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• What is the difference between development and R&D?

  - by MainMa

  I was asked by a colleague to explain clearly the difference between ordinary development and research and development (R&D) and was unable to do it. After reading Wikipedia, I still don't have the precise answer. According to Wikipedia (slightly modified): There are two primary models: In one model, the primary function is to develop new products; in the other model, the primary function is to discover and create new knowledge about scientific and technological topics for the purpose of uncovering and enabling development of valuable new products, processes, and services. The first model is confusing. Does it mean that development (not R&D) consists exclusively in adding new features to a product, solving bugs and doing maintenance? What if something which was previously developed as a new feature becomes a separate product? The second model is less confusing, but still, how to qualify whether something is new knowledge or existent knowledge which is just rediscovered? Later, Wikipedia adds that ordinary development is different from R&D because of its: nearly immediate profit or immediate improvement. It's still not clear enough. How to qualify "nearly immediate profit"? What if a task has an immediate profit but requires heavy research? Or if it is basic but has uncertain profit, like the enforcement of a common style over the codebase? For example, does it belong to development or R&D to: Develop an engine which abstracts the access to the database, simplifying and shortening enormously the code of other applications (existent or ones which will be written in future) which should access to the database? Establish a new service-oriented architecture for the entire organization of company resources, in order to move from a bunch of separate and autonomous applications to a set of well-organized, interconnected web services, like what is used by Amazon? Design a new communication protocol to allow faster replication of data between two data centers of the company? Conceive a new type of software testing while working on a specific product, knowing that this type of testing will improve/simplify the testing process? Prove that Functional programming is more appropriate than OOP for a specific application, based on evidence, logic and previous experience? Enhance the existent application by adding gestures on tactile screens, after doing studies and testing that shows that those gestures improve the productivity of the users by a ratio of at least 1.4 for a precise set of tasks? Find a way to strongly enhance the Power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a data center? Create a Domain-Specific Language (DSL)? In short, how could I determine whether I'm doing R&D while working on something?

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• iTorque for a simple arcade game

  - by Herfus

  I have a basic understanding of programming, but I am no programmer. I've had a couple of a semesters with java programming, so we're talking pretty basic here. I have some scripting experience with game editors where I've created a few (simple) encounters, boss AI, abilities, events and so on. I've mostly done level design with UDK, Source and several other toolsets for a few years now, but I'd like to divert some of the focus to iphone-development. I've participated in a few development projects (source, udk, daot) where I've had a variety of roles (yet never beyond simple scripting). I have just finished prototyping an Iphone game (using game maker) and begun a bit more precise planning on what I'll have to do for the real version. The game is fairly simple, perhaps the best comparison in scope and complexity would be Doodlejump for iPhone. The reason I created the prototype was not just to answer a few questions about the gameplay, but to get some insight into what kind of problems I might face when trying to develop the real thing. I've been looking for engines that I can use for this. iTorque looks, so far, like the best option with a scripting language and WYSIWYG-editor. However the price is fairly steep and I'd like to prepare myself as much as possible before jumping into this, which is why I'm going to ask a few questions here. What kind of difficulties do you think I might run into, considering what you've read so far? Not just with torque, but development in general. I'm making this question mostly to have someone to reality check me. I usually achieve to do what I'm trying to do with scripting, but something tells me there's a very big difference between scripting an AI or an event and creating game logic. Will it be too much of a leap? Just how simple is it to use the Torque scripting language? Obviously I don't expect to be prepared, I expect it to be a learning process. However, I'd still like to be at least a bit confident on the time I'll have to dedicate to this first.

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• Guiding Management to the Correct Decision

  - by Blumer

  My supervisor (also a developer) and I have a running joke about writing a book called "Managing From Beneath: Subversively Guiding Management to the Right Decision" and including a number of "techniques" we've developed for helping those who make the decisions to make the right ones. So far, we've got (cynicism warning!): BIC It! BIC stands for "Bury In Committee." When a bad idea comes up that someone wants to champion, we try to get it deferred to a committee for input. Typically it will either get killed outright (especially if other members of the committee are competing for you as a resource), or it will be hung up long enough that the proponent forgets about it. Smart, Stupid, or Expensive? When someone gets a visionary idea, offer them three ways to do it: a smart way, a stupid way, and an expensive way. The hope is that you've at least got a 2/3 shot of not having to do it the way that makes a piece of your soul die. All-Pro. It's a preemptive pro/con list in which you get into the mind of the (pr)opponent and think what would be cons against doing it your way. Twist them into pros and present them in your pro list before they have a chance to present them as cons. Dependicitis. Link pending decisions together, ideally with the proponent's pet project as the final link in the chain. Use this leverage to force action on those that have been put off. Preemptive Acceptance. Sometimes it's clear that management is going to go a particular direction regardless of advice to the contrary, and it's time to make the best of it. Take the opportunity to get something else you need, though. Approach the sponsor out of the blue and take the first step: "You know, I've been thinking about it, and while it's not the route I would advise, as long as we can get the schedule and budget for Project Awesome loosened up, I can work some magic to make your project fly." So ... what techniques have you come up with to try to head off the problem projects or make the best of what may come?

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• Latency Matters

  - by Frederic P

  A lot of interest in low latencies has been expressed within the financial services segment, most especially in the stock trading applications where every millisecond directly influences the profitability of the trader. These days, much of the trading is executed by software applications which are trained to respond to each other almost instantaneously. In fact, you could say that we are in an arms race where traders are using any and all options to cut down on the delay in executing transactions, even by moving physically closer to the trading venue. The Solaris OS network stack has traditionally been engineered for high throughput, at the expense of higher latencies. Knowledge of tuning parameters to redress the imbalance is critical for applications that are latency sensitive. We are presenting in this blog how to configure further a default Oracle Solaris 10 installation to reduce network latency. There are many parameters in fact that can be altered, but the most effective ones are intr_blank_time and intr_blank_packets. These parameters affect on-board network throughput and latency on Solaris systems. If interrupt blanking is disabled, packets are processed by the driver as soon as they arrive, resulting in higher network throughput and lower latency, but with higher CPU utilization. With interrupt blanking disabled, processor utilization can be as high as 80–90% in some high-load web server environments. If interrupt blanking is enabled, packets are processed when the interrupt is issued. Enabling interrupt blanking can result in reduced processor utilization and network throughput, but higher network latency. Both parameters should be set at the same time. You can set these parameters by using the ndd command as follows: # ndd -set /dev/eri intr_blank_time 0 # ndd -set /dev/eri intr_blank_packets 0 You can add them to the /etc/system file as follows: set eri:intr_blank_time 0 set eri:intr_blank_packets 0 The value of the interrupt blanking parameter is a trade-off between network throughput and processor utilization. If higher processor utilization is acceptable for achieving higher network throughput, then disable interrupt blanking. If lower processor utilization is preferred and higher network latency is the penalty, then enable interrupt blanking. Our experience at ISV Engineering is that under controlled experiments the above settings result in reduction of network latency by at least 50%; on a two-socket 3GHz Sun Fire X4170 M2 running Solaris 10 Update 9, the above settings improved ping-pong latency from 60µs to 25-30µs with the on-board NIC.

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• The Solution

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  So I recently attended a class about time management as well as read the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.  Both have been instrumental in helping me get my priorities aligned as well as keep me focused. The reason I bring this up is that it gave me a great idea for a small application with which to create a great technical stack solution that would be easy to demo and explain.  Therefore, the project from this point forward with be the Liekhus.TimeTracker application which will bring some the time management skills that I have acquired into a technical implementation.  The idea is rather simple, but leverages some of the basic principles of Covey along with some of the worksheets that I garnered from class.  The basics are as such: 1) a plan is a must have and 2) write it down!  A plan not written down is just an idea.  How many times have you had an idea that didn’t materialize?  Exactly.  Hence why I am writing it all down now! The worksheet consists of a few simple columns that I will outline below as well as some modifications that I made according to the Covey habits.  The worksheet looks like the following: Status Issue Area CQ Notes P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   P  F  L     1234   The idea is really simple and straightforward; you write down all your tasks and keep track of them along the way.  The status stands for (P)ending, (F)inished or (L)ater.  You write a quick title for the issue and select the CQ (Covey Quadrant) with which the issue occurs.  The notes section is for things that happen while you are working through the issue.  And last, but not least, is the Area column that I added as a way to identify the Role or Area of your life that this task falls within based upon Covey’s teachings. The second part of this application is a simple phone log that allows you to track your phone conversations throughout the day.  All of this is currently done on a sheet of paper, but being involved in technology, I want it to have bells and whistles.  Therefore, this is my simple idea for a project that will allow me to test my theories about coding and implementations.  Stay tuned as the next session will be flushing out the concept and coming up with user stories to begin the SCRUM process. Thanks

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• Gamification in the enterprise updates, September edition

  - by erikanollwebb

  Things have been a little busy here at GamifyOracle.  Last week, I attended a small conference in San Diego on Enterprise Gamification.  Mario Herger of SAP, Matt Landes of Google and I were on a panel discussion about how to introduce and advocate gamification in your organization.  I gave a talk as well as a workshop on gamification.  The workshop was a new concept, to take our Design Jam from Applications User Experience and try it with people outside of user experience.  I have to say, the whole thing was a great success, in great part because I had some expert help from Teena Singh from Apps UX.  We took a flow from expense reporting and created a scenario about sales reps who are on the road a lot and how we needed them to get their expense reports filed by the end of the fiscal year.  We divided the attendees into groups and gave them a little over two hours to work out how they might use game mechanics to gamify the flows.   We even took the opportunity to re-use the app our fab dev team in our Mexico Development Center put together to gamify the event including badges, points, prizes and a leaderboard.  Since I am a firm believer that you can't gamify everything (or at least, not everything well), I focused my talk prior to the workshop on when it works, and when it might not, including pitfalls to gamifying badly.  I was impressed that the teams all considered what might go wrong with gamifying expenses and built into their designs some protections against that.  I can't wait to take this concept on the road again, it really was a fun day. Now that we have gotten through that set of events, we're wildly working on our next project for next week.  I'm doing a focus group at Oracle OpenWorld on Gamification in the Enterprise.  To do that, Andrea Cantu and I are trying to kill as many trees as possible while we work out some gamification concepts to present (see proof below!).  It should be a great event and I'm hoping we learn a lot about what our customers think about the use of gamification in their companies and in the products they use. So that's the news so far from GamifyOracle land.  I'll try to get more out about those events and more after next week. And if you will be at OOW, ping me and we can discuss in person!  I'd love to know what everyone is thinking in the area.

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• #SSAS #Tabular Workshop and Community Events in Netherlands and Denmark

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Next week I will finally start the roadshow of the SSAS Tabular Workshop, a 2-day seminar about the new BISM Tabular model for Analysis Services that has been introduced in SQL Server 2012. During these roadshows, we always try to arrange some speeches at local community events in the evening - we already defined for Copenhagen, we have some logistic issue in Amsterdam that we're trying to solve. Here is the timetable: Netherlands SSAS Workshop in Amsterdam, NL – April 16-17, 2012 2-day seminar, I and Alberto will be the trainers for this event, register here We're trying to manage a Community event but we still don't have a confirmation, stay tuned        Denmark SSAS Workshop in Copenhagen, DK – April 26-27, 2012 2-day seminar, I and Alberto will be the trainers for this event, register here Community event on April 26, 2012 This event will run in Hellerup, at Microsoft venue All details available here: http://msbip.dk/events/26/msbip-mode-nr-5/ People from Sweden are welcome! Just register to this private group on LinkedIn in order to announce your presence, so we’ll know how many people will attend In community events we’ll deliver two speeches – here are the descriptions: Inside xVelocity (VertiPaq) PowerPivot and BISM Tabular models in Analysis Services share a great columnar-based database engine called xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq). If you want to improve performance and optimize memory used, you have to understand some basic principles about how this engine works, how data is compressed, and how you can design a data model for better optimization. Prepare yourself to change your mind. xVelocity optimization techniques might seem counterintuitive and are absolutely different than OLAP and SQL ones! Choosing between Tabular and Multidimensional You have a new project and you have to make an important decision upfront. Should you use Tabular or Multidimensional? It is not easy to answer, because sometime there is a clear choice, but most of the times both decisions might be correct, at least at the beginning. In this session we’ll help you making an informed decision, correctly evaluating pros and cons of each one according to common scenarios, considering both short-term and long-term consequences of your choice. I hope to meet many people in this first dates. We have many other events coming in May and June, including an online event (for US time zones), and you can also attend our PreCon Day at TechEd US in Orland (PRC06) or TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. I’ll be a good customer for airline companies in the next three months! I’m just sorry that I hadn’t time to write other articles in the last month, but I’m accumulating material that I will need to write down during some flight – stay tuned…

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• What does the Spring framework do? Should I use it? Why or why not?

  - by sangfroid

  So, I'm starting a brand-new project in Java, and am considering using Spring. Why am I considering Spring? Because lots of people tell me I should use Spring! Seriously, any time I've tried to get people to explain what exactly Spring is or what it does, they can never give me a straight answer. I've checked the intros on the SpringSource site, and they're either really complicated or really tutorial-focused, and none of them give me a good idea of why I should be using it, or how it will make my life easier. Sometimes people throw around the term "dependency injection", which just confuses me even more, because I think I have a different understanding of what that term means. Anyway, here's a little about my background and my app : Been developing in Java for a while, doing back-end web development. Yes, I do a ton of unit testing. To facilitate this, I typically make (at least) two versions of a method : one that uses instance variables, and one that only uses variables that are passed in to the method. The one that uses instance variables calls the other one, supplying the instance variables. When it comes time to unit test, I use Mockito to mock up the objects and then make calls to the method that doesn't use instance variables. This is what I've always understood "dependency injection" to be. My app is pretty simple, from a CS perspective. Small project, 1-2 developers to start with. Mostly CRUD-type operations with a a bunch of search thrown in. Basically a bunch of RESTful web services, plus a web front-end and then eventually some mobile clients. I'm thinking of doing the front-end in straight HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery, so no real plans to use JSP. Using Hibernate as an ORM, and Jersey to implement the webservices. I've already started coding, and am really eager to get a demo out there that I can shop around and see if anyone wants to invest. So obviously time is of the essence. I understand Spring has quite the learning curve, plus it looks like it necessitates a whole bunch of XML configuration, which I typically try to avoid like the plague. But if it can make my life easier and (especially) if make it can make development and testing faster, I'm willing to bite the bullet and learn Spring. So please. Educate me. Should I use Spring? Why or why not?

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• How to force a clock update using ntp?

  - by ysap

  I am running Ubuntu on an ARM based embedded system that lacks a battery backed RTC. The wake-up time is somewhere during 1970. Thus, I use the NTP service to update the time to the current time. I added the following line to /etc/rc.local file: sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov However, after startup, it still takes a couple of minutes until the time is updated, during which period I cannot work effectively with tar and make. How can I force a clock update at any given time? UPDATE 1: The following (thanks to Eric and Stephan) works fine from command line, but fails to update the clock when put in /etc/rc.local: $ date ; sudo service ntp stop ; sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov ; sudo service ntp start ; date Thu Jan 1 00:00:58 UTC 1970 * Stopping NTP server ntpd [ OK ] * Starting NTP server [ OK ] Thu Feb 14 18:52:21 UTC 2013 What am I doing wrong? UPDATE 2: I tried following the few suggestions that came in response to the 1st update, but nothing seems to actually do the job as required. Here's what I tried: Replace the server to us.pool.ntp.org Use explicit paths to the programs Remove the ntp service altogether and leave just sudo ntpdate ... in rc.local Remove the sudo from the above command in rc.local Using the above, the machine still starts at 1970. However, when doing this from command line once logged in (via ssh), the clock gets updated as soon as I invoke ntpdate. Last thing I did was to remove that from rc.local and place a call to ntpdate in my .bashrc file. This does update the clock as expected, and I get the true current time once the command prompt is available. However, this means that if the machine is turned on and no user is logged in, then the time never gets updates. I can, of course, reinstall the ntp service so at least the clock is updated within a few minutes from startup, but then we're back at square 1. So, is there a reason why placing the ntpdate command in rc.local does not perform the required task, while doing so in .bashrc works fine?

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• Push-Based Events in a Services Oriented Architecture

  - by Colin Morelli

  I have come to a point, in building a services oriented architecture (on top of Thrift), that I need to expose events and allow listeners. My initial thought was, "create an EventService" to handle publishing and subscribing to events. That EventService can use whatever implementation it desires to actually distribute the events. My client automatically round-robins service requests to available service hosts which are determined using Zookeeper-based service discovery. So, I'd probably use JMS inside of EventService mainly for the purpose of persisting messages (in the event that a service host for EventService goes down before it can distribute the message to all of the available listeners). When I started considering this, I began looking into the differences between Queues and Topics. Topics unfortunately won't work for me, because (at least for now), all listeners must receive the message (even if they were down at the time the event was pushed, or hadn't made a subscription yet because they haven't completed startup (during deployment, for example) - messages should be queued until the service is available). However, I don't want EventService to be responsible for handling all of the events. I don't think it should have the code to react to events inside of it. Each of the services should do what it needs with a given event. This would indicate that each service would need a JMS connection, which questions the value of having EventService at all (as the services could individually publish and subscribe to JMS directly). However, it also couples all of the services to JMS (when I'd rather that there be a single service that's responsible for determining how to distribute events). What I had thought was to publish an event to EventService, which pulls a configuration of listeners from some configuration source (database, flat file, irrelevant for now). It replicates the message and pushes each one back into a queue with information specific to that listener (so, if there are 3 listeners, 1 event would become 3 events in JMS). Then, another thread in EventService (which is replicated, running on multiple hots) would be pulling from the queue, attempting to make the service call to the "listener", and returning the message to the queue (if the service is down), or discarding the message (if the listener completed successfully). tl;dr If I have an EventService that is responsible for receiving events and delegating service calls to "event listeners," (which are really just endpoints on other services), how should it know how to craft the service call? Should I create a generic "Event" object that is shared among all services? Then, the EventService can just construct this object and pass it to the service call. Or is there a better answer to this problem entirely?

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• How to update off screen bitmap in a surfaceview thread

  - by DKDiveDude

  I have a Surfaceview thread and an off canvas texture bitmap that is being generated (changed), first row (line), every frame and then copied one position (line) down on regular surfaceview bitmap to make a scrolling effect, and I then continue to draw other things on top of that. Well that is what I really want, however I can't get it to work even though I am creating a separate canvas for off screen bitmap. It is just not scrolling at all. I other words I have a memory bitmap, same size as Surfaceview canvas, which I need to scroll (shift) down one line every frame, and then replace top line with new random texture, and then draw that on regular Surfaceview canvas. Here is what I thought would work; My surfaceChanged where I specify bitmap and canvasses and start thread: @Override public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) { intSurfaceWidth = mSurfaceView.getWidth(); intSurfaceHeight = mSurfaceView.getHeight(); memBitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(intSurfaceWidth, intSurfaceHeight, Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888); memCanvas = new Canvas(memCanvas); myThread = new MyThread(holder, this); myThread.setRunning(true); blnPause = false; myThread.start(); } My thread, only showing essential middle running part: @Override public void run() { while (running) { c = null; try { // Lock canvas for drawing c = myHolder.lockCanvas(null); synchronized (mSurfaceHolder) { // First draw off screen bitmap to off screen canvas one line down memCanvas.drawBitmap(memBitmap, 0, 1, null); // Create random one line(row) texture bitmap memTexture = Bitmap.createBitmap(imgTexture, 0, rnd.nextInt(intTextureImageHeight), intSurfaceWidth, 1); // Now add this texture bitmap to top of off screen canvas and hopefully bitmap memCanvas.drawBitmap(textureBitmap, intSurfaceWidth, 0, null); // Draw above updated off screen bitmap to regular canvas, at least I thought it would update (save changes) shifting down and add the texture line to off screen bitmap the off screen canvas was pointing to. c.drawBitmap(memBitmap, 0, 0, null); // Other drawing to canvas comes here } finally { // do this in a finally so that if an exception is thrown // during the above, we don't leave the Surface in an // inconsistent state if (c != null) { myHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(c); } } } } For my game Tunnel Run. Right now I have a working solution where I instead have an array of bitmaps, size of surface height, that I populate with my random texture and then shift down in a loop for each frame. I get 50 frames per second, but I think I can do better by instead scrolling bitmap.

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• Interconnect nodes in a Java distributed infrastructure for tweet processing

  - by David Moreno García

  I'm working in a new version of an old project that I used to download and process user statuses from Twitter. The main problem of that project was its infrastructure. I used multiple instances of a java application (trackers) to download from Twitter given an specific task (basically terms to search for), connected with a central node (a web application) that had to process all tweets once per day and generate a new task for each trackers once each 15 minutes. The central node also had to monitor all trackers and enable/disable them under user petition. This, as I said, was too slow because I had multiple bottlenecks, so in this new version I want to improve the infrastructure and isolate all functionalities in specific nodes. I also need a good notification system to receive notifications for any node. So, in the next diagram I show the components that I'll need in this new version: As you can see, there are more nodes. Here are some notes about them: Dashboard: Controls trackers statuses and send a single task to each of them (under user request). The trackers will use this task until replaced with a new one (if done, not each 15 minutes like before). Search engine: I need to store all the tweets. They are firstly stored in a local database for each tracker but after that I'm thinking on using something like Elasticsearch to be able to do fast searches. Tweet processor: Just and isolated component with its own database (maybe something like the search engine to have fast access to info generated by the module). In the future more could be added. Application UI: A web application with a shared database with the Dashboard (mainly to store users information and preferences). Indeed, both could be merged into a single web. The main difference with the previous version of the project is that now they will be isolated and they will only show information and send requests. I will not do any heavy task in them (like process tweets as I did before). So, having this components, my main headache is how to structure all to not have to rewrite a lot of code every time I need to access any new data. Another headache is how can I interconnect nodes. I could use sockets but that is a pain in the ass. Maybe a REST layer? And finally, if all the nodes are isolated, how could I generate notifications for each user which info is only in the database used by the Application UI? I'm programming this using Java and Spring (at least I used them in the last version) but I have no problems with changing the language if I can take advantage of a tool/library/engine to make my life easier and have a better platform. Any comment will be appreciated.

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• Walmart's Mobile Self-Checkout

  - by David Dorf

  Reuters recently reported that Walmart was testing an iPhone-based self-checkout at a store near its headquarters.  Consumers scan items as they're placed in the physical basket, then the virtual basket is transferred to an existing self-checkout station where payment is tendered.  A very solid solution, but not exactly original. Before we go further, let's look at the possible cost savings for Walmart.  According to the article: Pushing more shoppers to scan their own items and make payments without the help of a cashier could save Wal-Mart millions of dollars, Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley said on March 7. The company spends about $12 million in cashier wages every second at its Walmart U.S. stores. Um, yeah. Using back-of-the-napkin math, I calculated Walmart's cashiers are making $157k per hour.  A more accurate statement would be saving $12M per year for each second saved on the average transaction time.  So if this self-checkout approach saves 2 seconds per transaction on average, Walmart would save $24M per year on labor.  Maybe.  Sometimes that savings will be used to do other tasks in the store, so it may not directly translate to less employees. When I saw this approach demonstrated in Sweden, there were a few differences, which may or may not be in Walmart's plans.  First, the consumers were identified based on their loyalty card.  In order to offset the inevitable shrink, retailers need to save on labor but also increase basket size, typically via in-aisle promotions.  As they scan items, retailers should target promos, and that's easier to do if you know some shopping history.  Last I checked, Walmart had no loyalty program. Second, at the self-checkout station consumers were randomly selected for an audit in which they must re-scan all the items just like you do at a typical self-checkout.  If you were found to be stealing, your ability to use the system can be revoked.  That's a tough one in the US, especially when the system goes wrong, either by mistake or by lying.  At least in my view, the Swedes are bit more trustworthy than the people of Walmart. So while I think the idea of mobile self-checkout has merit, perhaps its not right for Walmart.

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• Editing /.config/dconf/user

  - by user86322

  I am having a problem with Gnome3 (actually, I have it set to fallback mode, or Gnome 2). I have two displays and I need an X screen (I used nvidia-xconfig and nvidia-settings to do this) for each screen. However, every time I either restart X or log in, Gnome seems to be adding the objects values under /gnome/gnome-panel/layouts (ex. first time I set the two separate X screens I had clock, then log out/in, there was clock and clock1 under objects, and then log out/in there were three, clock, clock1, clock2,.......log out/in, ............30 times....clock, clock1, clock2, ......clock 42.....!! The same thing goes for top-panels, menu-bars, etc.) After a while, I found out I could remove all those using the dconf-editor, going to /gnome/gnome-panel/layouts, removing all the repetitions under fields objects-id-list and top-id-list and leaving one value of each object. This is not a solution but at least allow me to keep using Linux without so much problem. However, the problem persists every time I restart X or log in. I now finally learned about "dconf" and where the user profile settings are located (~/.config/dconf/user) and one can use "dconf" to see the keys. In my case, I need to change/remove many keys (all those clocksX, workspace-X, menu-bar-X, etc., where goes from 1 to 42 and still counting) so it's really tedious and boring to be changing one by one using "dconf write". So I found "dconf dump", which actually allow me to dump everything into a .txt file and edit the file really quick (i.e, "dconf dump / >> dump_user.txt"). The problems? Two of them: How do I "load" back "dump_user.txt" I edited into the user profile? (I read somewhere there was a "dconf reload" but reload doesn't exist as a command under "dconf") How do I stop Gnome from keep adding more objects to my desktop environment every time I log in/restart X? NOTE: The problem doesn't occur when I set the displays to use TwinView feature (i.e., the desktop is extended/shared by both displays). However, for my case I need two separate X's. Any help/suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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• Reduce weight in healthy way - Day 2

  - by krnites

  My second day of reducing weight and it seems most of the blog are correct in saying that you can reduce weight if your calorie consumption is less than what you burn. In one day I have lost 1 lbs without doing anything. My current weight is 177.4 lbs. Yesterday I ate small portion of dinner that I used to eat that also around 7 PM. Normally I eat my dinner around 10 PM and withing 2 hour of eating I go for sleep, but yesterday I ate around 7 PM and went for sleep only after 12.On my second day I have eaten noodles and 3 eggs in breakfast and sesame chicken ( I love it) and fried rice in lunch, I still have not gone for running but had plan to go for running and then swimming. I hope it will at least burn the calories that I had taken. On some site it was written that a normal men body needs around 2000 Calorie a day. So if I am eating less than 2000 calorie ( noodles + 3 eggs = 400+200, rice + sesame chicken = 1300, total = 1900) and burning around 300 calorie, my total calorie intake will be 1600 which is less than what my body needs. So most probably by tomorrow I should come under 176 lb bracket.Apart from counting the calorie that I am taking in everyday and approx number of calorie that I am burning everyday, I had also starting tracking my physical activities on my mobile. I have got a beautiful Samsung Focus S Windows 7.5 mobile. And after browsing through the market I have downloaded couple of health Apps.1. 6 Week training - this has set of exercise and lets you choose the number of sets you want to do for all exercise. Its focus on your core muscles.2. Fast food Calories - This apps has all the fast food chain listed and give the calorie count of each of the food item available on there menu. Like for Burger King's French Fries Large (Salted) contains 500 Calorie.3. Gym Pocket Guide - Contains instructions for different kind of exercise and tells a right way of doing them.4.  RunSat - kind of GPS based application. Its mark the distance you have run, shows the path you have taken on a map, total calorie burnt, laps completed. I love this apps.5. Stop Watch I also have noticed that If I am running in GYM and have television in front of me where a movie or serial is going on which I like,  I normally didn't notice the time. Most of the time running on treadmill is very boring, but if some music video is playing or some kind of sitcom is going, I can run for  a hour or half.So on day 2 I have lost 1 lbs and had learnt that calorie intake should be less then calorie burnt for a given day.

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• Best Language for the job? Database | C++, .NET, Java

  - by Randy E

  Ok, quick overview. I'm pretty brand new to software design. I have experience reading and editing/customizing PHP things for online scripts/software; Such as CMS, Wordpress, some forum solutions. I'm about to begin my degree in Software Design, the school I'm going to will allow us to kind of focus on an area, C++, Java, or .NET. I've played around a little with VB over the past week, mostly just trying to get a slight feel for it, however nothing extensive. I've been through Herbert Schildt's "C++, A Beginner's Guide." but I was mainly reading it, not doing anything with it beyond a couple basic Console Apps (and getting frustrated with auto-close :/ ). Now, where I decide to focus more in with my degree will depend on what the best language for the job is for my first piece of software I want to develop on my own. Assume I haven't looked at any of the languages at all, please help with the following: My first piece of software will be a database program. Everything has to do with users inputting and retrieving data, and calling that data to help with another function of the software, automatically calculating billing information based on information inputted in the other portion of the program. I won't go into too many details as I'm targeting a niche that doesn't have too much competition, but the competition that is there is established. I want to offer more features, scalable solutions, and the ability to port it to an online version. Ok, basically, it is a complete case management with integrated billing for Private Investigators. I would like the case management to be able to check the Database to see if certain information has been inputted before (such as Names/SSN's), and then the billing will pull hours inputted in the case portion for investigative work, multiplying by an already inputted amount for the fee, and then calculate sales tax. I also want to provide potential clients with an easily scalable solution, that is, a basic option for start ups that costs the least amount, with no additional users, ran on one machine. A middle option with the ability to create users and place them in two groups (User or Admin), as well as adding a few additional features, ran on one machine, but this will allow it to be accessed after being mapped on a network drive. And a third option to allow the placement into 4 different groups (Investigators, Billing, Managers, Admins) and more features. And then, a couple of years after launch, a 4th option that is browser based allowing the same 4 groups to login, as well as clients (view things concerning their case, with some admin customizable objects that can be added for clients view), over the internet. The only licensing security I would like to employ right off the bat will be serial key generated after ordering online (received in an email after the successful purchase). The program will access a database stored on a server periodically to verify license. I would like it to be able to check to make sure it's the most updated version and automatically update if not.

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• What should filenames and URLs of images contain for SEO benefit?

  - by Baumr

  We know that good site architecture usually looks like this: example-company.com/ example-company.com/about/ example-company.com/contact/ example-company.com/products/ example-company.com/products/category/ example-company.com/products/category/productname/ Now, when it comes to Google Image search, it is clear that the img alt tag, filename/URL, and surrounding text (captions, headings, paragraphs) have an effect on ranking. I want to ask about the filename of the images that we should use (e.g. product-photo.jpg). ...but first about the URL: Often web developers stick all images in a single folder in the root: example-company.com/img/ — and I have stopped doing that. (I don't want to get into it, but basically, it seems more semantic for images which make up part of the content at each sub-directory) However, when all images appear in a folder, I feel that their filename needs to reflect what they are a bit more than usual, for example: example-company.com/img/example-company-productname-category.jpg It's a longer filename than just product.png, but as long as it's relevant, I see no problem with regards to SEO (unless you're keyword stuffing), and it could even help rank for keywords: "example company" "productname" "category" So no questions there. But what about when we have places images in the site architecture we outlined at the beginning? In other words, what if image URL paths look like this: example-company.com/products/category/productname/productname.jpg My question is, should the URL be kept short like above and only have the "productname" (and some descriptive keywords) as part of it's filename? Or, should it also include the "example-company" and "category"? Like so: example-company.com/products/category/productname/example-company-category-productname.jpg That seems much longer, and redundant when we look at the URL, but here are a few considerations. Images are often downloaded onto computers, and, to the average user, they lose their original URL and thus — it isn't clear where they came from. Also, some social networks, forums, and other platforms leave the filename intact when uploaded. (Many others rewrite it, for example, Pinterest and Facebook.) Another consideration, will this really help (even if ever so slightly) rank in Google Image Search, or at least inform Google that the product is something specific to the "example-company"? For example, what if this product can only be bought at this store and is the flagship product? In addition to an abundance of internal links to this product page, would having the "example company" name and "category" help it appear in "example company" searches? In other words, is less more?

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• cloud programming for OpenStack in C / C++

  - by Basile Starynkevitch

  (Sorry for such a fuzzy question, I am very newbie to cloud programming) I am interested in designing (and developing) a (free software) program in C or C++ (probably, most of it being meta-programmed, i.e. part of the C code code being generated). I am still in the thinking / designing phase. And I might perhaps give up. For reference, I am the main architect and implementor of GCC MELT, a domain specific language to extend the GCC compiler (the MELT language is translated to C/C++ and is bootstrapped: the MELT to C/C++ translator being written in MELT). And I am dreaming of extending it with some cloud computing abilities. But I am a newbie in cloud computing. (I am only interested in free-software, GPLv3 friendly, based cloud computing, which probably means openstack). I believe that "compiling on the cloud with some enhanced GCC" could make sense (for super-optimizations or static analysis of e.g. an entire Linux distribution, or at least a massive GCC compiled free software like Qt, GCC itself, or the Linux kernel). I'm dreaming of a MELT specific monitoring program which would store, communicate, and and enhance GCC compilation (extended by MELT). So the picture would be that each GCC process (actually the cc1 or cc1plus started by the gcc driver, suitably extended by some MELT extension) would communicate with some monitor. That "monitoring/persisting" program would run "on the cloud" (and probably manage some information produced by GCC e.g. on NoSQL bases). So, how should some (yet to be written) C program (some Linux daemon) be designed to be cloud-friendly? So far, I understood that it should provide some Web service, probably thru a RESTful service, so should use an HTTP server library like onion. And that OpenStack is able to start (e.g. a dozen of) such services. But I don't have a clear picture of what OpenStack brings. So far, I noticed the ability to manage (and distribute) virtual machines (with some Python API). It is less clear how can it distribute some ELF executable, how can it start it, etc. Do you have any references or examples of C / C++ programming on the cloud? How should a "cloud-friendly" (actually, OpenStack friendly) C/C++ server application be designed?

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• Database unit testing is now available for SSDT

  - by jamiet

  Good news was announced yesterday for those that are using SSDT and want to write unit tests, unit testing functionality is now available. The announcement was made on the SSDT team blog in post Available Today: SSDT—December 2012. Here are a few thoughts about this news. Firstly, there seems to be a general impression that database unit testing was not previously available for SSDT – that’s not entirely true. Database unit testing was most recently delivered in Visual Studio 2010 and any database unit tests written therein work perfectly well against SQL Server databases created using SSDT (why wouldn’t they – its just a database after all). In other words, if you’re running SSDT inside Visual Studio 2010 then you could carry on freely writing database unit tests; some of the tight integration between the two (e.g. right-click on an object in SQL Server Object Explorer and choose to create a unit test) was not there – but I’ve never found that to be a problem. I am currently working on a project that uses SSDT for database development and have been happily running VS2010 database unit tests for a few months now. All that being said, delivery of database unit testing for SSDT is now with us and that is good news, not least because we now have the ability to create unit tests in VS2012. We also get tight integration with SSDT itself, the like of which I mentioned above. Having now had a look at the new features I was delighted to find that one of my big complaints about database unit testing has been solved. As I reported here on Connect a refactor operation would cause unit test code to get completely mangled. See here the before and after from such an operation: SELECT    * FROM    bi.ProcessMessageLog pml INNER JOIN bi.[LogMessageType] lmt     ON    pml.[LogMessageTypeId] = lmt.[LogMessageTypeId] WHERE    pml.[LogMessage] = 'Ski[LogMessageTypeName]of message: IApplicationCanceled' AND        lmt.[LogMessageType] = 'Warning'; which is obviously not ideal. Thankfully that seems to have been solved with this latest release. One disappointment about this new release is that the process for running tests as part of a CI build has not changed from the horrendously complicated process required previously. Check out my blog post Setting up database unit testing as part of a Continuous Integration build process [VS2010 DB Tools - Datadude] for instructions on how to do it. In that blog post I describe it as “fiddly” – I was being kind when I said that! @Jamiet

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• best way to "introduce" OOP/OOD to team of experienced C++ engineers

  - by DXM

  I am looking for an efficient way, that also doesn't come off as an insult, to introduce OOP concepts to existing team members? My teammates are not new to OO languages. We've been doing C++/C# for a long time so technology itself is familiar. However, I look around and without major infusion of effort (mostly in the form of code reviews), it seems what we are producing is C code that happens to be inside classes. There's almost no use of single responsibility principle, abstractions or attempts to minimize coupling, just to name a few. I've seen classes that don't have a constructor but get memset to 0 every time they are instantiated. But every time I bring up OOP, everyone always nods and makes it seem like they know exactly what I'm talking about. Knowing the concepts is good, but we (some more than others) seem to have very hard time applying them when it comes to delivering actual work. Code reviews have been very helpful but the problem with code reviews is that they only occur after the fact so to some it seems we end up rewriting (it's mostly refactoring, but still takes lots of time) code that was just written. Also code reviews only give feedback to an individual engineer, not the entire team. I am toying with the idea of doing a presentation (or a series) and try to bring up OOP again along with some examples of existing code that could've been written better and could be refactored. I could use some really old projects that no one owns anymore so at least that part shouldn't be a sensitive issue. However, will this work? As I said most people have done C++ for a long time so my guess is that a) they'll sit there thinking why I'm telling them stuff they already know or b) they might actually take it as an insult because I'm telling them they don't know how to do the job they've been doing for years if not decades. Is there another approach which would reach broader audience than a code review would, but at the same time wouldn't feel like a punishment lecture? I'm not a fresh kid out of college who has utopian ideals of perfectly designed code and I don't expect that from anyone. The reason I'm writing this is because I just did a review of a person who actually had decent high-level design on paper. However if you picture classes: A - B - C - D, in the code B, C and D all implement almost the same public interface and B/C have one liner functions so that top-most class A is doing absolutely all the work (down to memory management, string parsing, setup negotiations...) primarily in 4 mongo methods and, for all intents and purposes, calls almost directly into D. Update: I'm a tech lead(6 months in this role) and do have full support of the group manager. We are working on a very mature product and maintenance costs are definitely letting themselves be known.

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• Dealing with coworkers when developing, need advice [closed]

  - by Yippie-Kai-Yay

  I developed our current project architecture and started developing it on my own (reaching something like, revision 40). We're developing a simple subway routing framework and my design seemed to be done extremely well - several main models, corresponding views, main logic and data structures were modeled "as they should be" and fully separated from rendering, algorithmic part was also implemented apart from the main models and had a minor number of intersection points. I would call that design scalable, customizable, easy-to-implement, interacting mostly based on the "black box interaction" and, well, very nice. Now, what was done: I started some implementations of the corresponding interfaces, ported some convenient libraries and wrote implementation stubs for some application parts. I had the document describing coding style and examples of that coding style usage (my own written code). I forced the usage of more or less modern C++ development techniques, including no-delete code (wrapped via smart pointers) and etc. I documented the purpose of concrete interface implementations and how they should be used. Unit tests (mostly, integration tests, because there wasn't a lot of "actual" code) and a set of mocks for all the core abstractions. I was absent for 12 days. What do we have now (the project was developed by 4 other members of the team): 3 different coding styles all over the project (I guess, two of them agreed to use the same style :), same applies to the naming of our abstractions (e.g CommonPathData.h, SubwaySchemeStructures.h), which are basically headers declaring some data structures. Absolute lack of documentation for the recently implemented parts. What I could recently call a single-purpose-abstraction now handles at least 2 different types of events, has tight coupling with other parts and so on. Half of the used interfaces now contain member variables (sic!). Raw pointer usage almost everywhere. Unit tests disabled, because "(Rev.57) They are unnecessary for this project". ... (that's probably not everything). Commit history shows that my design was interpreted as an overkill and people started combining it with personal bicycles and reimplemented wheels and then had problems integrating code chunks. Now - the project still does only a small amount of what it has to do, we have severe integration problems, I assume some memory leaks. Is there anything possible to do in this case? I do realize that all my efforts didn't have any benefit, but the deadline is pretty soon and we have to do something. Did someone have a similar situation? Basically I thought that a good (well, I did everything that I could) start for the project would probably lead to something nice, however, I understand that I'm wrong. Any advice would be appreciated, sorry for my bad english.

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• TouchDevelop: The Fast Path to Windows 8 and Phone Apps

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Are you looking for a little extra cash for the upcoming holidays? Then you might be interested in creating some cool apps to sell in the Windows Store. Or maybe you’re simply curious and want to try your hand at developing for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. In either case, the newly released TouchDevelop Web App is for you. TouchDevelop Web App is a development environment to create apps on your tablet or smartphone, without requiring a separate PC. Scripts written by using TouchDevelop can access data, media, and sensors on the phone, tablet, and PC. The script can interact with cloud services, including storage, computing, and social networks. TouchDevelop lets you quickly create fun games and useful tools, turning your scripts into true Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. A year ago, Microsoft Research released TouchDevelop for Windows Phone, which is being used by enthusiasts, students, and researchers to program their phones in fun, inventive, and interesting ways. These scripts are available at TouchDevelop for anyone to download and use. Ever since we released TouchDevelop, we’ve been eyeing the tablet form factor and working on a version for the browser. Now, with the release of TouchDevelop Web App, the wait is over: the tablet version is ready, so go play around with it. All TouchDevelop scripts that are developed on the smartphone can be downloaded to the tablet and run (if hardware allows). Any script that is developed on the tablet can also be accessed on the phone. And scripts can be converted to Windows Phone or Windows 8 apps and submitted to the Windows Phone Store or Windows Store, respectively. TouchDevelop Web App’s editor and programming language have been designed for tablet devices with touchscreens, but you can also use a keyboard and a mouse. So grab your web-enabled device and give the TouchDevelop Web App a try. It’s fun and easy, and could even put a little cash in your holiday-depleted wallet. Or at least give you bragging rights at family get-togethers. Are you interested in further tips on Windows 8 development?  Sign up for the 30 to launch program which will help you build a Windows Store application in 30 days.  You will receive a tip per day for 30 days, along with potential free design consultations and technical support from a Windows 8 expert. As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• TechEd 2012: Windows 8 And Metro

  - by Tim Murphy

  Windows 8 is here (or at least very close) and that was the main feature of this morning’s key note.  Antoine LeBlond started off by apologizing to the IT professionals since he planned on showing code.  I’m not sure if IT Pros are that easily confused or why you would need such a disclaimer.  Developers do real work, IT Pros just play with toys (just kidding). The highlights of the Windows 8 keynote for me started with some of the UI design elements that I had not seen when I was shown one of the Build tablets.  Specifically I liked the AppBar features that we have become used to with Windows Phone and some of the gesture features.  Even though they have been available on other platforms before I think Microsoft really got them right. Two other great features of Windows 8 that they demonstrated were the Hyper-V capabilities and the ability to run Windows 8 anywhere from a USB key.  My jaw dropped through the floor seeing a feature rich OS boot off of a thumb drive. WOW!  I also can’t wait to get rid of dual booting just to run Hyper-V images when developing. The morning continued with a session on Metro XAML development with Tim Heuer.  While included a lot of great XAML Metro demos, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things I found out about Visual Studio 2012.  Finding out that Blend is now integrated with VS2012 was a nice addition after working with them as separate applications was an encouraging start. Moving on to Metro he introduced the nugget that WinRT is Async everywhere.  How deep this model goes will be an interesting thing to find out as I learn more about developing for the platform.  Thankfully he followed that up with a couple of new keywords, await and async, that eliminates a lot of plumbing that has been required in the past for asynchronous transactions. Tim also related that since the Metro framework is relatively small and most apps will use a significant amount of it the entire surface is referenced by default.  This is a contrast to adding namespace and assemblies one after another as we normally do. This was such a power packed session that I can’t detail it all here so here is the teaser list. New icons in VS2012 for extension methods Emulator/simulator testing features for gestures Portable class libraries XAML no longer managed code And so much more …   del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Metro,Tim Heuer,XAML,Widows Phone,Hyper-V,Antoine LeBlond,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012,Visual Studio

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• Why would you dual-run an app on Azure and AWS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/11/10/why-would-you-dual-run-an-app-on-azure-and-aws.aspxI had this question from a viewer of my Pluralsight course, Implementing the Reactive Manifesto with Azure and AWS, and thought I’d publish the response. So why would you dual-run your cloud app by hosting it on Azure and AWS? Sounds like a lot of extra development and management overhead. Well the most compelling reasons are reliability and portability. In 2012 I was working for a client who was making a big investment in the cloud, and at the end of the year we published their first external API for business partners. It was hosted in Azure and used some really nice features to route back into existing on-premise services. We were able to publish a clean, simple API to partners, and hide away the underlying complexity of the internal services while still leveraging them to do all the work. Two days after we went live, we were hit by the Azure SSL certificate expiry outage, and our API was unavailable for the best part of 3 days. Fortunately we had planned a gradual roll-out to partners, so the impact was minimal, but we’d been intending to ramp up quickly, and if the outage had happened a week or two later we would have been in a very bad place. Not least because our app could only run on Azure, we couldn’t package it up for another service without going back and reworking the code. More recently AWS had an issue with a networking device in one of their data centres which caused an outage that took the best part of a day to resolve. In both scenarios the SLAs are worthless, as you’ll get back a small percentage of your cloud expenditure, which is going to be negligible compared to your costs in dealing with the outage. And if your app is built specifically for AWS or Azure then if there’s an extended outage you can’t just deploy it onto a new set of kit from a different supplier. And the chances are pretty good there will be another extended outage, both for Microsoft and for Amazon. But the chances are small that it will happen to both at the same time. So my basic guidance has been: ignore the SLAs, go for better uptime by using two clouds. As soon as you need to scale beyond a single instance, start by scaling out to another cloud. Then scale out to different data centres in both clouds. Then you’ve got dual-cloud, quadruple-datacentre redundancy, so any more scaling you need can be left to the clouds to auto-scale themselves. By running in both clouds, you’ve made your app portable, so in the highly unlikely event that both AWS and Azure go down in multiple regions, you’ll have a deployment package which will let you spin up a new stack on yet another cloud, without having to rework your solution.

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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