactor meltdown released 400 times more radio active material than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The effects of nuclear meltdowns are beyond imagination of a common man, thousands of people loose their lives and many more lakhs of people suffer with radiation related diseases for many years. Nuclear Meltdowns are dangerous, but how do they happen? What causes a nuclear meltdown? In simple terms – Nuclear meltdown is an accident that happens due to severe overheating of a nuclear reactor and results in release of nuclear radiation into the environment.  How A Nuclear Meltdown Happens? According to Wikipedia A meltdown occurs when a severe failure of a nuclear power plant system prevents proper cooling of the reactor core, to the extent that the nuclear fuel assemblies overheat and melt. A meltdown is considered very serious because of the potential that radioactive materials could be released into the environment. The fuel assemblies in a reactor core can melt if heat is not removed. A nuclear reactor does not have to remain critical for a core damage incident to occur, because decay heat continues to heat the reactor fuel assemblies after the reactor has shut down, though this heat decreases with time. A core damage accident is caused by the loss of sufficient cooling for the nuclear fuel within the reactor core. The reason may be one of several factors, including a loss of pressure control accident, a loss of coolant accident (LOCA), an uncontrolled power excursion or, in some types, a fire within the reactor core. Failures in control systems may cause a series of events resulting in loss of cooling. Contemporary safety principles of defense in depth, ensure that multiple layers of safety systems are always present to make such accidents unlikely. Video – What Causes Nuclear Meltdown AlJazeera news has a good analysis on feared nuclear meltdown of Japan’s nuclear plants and also an animation on what causes Nuclear Meltdown. cc image credit: flickr/jtjdt This article titled,What Is Nuclear Meltdown?, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Space partitioning when everything is moving

  - by Roy T.

  Background Together with a friend I'm working on a 2D game that is set in space. To make it as immersive and interactive as possible we want there to be thousands of objects freely floating around, some clustered together, others adrift in empty space. Challenge To unburden the rendering and physics engine we need to implement some sort of spatial partitioning. There are two challenges we have to overcome. The first challenge is that everything is moving so reconstructing/updating the data structure has to be extremely cheap since it will have to be done every frame. The second challenge is the distribution of objects, as said before there might be clusters of objects together and vast bits of empty space and to make it even worse there is no boundary to space. Existing technologies I've looked at existing techniques like BSP-Trees, QuadTrees, kd-Trees and even R-Trees but as far as I can tell these data structures aren't a perfect fit since updating a lot of objects that have moved to other cells is relatively expensive. What I've tried I made the decision that I need a data structure that is more geared toward rapid insertion/update than on giving back the least amount of possible hits given a query. For that purpose I made the cells implicit so each object, given it's position, can calculate in which cell(s) it should be. Then I use a HashMap that maps cell-coordinates to an ArrayList (the contents of the cell). This works fairly well since there is no memory lost on 'empty' cells and its easy to calculate which cells to inspect. However creating all those ArrayLists (worst case N) is expensive and so is growing the HashMap a lot of times (although that is slightly mitigated by giving it a large initial capacity). Problem OK so this works but still isn't very fast. Now I can try to micro-optimize the JAVA code. However I'm not expecting too much of that since the profiler tells me that most time is spent in creating all those objects that I use to store the cells. I'm hoping that there are some other tricks/algorithms out there that make this a lot faster so here is what my ideal data structure looks like: The number one priority is fast updating/reconstructing of the entire data structure Its less important to finely divide the objects into equally sized bins, we can draw a few extra objects and do a few extra collision checks if that means that updating is a little bit faster Memory is not really important (PC game)

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• Am I experienced enough to learn and develop immediately using Ruby on Rails?

  - by acheong87

  General Question I understand that discussions revolving around questions of this form run the risk of becoming too specific to help others. So, perhaps a better, general question would be: What kind of experience, if any, translates easily to Ruby on Rails; and if none, then what's the learning curve like, in comparison to other popular languages? Background I have the opportunity to build a website using whatever technologies I wish to use. It's a fairly simple website, for listing products, taking payments, managing customer data, providing a back-end portal for employees to manage data, possibly hooking in flight information (the products are travel related), possibly integrating a blog and all the social-networking goodies. Specific Problem I have to let the client know by tonight whether I'm interested in taking up this project, before he talks to other potential developers, but I'm on the fence. I already work a full-time C++ development job, so the money doesn't do it for me. It's the opportunity to (be paid to) learn some new technologies and to have a real, running product in the end. I've heard and read great things about Ruby, and am really intrigued. I zipped through some introductory Ruby tutorials, no sweat. However I found the Rails tutorials a little overwhelming, especially not being able to try it out anywhere. And researching Rails hosts like Heroku and EngineYard makes me think that maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into. The ship's leaving port! I wish I had more time to learn, better yet play with the language, but I have to decide soon! Should I venture or pass? Additional Details My experiences are in C/C++/Tcl/Perl/PHP/jQuery, and basic knowledge of Java/C#. I didn't study C.S. formally so I wasn't exposed to design principles, programming paradigms, etc., which is my greatest concern. Will my lack of understanding in this realm make RoR frustrating to learn? Will it be so incompatible with a C++ "way" of thinking that I'll wish I never started? Am I putting my client at risk by attempting this? If it helps, I'm quick to learn new things (self-taught so far) and care a great deal about correctness, using things for their intended purposes, and so on. I've read numerous recommendations of Agile Development with Rails and would love to read it (though perhaps, while developing in parallel, for shortness of time). Worse comes to worst, I'd give up and do the standard LAMP gig, of course, not charging the client for wasted time. But I'm hoping to avoid the project altogether if it's gonna come down to that! Thanks in advance for any tips, insights, votes of confidence, votes of discouragement (for the better), and such.

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• Brendan Gregg's "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud"

  - by user12608550

  Long ago, the prerequisite UNIX performance book was Adrian Cockcroft's 1994 classic, Sun Performance and Tuning: Sparc & Solaris, later updated in 1998 as Java and the Internet. As Solaris evolved to include the invaluable DTrace observability features, new essential performance references have been published, such as Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (2006)  by McDougal, Mauro, and Gregg, and DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (2011), also by Mauro and Gregg. Much has occurred in Solaris Land since those books appeared, notably Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 and the demise of the OpenSolaris community. But operating system technologies have continued to improve markedly in recent years, driven by stunning advances in multicore processor architecture, virtualization, and the massive scalability requirements of cloud computing. A new performance reference was needed, and I eagerly waited for something that thoroughly covered modern, distributed computing performance issues from the ground up. Well, there's a new classic now, authored yet again by Brendan Gregg, former Solaris kernel engineer at Sun and now Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud is a modern, very comprehensive guide to general system performance principles and practices, as well as a highly detailed reference for specific UNIX and Linux observability tools used to examine and diagnose operating system behaviour.  It provides thorough definitions of terms, explains performance diagnostic Best Practices and "Worst Practices" (called "anti-methods"), and covers key observability tools including DTrace, SystemTap, and all the traditional UNIX utilities like vmstat, ps, iostat, and many others. The book focuses on operating system performance principles and expands on these with respect to Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS are cited), and to Solaris and its derivatives [1]; it is not directed at any one OS so it is extremely useful as a broad performance reference. The author goes beyond the intricacies of performance analysis and shows how to interpret and visualize statistical information gathered from the observability tools.  It's often difficult to extract understanding from voluminous rows of text output, and techniques are provided to assist with summarizing, visualizing, and interpreting the performance data. Gregg includes myriad useful references from the system performance literature, including a "Who's Who" of contributors to this great body of diagnostic tools and methods. This outstanding book should be required reading for UNIX and Linux system administrators as well as anyone charged with diagnosing OS performance issues.  Moreover, the book can easily serve as a textbook for a graduate level course in operating systems [2]. [1] Solaris 11, of course, and Joyent's SmartOS (developed from OpenSolaris) [2] Gregg has taught system performance seminars for many years; I have also taught such courses...this book would be perfect for the OS component of an advanced CS curriculum.

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• Best Ati Radeon x1200 drivers for 12.10

  - by Jaclyn

  [Long story short is at the bottom if you don't care about my ranting] Ok, well, I have the unfortunate distinction of having an Acer Extensa 4420 (Yes, the model with the faulty motherboard, and no, I do not know how it is still working either). Long story short I need the best drivers for my Ati Radeon x1200 integrated graphics card. The Ati Propriatary drivers for 12.10 no longer supports my video card. Currently when I try to play Minecraft, or any game really, the framerate is quite terrible despite the fact that my handy dandy system load monitor says that I have plenty of memory and CPU power (Mind you, this is when I'm not playing minecraft; that kind of uses up all of my resources unless it's on the worst graphical settings, and even then I have terrible framerate, but plenty of resources left over). I tried the fglrx through a workaround guide, and it completely killed my display and I had to uninstall it. I'm considering just trying to install fglrx through synaptic, but I am hesitant to do so since I don't want a repeat of the BSBDD!!! (Black Screen of Bad Drivers 'o DOOOM!!!), so I will wait until after I get some input from you fine ladies and gentlemen on to what your advice it. ok, so I'm running xubuntu 12.10 64 bit. I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04. Then about a month ago I went from natty to quantal via the update option in the package updater, and then I decided that I was sick of gnome so I installed xfce. I did not install new drivers from natty to when I wound up at 12.10, so that shouldn't have changed, and they were indeed quite terrible back then, but now I'm using xubuntu as my main os, so I actually need good drivers. uuuugh. Anyway, long story short: I need to know what are the best drivers available for my card, and how to install them, because I am a linux novice, and I have tried everything that I can think of, including search google. Small edit: I forgot to note that since I upgraded to 12.10, my VGA out does not work (I haven't had a chance to try the s-video yet), and possibly related, the USB port on that side of my laptop does not work anymore either.

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• Which web framework to use under Backbonejs?

  - by egidra

  For a previous project, I was using Backbonejs alongside Django, but I found out that I didn't use many features from Django. So, I am looking for a lighter framework to use underneath a Backbonejs web app. I never used Django built in templates. When I did, it was to set up the initial index page, but that's all. I did use the user management system that Django provided. I used the models.py, but never views.py. I used urls.py to set up which template the user would hit upon visiting the site. I noticed that the two features that I used most from Django was South and Tastypie, and they aren't even included with Django. Particularly, django-tastypie made it easy for me to link up my frontend models to my backend models. It made it easy to JSONify my front end models and send them to Tastypie. Although, I found myself overriding a lot of tastypie's methods for GET, PUT, POST requests, so it became useless. South made it easy to migrate new changes to the database. Although, I had so much trouble with South. Is there a framework with an easier way of handling database modifications than using South? When using South with multiple people, we had the worse time keeping our databases synced. When someone added a new table and pushed their migration to git, the other two people would spend days trying to use South's automatic migration, but it never worked. I liked how Rails had a manual way of migrating databases. Even though I used Tastypie and South a lot, I found myself not actually liking them because I ended up overriding most Tastypie methods for each Resource, and I also had the worst trouble migrating new tables and columns with South. So, I would like a framework that makes that process easier. Part of my problem was that they are too "magical". Which framework should I use? Nodejs or a lighter Python framework? Which works best with my above criteria?

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