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• My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

  - by Greg Malcolm

  I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

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• Real-world SignalR example, ditching ghetto long polling

  - by Jeff

  One of the highlights of BUILD last week was the announcement that SignalR, a framework for real-time client to server (or cloud, if you will) communication, would be a real supported thing now with the weight of Microsoft behind it. Love the open source flava! If you aren’t familiar with SignalR, watch this BUILD session with PM Damian Edwards and dev David Fowler. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll be in a happy place within the first ten minutes. If you skip to the end, you’ll see that they plan to ship this as a real first version by the end of the year. Insert slow clap here. Writing a few lines of code to move around a box from one browser to the next is a way cool demo, but how about something real-world? When learning new things, I find it difficult to be abstract, and I like real stuff. So I thought about what was in my tool box and the decided to port my crappy long-polling “there are new posts” feature of POP Forums to use SignalR. A few versions back, I added a feature where a button would light up while you were pecking out a reply if someone else made a post in the interim. It kind of saves you from that awkward moment where someone else posts some snark before you. While I was proud of the feature, I hated the implementation. When you clicked the reply button, it started polling an MVC URL asking if the last post you had matched the last one the server, and it did it every second and a half until you either replied or the server told you there was a new post, at which point it would display that button. The code was not glam: // in the reply setup PopForums.replyInterval = setInterval("PopForums.pollForNewPosts(" + topicID + ")", 1500); // called from the reply setup and the handler that fetches more posts PopForums.pollForNewPosts = function (topicID) { $.ajax({ url: PopForums.areaPath + "/Forum/IsLastPostInTopic/" + topicID, type: "GET", dataType: "text", data: "lastPostID=" + PopForums.currentTopicState.lastVisiblePost, success: function (result) { var lastPostLoaded = result.toLowerCase() == "true"; if (lastPostLoaded) { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "hidden"); } else { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "visible"); clearInterval(PopForums.replyInterval); } }, error: function () { } }); }; What’s going on here is the creation of an interval timer to keep calling the server and bugging it about new posts, and setting the visibility of a button appropriately. It looks like this if you’re monitoring requests in FireBug: Gross. The SignalR approach was to call a message broker when a reply was made, and have that broker call back to the listening clients, via a SingalR hub, to let them know about the new post. It seemed weird at first, but the server-side hub’s only method is to add the caller to a group, so new post notifications only go to callers viewing the topic where a new post was made. Beyond that, it’s important to remember that the hub is also the means to calling methods at the client end. Starting at the server side, here’s the hub: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Hubs; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public class Topics : Hub { public void ListenTo(int topicID) { Groups.Add(Context.ConnectionId, topicID.ToString()); } } } Have I mentioned how awesomely not complicated this is? The hub acts as the channel between the server and the client, and you’ll see how JavaScript calls the above method in a moment. Next, the broker class and its associated interface: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR; using Topic = PopForums.Models.Topic; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public interface IBroker { void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID); } public class Broker : IBroker { public void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID) { var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>(); context.Clients.Group(topic.TopicID.ToString()).notifyNewPosts(lasPostID); } } } The NotifyNewPosts method uses the static GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>() method to get a reference to the hub, and then makes a call to clients in the group matched by the topic ID. It’s calling the notifyNewPosts method on the client. The TopicService class, which handles the reply data from the MVC controller, has an instance of the broker new’d up by dependency injection, so it took literally one line of code in the reply action method to get things moving. _broker.NotifyNewPosts(topic, post.PostID); The JavaScript side of things wasn’t much harder. When you click the reply button (or quote button), the reply window opens up and fires up a connection to the hub: var hub = $.connection.topics; hub.client.notifyNewPosts = function (lastPostID) { PopForums.setReplyMorePosts(lastPostID); }; $.connection.hub.start().done(function () { hub.server.listenTo(topicID); }); The important part to look at here is the creation of the notifyNewPosts function. That’s the method that is called from the server in the Broker class above. Conversely, once the connection is done, the script calls the listenTo method on the server, letting it know that this particular connection is listening for new posts on this specific topic ID. This whole experiment enables a lot of ideas that would make the forum more Facebook-like, letting you know when stuff is going on around you.

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• Detecting Duplicates Using Oracle Business Rules

  - by joeywong-Oracle

  Recently I was involved with a Business Process Management Proof of Concept (BPM PoC) where we wanted to show how customers could use Oracle Business Rules (OBR) to easily define some rules to detect certain conditions, such as duplicate account numbers, duplicate names, high transaction amounts, etc, in a set of transactions. Traditionally you would have to loop through the transactions and compare each transaction with each other to find matching conditions. This is not particularly nice as it relies on more traditional approaches (coding) and is not the most efficient way. OBR is a great place to house these types’ of rules as it allows users/developers to externalise the rules, in a simpler manner, externalising the rules from the message flows and allows users to change them when required. So I went ahead looking for some examples. After quite a bit of time spent Googling, I did not find much out in the blogosphere. In fact the best example was actually from...... wait for it...... Oracle Documentation! (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28271_01/user.1111/e10228/rules_start.htm#ASRUG228) However, if you followed the link there was not much explanation provided with the example. So the aim of this article is to provide a little more explanation to the example so that it can be better understood. Note: I won’t be covering the BPM parts in great detail. Use case: Payment instruction file is required to be processed. Before instruction file can be processed it needs to be approved by a business user. Before the approval process, it would be useful to run the payment instruction file through OBR to look for transactions of interest. The output of the OBR can then be used to flag the transactions for the approvers to investigate. Example BPM Process So let’s start defining the Business Rules Dictionary. For the input into our rules, we will be passing in an array of payments which contain some basic information for our demo purposes. Input to Business Rules And for our output we want to have an array of rule output messages. Note that the element I am using for the output is only for one rule message element and not an array. We will configure the Business Rules component later to return an array instead. Output from Business Rules Business Rule – Create Dictionary Fill in all the details and click OK. Open the Business Rules component and select Decision Functions from the side. Modify the Decision Function Configuration Select the decision function and click on the edit button (the pencil), don’t worry that JDeveloper indicates that there is an error with the decision function. Then click the Ouputs tab and make sure the checkbox under the List column is checked, this is to tell the Business Rules component that it should return an array of rule message elements. Updating the Decision Service Next we will define the actual rules. Click on Ruleset1 on the side and then the Create Rule in the IF/THEN Rule section. Creating new rule in ruleset Ok, this is where some detailed explanation is required. Remember that the input to this Business Rules dictionary is a list of payments, each of those payments were of the complex type PaymentType. Each of those payments in the Oracle Business Rules engine is treated as a fact in its working memory. Implemented rule So in the IF/THEN rule, the first task is to grab two PaymentType facts from the working memory and assign them to temporary variable names (payment1 and payment2 in our example). Matching facts Once we have them in the temporary variables, we can then start comparing them to each other. For our demonstration we want to find payments where the account numbers were the same but the account name was different. Suspicious payment instruction And to stop the rule from comparing the same facts to each other, over and over again, we have to include the last test. Stop rule from comparing endlessly And that’s it! No for loops, no need to keep track of what you have or have not compared, OBR handles all that for you because everything is done in its working memory. And once all the tests have been satisfied we need to assert a new fact for the output. Assert the output fact Save your Business Rules. Next step is to complete the data association in the BPM process. Pay extra care to use Copy List instead of the default Copy when doing data association at an array level. Input and output data association Deploy and test. Test data Rule matched Parting words: Ideally you would then use the output of the Business Rules component to then display/flag the transactions which triggered the rule so that the approver can investigate. Link: SOA Project Archive [Download]

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 5

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Describe the operation of a memory cell Explain the difference between DRAM and SRAM Discuss the different types of ROM Explain the concepts of a hard failure and a soft error respectively Describe SDRAM organization Semiconductor Main Memory The two traditional forms of RAM used in computers are DRAM and SRAM DRAM (Dynamic RAM) Divided into two technologies… Dynamic Static Dynamic RAM is made with cells that store data as charge on capacitors. The presence or absence of charge in a capacitor is interpreted as a binary 1 or 0. Because capacitors have natural tendency to discharge, dynamic RAM requires periodic charge refreshing to maintain data storage. The term dynamic refers to the tendency of the stored charge to leak away, even with power continuously applied. Although the DRAM cell is used to store a single bit (0 or 1), it is essentially an analogue device. The capacitor can store any charge value within a range, a threshold value determines whether the charge is interpreted as a 1 or 0. SRAM (Static RAM) SRAM is a digital device that uses the same logic elements used in the processor. In SRAM, binary values are stored using traditional flip flop logic configurations. SRAM will hold its data as along as power is supplied to it. Unlike DRAM, no refresh is required to retain data. SRAM vs. DRAM DRAM is simpler and smaller than SRAM. Thus it is more dense and less expensive than SRAM. The cost of the refreshing circuitry for DRAM needs to be considered, but if the machine requires a large amount of memory, DRAM turns out to be cheaper than SRAM. SRAMS are somewhat faster than DRAM, thus SRAM is generally used for cache memory and DRAM is used for main memory. Types of ROM Read Only Memory (ROM) contains a permanent pattern of data that cannot be changed. ROM is non volatile meaning no power source is required to maintain the bit values in memory. While it is possible to read a ROM, it is not possible to write new data into it. An important application of ROM is microprogramming, other applications include library subroutines for frequently wanted functions, System programs, Function tables. A ROM is created like any other integrated circuit chip, with the data actually wired into the chip as part of the fabrication process. To reduce costs of fabrication, we have PROMS. PROMS are… Written only once Non-volatile Written after fabrication Another variation of ROM is the read-mostly memory, which is useful for applications in which read operations are far more frequent than write operations, but for which non volatile storage is required. There are three common forms of read-mostly memory, namely… EPROM EEPROM Flash memory Error Correction Semiconductor memory is subject to errors, which can be classed into two categories… Hard failure – Permanent physical defect so that the memory cell or cells cannot reliably store data Soft failure – Random error that alters the contents of one or more memory cells without damaging the memory (common cause includes power supply issues, etc.) Most modern main memory systems include logic for both detecting and correcting errors. Error detection works as follows… When data is to be read into memory, a calculation is performed on the data to produce a code Both the code and the data are stored When the previously stored word is read out, the code is used to detect and possibly correct errors The error checking provides one of 3 possible results… No errors are detected – the fetched data bits are sent out An error is detected, and it is possible to correct the error. The data bits plus error correction bits are fed into a corrector, which produces a corrected set of bits to be sent out An error is detected, but it is not possible to correct it. This condition is reported Hamming Code See wiki for detailed explanation. We will probably need to know how to do a hemming code – refer to the textbook (pg. 188 – 189) Advanced DRAM organization One of the most critical system bottlenecks when using high-performance processors is the interface to main memory. This interface is the most important pathway in the entire computer system. The basic building block of main memory remains the DRAM chip. In recent years a number of enhancements to the basic DRAM architecture have been explored, and some of these are now on the market including… SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) DDR-DRAM RDRAM SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) SDRAM exchanges data with the processor synchronized to an external clock signal and running at the full speed of the processor/memory bus without imposing wait states. SDRAM employs a burst mode to eliminate the address setup time and row and column line precharge time after the first access In burst mode a series of data bits can be clocked out rapidly after the first bit has been accessed SDRAM has a multiple bank internal architecture that improves opportunities for on chip parallelism SDRAM performs best when it is transferring large blocks of data serially There is now an enhanced version of SDRAM known as double data rate SDRAM or DDR-SDRAM that overcomes the once-per-cycle limitation of SDRAM

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• Swap partition not recognized (The disk drive with UUID=... is not ready yet or not present)

  - by ladaghini

  I think I had an encrypted swap partition, because I chose to encrypt my home directory during the installation. I believe that's what the line with /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 ... in my /etc/fstab is all about. I did something to bork my swap because on the next boot, I got a message (paraphrased): The disk drive for /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 is not ready yet or not present. Wait to continue. Press S to skip or M to manually recover. (As a side note, pressing S or M seemed to do nothing different from just waiting.) Here's what I've tried: This tutorial on how to fix the swap partition not mounting. However, in the above, the mkswap command fails because the device is busy. So I booted from a live USB, ran GParted to reformat the swap partition (which showed up as an unknown fs type), and chrooted into the broken system to try that tutorial again. I also adjusted /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and /etc/fstab to reflect the new UUID generated from formatting the partition as a swap. That still didn't work; instead of /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 not present, "The disk drive with UUID=[swap partition's UUID] is not ready yet or not present..." So I decided to start afresh as though I never had created a swap partition in the first place. From the Live USB, I deleted the swap partition altogether (which, again showed up in GParted as an unknown fs type), removed the swap and cryptswap entries in /etc/fstab as well as removed /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and /etc/crypttab. At this point the main system shouldn't be considered broken because there is no swap partition and no instructions to mount one, right? I didn't get any errors during startup. I followed the same instructions to create and encrypt the swap partition, starting with creating a partition for the swap, though I think fdisk said a reboot was necessary to see changes. I was confident the 3rd process above would work, but the problem yet persists. Some relevant info (/dev/sda8 is the swap partition): /etc/fstab file: # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=4c11e82c-5fe9-49d5-92d9-cdaa6865c991 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /boot was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=4031413e-e89f-49a9-b54c-e887286bb15e /boot ext4 defaults 0 2 # /home was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=d5bbfc6f-482a-464e-9f26-fd213230ae84 /home ext4 defaults 0 2 # swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation UUID=5da2c720-8787-4332-9317-7d96cf1e9b80 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0 output of sudo mount: /dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/sda5 on /boot type ext4 (rw) /dev/sda7 on /home type ext4 (rw) /home/undisclosed/.Private on /home/undisclosed type ecryptfs (ecryptfs_check_dev_ruid,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs,ecryptfs_sig=cbae1771abd34009,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=7cefe2f59aab8e58) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/undisclosed/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=undisclosed) output of sudo blkid (note that /dev/sda8 is missing): /dev/sda1: LABEL="SYSTEM" UUID="960490E80490CC9D" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda2: UUID="D4043140043126C0" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda3: LABEL="Shared" UUID="80F613E1F613D5EE" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda5: UUID="4031413e-e89f-49a9-b54c-e887286bb15e" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda6: UUID="4c11e82c-5fe9-49d5-92d9-cdaa6865c991" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda7: UUID="d5bbfc6f-482a-464e-9f26-fd213230ae84" TYPE="ext4" /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: UUID="41fa147a-3e2c-4e61-b29b-3f240fffbba0" TYPE="swap" output of sudo fdisk -l: Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xdec3fed2 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 409599 203776 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 409600 210135039 104862720 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 210135040 415422463 102643712 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 415424510 625141759 104858625 5 Extended /dev/sda5 415424512 415922175 248832 83 Linux /dev/sda6 415924224 515921919 49998848 83 Linux /dev/sda7 515923968 621389823 52732928 83 Linux /dev/sda8 621391872 625141759 1874944 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 1919 MB, 1919942656 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 233 cylinders, total 3749888 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xaf5321b5 /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume file: RESUME=UUID=5da2c720-8787-4332-9317-7d96cf1e9b80 /etc/crypttab file: cryptswap1 /dev/sda8 /dev/urandom swap,cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 output of sudo swapon -as: Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 partition 1874940 0 -1 output of sudo free -m: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1476 1296 179 0 35 671 -/+ buffers/cache: 590 886 Swap: 1830 0 1830 So, how can this be fixed?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 02, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 02, 2014Popular ReleasesPortable Class Library for SQLite: Portable Class Library for SQLite - 3.8.4.4: This pull request from mattleibow addresses an issue with custom function creation (define functions in C# code and invoke them from SQLite as id they where regular SQL functions). Impact: Xamarin iOSTweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Tweetinvi 0.9.3.x: Timelines- Added all the parameters available from the Timeline Endpoints in Tweetinvi. - This is available for HomeTimeline, UserTimeline, MentionsTimeline // Simple query var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(); // Create a parameter for queries with specific parameters var timelineParameter = Timeline.GenerateHomeTimelineRequestParameter(); timelineParameter.ExcludeReplies = true; timelineParameter.TrimUser = true; var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(timelineParameter); Tweets- Add mis...Sandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...Tooltip Web Preview: ToolTip Web Preview: Version 1.0Database Helper: Release 1.0.0.0: First Release of Database HelperCoMaSy: CoMaSy1.0.2: !Contact Management SystemImage View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.SEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 1: Added fix when loading game Textures for icons causing 'Unable to read beyond the end of the stream'. Added new Resource Report, that displays all in game resources in a concise report. Added in temp directory cleaner, to keep excess files from building up. Fixed use of colors on the windows, to work better with desktop schemes. Adding base support for multilingual resources. This will allow loading of the Space Engineers resources to show localized names, and display localized date a...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.2: More memory and performance improvements. Fixed an issue with pivot table field order.Vi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar: Version 1.0Top Verses ( Ayat Emas ): Binary Top Verses: This one is the bin folder of the component. the .dll component is inside.Traditional Calendar Component: Traditional Calender Converter: Duta Wacana Christian University This file containing Traditional Calendar Component and Demo Aplication that using Traditional Calendar Component. This component made with .NET Framework 4 and the programming language is C# .SQLSetupHelper: 1.0.0.0: First Stable Version of SQL SetupComposite Iconote: Composite Iconote: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Requirement: To develop this composite or use this component in your application, your computer must have .NET framework 4.5 or newer.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesNew Projects[ISEN] Rendu de projet Naughty3Dogs - Pong3D: Pong3D est un jeu qui reprend le principe classique du Pong en le portant dans un environnement 3D à l'aide du langage c# et du moteur Unity3DBootstrap for MVC: Bootstrap for MVC.F. A. Q. - Najczesciej zadawane pytania: FAQForuMvc: Technifutur short projecthomework456: no.iStoody: Studies organize solution, available through app for Windows and Windows Phone.liaoliao: ???????????Price Tracker: Allows a user to track prices based on parsed emailsRoslynEval: RoslynRx Hub: Rx Hub provides server side computation which initiate by subscriber requestSharepoint Online AppCache Reset: We are an IT resource company providing Virtual IT services and custom and opensource programs for everyday needs. UnitConversionLib : Smart Unit Conversion Library in C#: Conversion of units, arithmetic operation and parsing quantities with their units on run time. Smart unit converter and conversion lib for physical quantities,

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• Where Facebook Stands Heading Into 2013

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our last blog, we looked at how Twitter is positioned heading into 2013. Now it’s time to take a similar look at Facebook. 2012, for a time at least, seemed to be the era of Facebook-bashing. Between a far-from-smooth IPO, subsequent stock price declines, and anxiety over privacy, the top social network became a target for comedians, politicians, business journalists, and of course those who were prone to Facebook-bash even in the best of times. But amidst the “this is the end of Facebook” headlines, the company kept experimenting, kept testing, kept innovating, and pressing forward, committed as always to the user experience, while concurrently addressing monetization with greater urgency. Facebook enters 2013 with over 1 billion users around the world. Usage grew 41% in Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Korea and India in 2012. In the Middle East and North Africa, an average 21 new signups happen per minute. Engagement and time spent on the site would impress the harshest of critics. Facebook, while not bulletproof, has become such an integrated daily force in users’ lives, it’s getting hard to imagine any future mass rejection. You want to see a company recognizing weaknesses and shoring them up. Mobile was a weakness in 2012 as Facebook was one of many caught by surprise at the speed of user migration to mobile. But new mobile interfaces, better mobile ads, speed upgrades, standalone Messenger and Pages mobile apps, and the big dollar acquisition of Instagram, were a few indicators Facebook won’t play catch-up any more than it has to. As a user, the cool thing about Facebook is, it knows you. The uncool thing about Facebook is, it knows you. The company’s walking a delicate line between the public’s competing desires for customized experiences and privacy. While the company’s working to make privacy options clearer and easier, Facebook’s Paul Adams says data aggregation can move from acting on what a user is engaging with at the moment to a more holistic view of what they’re likely to want at any given time. To help learn about you, there’s Open Graph. Embedded through diverse partnerships, the idea is to surface what you’re doing and what you care about, and help you discover things via your friends’ activities. Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Mike Vernal, says building mobile social apps connected to Facebook in such ways is the next wave of big innovation. Expect to see that fostered in 2013. The Facebook site experience is always evolving. Some users like that about Facebook, others can’t wait to complain about it…on Facebook. The Facebook focal point, the News Feed, is not sacred and is seeing plenty of experimentation with the insertion of modules. From upcoming concerts, events, suggested Pages you might like, to aggregated “most shared” content from social reader apps, plenty could start popping up between those pictures of what your friends had for lunch.  As for which friends’ lunches you see, that’s a function of the mythic EdgeRank…which is also tinkered with. When Facebook changed it in September, Page admins saw reach go down and the high anxiety set in quickly. Engagement, however, held steady. The adjustment was about relevancy over reach. (And oh yeah, reach was something that could be charged for). Facebook wants users to see what they’re most likely to like, based on past usage and interactions. Adding to the “cream must rise to the top” philosophy, they’re now even trying out ordering post comments based on the engagement the comments get. Boy, it’s getting competitive out there for a social engager. Facebook has to make $$$. To do that, they must offer attractive vehicles to marketers. There are a myriad of ad units. But a key Facebook marketing concept is the Sponsored Story. It’s key because it encourages content that’s good, relevant, and performs well organically. If it is, marketing dollars can amplify it and extend its reach. Brands can expect the rollout of a search product and an ad network. That’s a big deal. It takes, as Open Graph does, the power of Facebook’s user data and carries it beyond the Facebook environment into the digital world at large. No one could target like Facebook can, and some analysts think it could double their roughly $5 billion revenue stream. As every potential revenue nook and cranny is explored, there are the users themselves. In addition to Gifts, Facebook thinks users might pay a few bucks to promote their own posts so more of their friends will see them. There’s also word classifieds could be purchased in News Feeds, though they won’t be called classifieds. And that’s where Facebook stands; a wildly popular destination, a part of our culture, with ever increasing functionalities, the biggest of big data, revenue strategies that appeal to marketers without souring the user experience, new challenges as a now public company, ongoing privacy concerns, and innovations that carry Facebook far beyond its own borders. Anyone care to write a “this is the end of Facebook” headline? @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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• Ok it has been pointed out to me

  - by Ratman21

  That it seems my blog is more of poor me or pity me or I deserve a job blog.   Hmmm I wont say, I have not wined here as I have used this blog to vent my frustration on the whole out of work thing (lack of money, self worth, family issues and the never end bills coming my way) but, it was also me trying to reach to others in the same boat as well as advertising, hay I am out here, employers.   It was also said, that I don’t have any thing listed here on me, like a cover letter or resume. Well there is but, it was so many months and post ago. Also what I had posted is not current. So here is my most current cover and resume.   Scott L Newman 45219 Dutton Way Callahan, Fl. 32011 To Whom It May Concern: I am really interested in the IT vacancie that you have listed for your company. Maybe I don’t have all the qualifications you want (hold on don’t hit delete yet) yet! But maybe I do, as I have over 20 + years experience in "IT” RIGHT NOW.   Read the rest of my cover and my resume. You will see what my “IT” skills are and it will Show that I can to this work! I can bring to your company along with my, can do attitude, a broad range of skills, including: Certified CompTIA A+, Security+  and Network+ Technician §         2.5 years (NOC) Network experience on large Cisco based Wan – UK to Austria §         20 years experience MIS/DP – Yes I can do IBM mainframes and Tandem  non-stops too §         18 years experience as technical Help Desk support – panicking users, no problem §         18 years experience with PC/Server based system, intranet and internet systems §         10+ years experienced on: Microsoft Office, Windows XP and Data Network Fundamentals (YES I do windows) §         Strong trouble shooting skills for software, hard ware and circuit issues (and I can tell you what kind of horrors I had to face on all of them). §         Very experienced on working with customers on problems – again panicking users, no problem §         Working experience with Remote Access (VPN/SecurID) – I didn’t just study them I worked on/with them §         Skilled in getting info for and creating documentation for Operation procedures (I don’t just wait for them to give it to me I go out and get it. Waiting for info on working applications is, well dumb) Multiple software languages (Hey I have done some programming) And much more experiences in “IT” (Mortgage, stocks and financial information systems experience and have worked “IT” in a hospital) Can multitask, also have ability to adapt to change and learn quickly. (once was put in charge of a system that I had not worked with for over two years. Talk about having to relearn and adapt to changes but, I did it.) I would welcome the opportunity to further discuss this position with you. If you have questions or would like to schedule an interview, please contact me by phone at 904-879-4880 or on my cell 352-356-0945 or by e-mail at [email protected] or leave a message on my web site (http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/). I have enclosed/attached my resume for your review and I look forward to hearing from you.   Thank you for taking a moment to consider my cover letter and resume. I appreciate how busy you are. Sincerely, Scott L. Newman    Scott L. Newman 45219 Dutton Way, Callahan, FL 32011? H (904)879-4880 C (352)356-0945 ? [email protected] Web - http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/                                                       ______                                                                                       OBJECTIVE To obtain a Network Operation or Helpdesk position.     PROFILE Information Technology Professional with 20+ years of experience. Volunteer website creator and back-up sound technician at True Faith Christian Fellowship. CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ Certified.   TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS   §         Technical Support §         Frame Relay §         Microsoft Office Suite §         Inventory Management §         ISDN §         Windows NT/98/XP §         Client/Vendor Relations §         CICS §         Cisco Routers/Switches §         Networking/Administration §         RPG §         Helpdesk §         Website Design/Dev./Management §         Assembler §         Visio §         Programming §         COBOL IV §               EDUCATION ? New HorizonsComputerLearningCenter, Jacksonville, Florida – CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+ Certified.             Currently working on CCNA Certification ?MottCommunity College, Flint, Michigan – Associates Degree - Data Processing and General Education ? Currently studying Japanese     PROFESSIONAL             TrueFaithChristianFellowshipChurch – Callahan, FL, October 2009 – Present Web site Tech ·        Web site Creator/tech, back up song leader and back up sound technician. Note church web site is (http://ambassadorsforjesuschrist.webs.com/) U.S. Census (temp employee) Feb. 23 to March 8, 2010 ·        Enumerator for NassauCounty   ThomasCreekBaptistChurch – Callahan, FL,     June 2008 – September 2009 Churchsound and video technician      ·        sound and video technician           Fidelity National Information Services ? Jacksonville, FL ? February 01, 2005 to October 28, 2008 Client Server Dev/Analyst I ·        Monitored Multiple Debit Card sites, Check Authorization customers and the Card Auth system (AuthNet) for problems with the sites, connections, servers (on our LAN) and/or applications ·        Night (NOC) Network operator for a large Wide Area Network (WAN) ·        Monitored Multiple Check Authorization customers for problems with circuits, routers and applications ·        Resolved circuit and/or router issues or assist circuit carrier in resolving issue ·        Resolved application problems or assist application support in resolution ·        Liaison between customer and application support ·        Maintained and updated the NetOps Operation procedures Guide ·        Kept the listing of equipment on the raised floor updated ·        Involved in the training of all Night Check and Card server operation operators ·        FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005. Was one of 3 kept on.   Certegy ? St.Pete, FL ? August 31, 2003 to February 1, 2005 Senior NetOps Operator(FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005 all of above jobs/skills were same as listed in FNIS) ·        Converting Documentation to Adobe format ·        Sole trainer of day/night shift System Management Center operators (SMC) ·        Equifax spun off Card/Check Dept. as Certegy. Certegy terminated contract with EDS. One of six in the whole IT dept that was kept on.   EDS  (Certegy Account) ? St.Pete, FL ? July 1, 1999 to August 31, 2003 Senior NetOps Operator ·        Equifax outsourced the NetOps dept. to EDS in 1999. ·        Same job skills as listed above for FNIS.   Equifax ? St.Pete&Tampa, FL ? January 1, 1991 to July 1, 1999 NetOps/Tandem Operator ·        All of the above for FNIS, except for circuit and router issues ·        Operated, monitored and trouble shot Tandem mainframe and servers on LAN ·        Supported in the operation of the Print, Tape and Microfiche rooms ·        Equifax acquired TelaCredit in 1991.   TelaCredit ? Tampa, FL ? June 28, 1989 to January 1, 1991 Tandem Operator ·        Operated and monitored Tandem Non-stop systems for Card and Check Auths ·        Operated multiple high-speed Laser printers and Microfiche printers ·        Mounted, filed and maintained 18 reel-to-reel mainframe tape drives, cartridges tape drives and tape library.

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• Polite busy-waiting with WRPAUSE on SPARC

  - by Dave

  Unbounded busy-waiting is an poor idea for user-space code, so we typically use spin-then-block strategies when, say, waiting for a lock to be released or some other event. If we're going to spin, even briefly, then we'd prefer to do so in a manner that minimizes performance degradation for other sibling logical processors ("strands") that share compute resources. We want to spin politely and refrain from impeding the progress and performance of other threads — ostensibly doing useful work and making progress — that run on the same core. On a SPARC T4, for instance, 8 strands will share a core, and that core has its own L1 cache and 2 pipelines. On x86 we have the PAUSE instruction, which, naively, can be thought of as a hardware "yield" operator which temporarily surrenders compute resources to threads on sibling strands. Of course this helps avoid intra-core performance interference. On the SPARC T2 our preferred busy-waiting idiom was "RD %CCR,%G0" which is a high-latency no-nop. The T4 provides a dedicated and extremely useful WRPAUSE instruction. The processor architecture manuals are the authoritative source, but briefly, WRPAUSE writes a cycle count into the the PAUSE register, which is ASR27. Barring interrupts, the processor then delays for the requested period. There's no need for the operating system to save the PAUSE register over context switches as it always resets to 0 on traps. Digressing briefly, if you use unbounded spinning then ultimately the kernel will preempt and deschedule your thread if there are other ready threads than are starving. But by using a spin-then-block strategy we can allow other ready threads to run without resorting to involuntary time-slicing, which operates on a long-ish time scale. Generally, that makes your application more responsive. In addition, by blocking voluntarily we give the operating system far more latitude regarding power management. Finally, I should note that while we have OS-level facilities like sched_yield() at our disposal, yielding almost never does what you'd want or naively expect. Returning to WRPAUSE, it's natural to ask how well it works. To help answer that question I wrote a very simple C/pthreads benchmark that launches 8 concurrent threads and binds those threads to processors 0..7. The processors are numbered geographically on the T4, so those threads will all be running on just one core. Unlike the SPARC T2, where logical CPUs 0,1,2 and 3 were assigned to the first pipeline, and CPUs 4,5,6 and 7 were assigned to the 2nd, there's no fixed mapping between CPUs and pipelines in the T4. And in some circumstances when the other 7 logical processors are idling quietly, it's possible for the remaining logical processor to leverage both pipelines. Some number T of the threads will iterate in a tight loop advancing a simple Marsaglia xor-shift pseudo-random number generator. T is a command-line argument. The main thread loops, reporting the aggregate number of PRNG steps performed collectively by those T threads in the last 10 second measurement interval. The other threads (there are 8-T of these) run in a loop busy-waiting concurrently with the T threads. We vary T between 1 and 8 threads, and report on various busy-waiting idioms. The values in the table are the aggregate number of PRNG steps completed by the set of T threads. The unit is millions of iterations per 10 seconds. For the "PRNG step" busy-waiting mode, the busy-waiting threads execute exactly the same code as the T worker threads. We can easily compute the average rate of progress for individual worker threads by dividing the aggregate score by the number of worker threads T. I should note that the PRNG steps are extremely cycle-heavy and access almost no memory, so arguably this microbenchmark is not as representative of "normal" code as it could be. And for the purposes of comparison I included a row in the table that reflects a waiting policy where the waiting threads call poll(NULL,0,1000) and block in the kernel. Obviously this isn't busy-waiting, but the data is interesting for reference. _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } _td { border: 1px green solid; } _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } Aggregate progress T = #worker threads Wait Mechanism for 8-T threadsT=1T=2T=3T=4T=5T=6T=7T=8 Park thread in poll() 32653347334833483348334833483348 no-op 415 831 124316482060249729303349 RD %ccr,%g0 "pause" 14262429269228623013316232553349 PRNG step 412 829 124616702092251029303348 WRPause(8000) 32443361333133483349334833483348 WRPause(4000) 32153308331533223347334833473348 WRPause(1000) 30853199322432513310334833483348 WRPause(500) 29173070315032223270330933483348 WRPause(250) 26942864294930773205338833483348 WRPause(100) 21552469262227902911321433303348

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• What to do after a servicing fails on TFS 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  What do you do if you run a couple of hotfixes against your TFS 2010 server and you start to see seem odd behaviour? A customer of mine encountered that very problem, but they could not just, or at least not easily, go back a version.   You see, around the time of the TFS 2010 launch this company decided to upgrade their entire 250+ development team from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. They encountered a few problems, owing mainly to the size of their TFS deployment, and the way they were using TFS. They were not doing anything wrong, but when you have the largest deployment of TFS outside of Microsoft you tend to run into problems that most people will never encounter. We are talking half a terabyte of source control in TFS with over 80 proxy servers. Its certainly the largest deployment I have ever heard of. When they did their upgrade way back in April, they found two major flaws in the product that meant that they had to back out of the upgrade and wait for a couple of hotfixes. KB983504 – Hotfix KB983578 – Patch KB2401992 -Hotfix In the time since they got the hotfixes they have run 6 successful trial migrations, but we are not talking minutes or hours here. When you have 400+ GB of data it takes time to copy it around. It takes time to do the upgrade and it takes time to do a backup. Well, last week it was crunch time with their developers off for Christmas they had a window of opportunity to complete the upgrade. Now these guys are good, but they wanted Northwest Cadence to be available “just in case”. They did not expect any problems as they already had 6 successful trial upgrades. The problems surfaced around 20 hours in after the first set of hotfixes had been applied. The new Team Project Collection, the only thing of importance, had disappeared from the Team Foundation Server Administration console. The collection would not reattach either. It would not even list the new collection as attachable! Figure: We know there is a database there, but it does not This was a dire situation as 20+ hours to repeat would leave the customer over time with 250+ developers sitting around doing nothing. We tried everything, and then we stumbled upon the command of last resort. TFSConfig Recover /ConfigurationDB:SQLServer\InstanceName;TFS_ConfigurationDBName /CollectionDB:SQLServer\instanceName;"Collection Name" -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff407077.aspx WARNING: Never run this command! Now this command does something a little nasty. It assumes that there really should not be anything wrong and sets about fixing it. It ignores any servicing levels in the Team Project Collection database and forcibly applies the latest version of the schema. I am sure you can imagine the types of problems this may cause when the schema is updated leaving the data behind. That said, as far as we could see this collection looked good, and we were even able to find and attach the team project collection to the Configuration database. Figure: After attaching the TPC it enters a servicing mode After reattaching the team project collection we found the message “Re-Attaching”. Well, fair enough that sounds like something that may need to happen, and after checking that there was disk IO we left it to it. 14+ hours later, it was still not done so the customer raised a priority support call with MSFT and an engineer helped them out. Figure: Everything looks good, it is just offline. Tip: Did you know that these logs are not represented in the ~/Logs/* folder until they are opened once? The engineer dug around a bit and listened to our situation. He knew that we had run the dreaded “tfsconfig restore”, but was not phased. Figure: This message looks suspiciously like the wrong servicing version As it turns out, the servicing version was slightly out of sync with the schema. KB Schema Successful           KB983504 341 Yes   KB983578 344 sort of   KB2401992 360 nope   Figure: KB, Schema table with notation to its success The Schema version above represents the final end of run version for that hotfix or patch. The only way forward The problem was that the version was somewhere between 341 and 344. This is not a nice place to be in and the engineer give us the  only way forward as the removal of the servicing number from the database so that the re-attach process would apply the latest schema. if his sounds a little like the “tfsconfig recover” command then you are exactly right. Figure: Sneakily changing that 3 to a 1 should do the trick Figure: Changing the status and dropping the version should do it Now that we have done that we should be able to safely reattach and enable the Team Project Collection. Figure: The TPC is now all attached and running You may think that this is the end of the story, but it is not. After a while of mulling and seeking expert advice we came to the opinion that the database was, for want of a better term, “hosed”. There could well be orphaned data in there and the likelihood that we would have problems later down the line is pretty high. We contacted the customer back and made them aware that in all likelihood the repaired database was more like a “cut and shut” than anything else, and at the first sign of trouble later down the line was likely to split in two. So with 40+ hours invested in getting this new database ready the customer threw it away and started again. What would you do? Would you take the “cut and shut” to production and hope for the best?

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• Content Query Web Part and the Yes/No Field

  - by Bil Simser

  The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is a pretty powerful beast. It allows you to do multiple site queries and aggregate the results. This is great for rolling up content and doing some summary type reporting. Here’s a trick to remember about Yes/No fields and using the CQWP. If you’re building a news style site and want to aggregate say all the announcements that people tag a certain way, up onto the home page this might be a solution. First we need to allow a way for users of all our sites to mark an announcement for inclusion on our Intranet Home Page. We’ll do this by just modifying the Announcement Content type and adding a Yes/No field to it. There are alternate ways of doing this like building a new Announcement type or stapling a feature to all sites to add our column but this is pretty low impact and only affects our current site collection so let’s go with it for now, okay? You can berate me in the comments about the proper way I should have done this part. Go to the Site Settings for the Site Collection and click on Site Content Types under the Galleries. This takes you to the gallery for this site and all subsites. Scroll down until you see the List Content Types and click on Announcements. Now we’re modifying the Announcement content type which affects all those announcement lists that are created by default if you’re building sites using the Team Site template (or creating a new Announcements list on any site for that matter). Click on Add from new site column under the Column list. This will allow us to create a new Yes/No field that users will see in Announcement items. This field will allow the user to flag the announcement for inclusion on the home page. Feel free to modify the fields as you see fit for your environment, this is just an example. Now that we’ve added the column to our Announcements Content type we can go into any site that has an announcement list, modify that announcement and flag it to be included on our home page. See the new Featured column? That was the result of modifying our Announcements Content Type on this site collection. Now we can move onto the dirty part, displaying it in a CQWP on the home page. And here is where the fun begins (and the head scratching should end). On our home page we want to drop a Content Query Web Part and aggregate any Announcement that’s been flagged as Featured by the users (we could also add the filter to handle Expires so we don’t show old content so go ahead and do that if you want). First add a CQWP to the page then modify the settings for the web part. In the first section, Query, we want the List Type to be set to Announcements and the Content type to be Announcement so set your options like this: Click Apply and you’ll see the results display all Announcements from any site in the site collection. I have five team sites created each with a unique announcement added to them. Now comes the filtering. We don’t want to include every announcement, only ones users flag using that Featured column we added. At first blush you might scroll down to the Additional Filters part of the Query options and set the Featured column to be equal to Yes: This seems correct doesn’t it? After all, the column is a Yes/No column and looking at an announcement in the site, it displays the field as Yes or No: However after applying the filter you get this result: (I have the announcements from Team Site 1 and Team Site 4 flagged as Featured) Huh? It’s BACKWARDS! Let’s confirm that. Go back in and change the Additional Filters section from Yes to No and hit Apply and you get this: Wait a minute? Shouldn’t I see Team Site 1 and 4 if the logic is backwards? Why am I seeing the same thing as before. What gives… For whatever reason, unknown to me, a Yes/No field (even though it displays as such) really uses 1 and 0 behind the scenes. Yeah, someone was stuck on using integer values for booleans when they wrote SharePoint (probably after a long night of white boarding ways to mess with developers heads) and came up with this. The solution is pretty simple but not very discoverable. Set the filter to include your flagged items like so: And it will filter the items marked as Featured correctly giving you this result: This kind of solution could also be extended and enhanced. Here are a few suggestions and ideas: Modify the ItemStyle.xsl file to add a new style for this aggregation which would include the first few paragraphs of the body (or perhaps add another field to the Content type called Excerpt or Summary and display that instead) Add an Image column to the Announcement Content type to include a Picture field and display it in the summary Add a Category choice field (Employee News, Current Events, Headlines, etc.) and add multiple CQWPs to the home page filtering each one on a different category I know some may find this topic old and dusty but I didn’t see a lot out there specifically on filtering the Yes/No fields and the whole 1/0 trick was a little wonky, so I figured a few pictures would help walk through overcoming yet another SharePoint weirdness. With a little work and some creative juices you can easily us the power of aggregation and the CQWP to build a news site from content on your team sites.

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• Looking into the JQuery Overlays Plugin

  - by nikolaosk

  I have been using JQuery for a couple of years now and it has helped me to solve many problems on the client side of web development.  You can find all my posts about JQuery in this link. In this post I will be providing you with a hands-on example on the JQuery Overlays Plugin.If you want you can have a look at this post, where I describe the JQuery Cycle Plugin.You can find another post of mine talking about the JQuery Carousel Lite Plugin here. Another post of mine regarding the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin can be found here.I will be writing more posts regarding the most commonly used JQuery Plugins. With the JQuery Overlays Plugin we can provide the user (overlay) with more information about an image when the user hovers over the image. I have been using extensively this plugin in my websites. In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like. You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.  You can download this plugin from this link. I launch Expression Web 4.0 and then I type the following HTML markup (I am using HTML 5) <html lang="en"> <head>    <link rel="stylesheet" href="ImageOverlay.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.3.min.js"></script>    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.ImageOverlay.min.js"></script>         <script type="text/javascript">        $(function () {            $("#Liverpool").ImageOverlay();        });    </script>   </head><body>    <ul id="Liverpool" class="image-overlay">        <li>            <a href="www.liverpoolfc.com">                <img alt="Liverpool" src="championsofeurope.jpg" />                <div class="caption">                    <h3>Liverpool Football club</h3>                    <p>The greatest club in the world</p>                </div>            </a>        </li>    </ul></body></html> This is a very simple markup. I have added references to the JQuery library (current version is 1.8.3) and the JQuery Overlays Plugin. Then I add 1 image in the element with "id=Liverpool". There is a caption class as well, where I place the text I want to show when the mouse hovers over the image. The caption class and the Liverpool id element are styled in the ImageOverlay.css file that can also be downloaded with the plugin.You can style the various elements of the html markup in the .css file. The Javascript code that makes it all happen follows.   <script type="text/javascript">        $(function () {            $("#Liverpool").ImageOverlay();        });    </script>        I am just calling the ImageOverlay function for the Liverpool ID element.The contents of ImageOverlay.css file follow .image-overlay { list-style: none; text-align: left; }.image-overlay li { display: inline; }.image-overlay a:link, .image-overlay a:visited, .image-overlay a:hover, .image-overlay a:active { text-decoration: none; }.image-overlay a:link img, .image-overlay a:visited img, .image-overlay a:hover img, .image-overlay a:active img { border: none; }.image-overlay a{    margin: 9px;    float: left;    background: #fff;    border: solid 2px;    overflow: hidden;    position: relative;}.image-overlay img{    position: absolute;    top: 0;    left: 0;    border: 0;}.image-overlay .caption{    float: left;    position: absolute;    background-color: #000;    width: 100%;    cursor: pointer;    /* The way to change overlay opacity is the follow properties. Opacity is a tricky issue due to        longtime IE abuse of it, so opacity is not offically supported - use at your own risk.         To play it safe, disable overlay opacity in IE. */    /* For Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome */    opacity: .8;    /* For IE 5-7 */    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80);    /* For IE 8 */    -MS-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=80)";}.image-overlay .caption h1, .image-overlay .caption h2, .image-overlay .caption h3,.image-overlay .caption h4, .image-overlay .caption h5, .image-overlay .caption h6{    margin: 10px 0 10px 2px;    font-size: 26px;    font-weight: bold;    padding: 0 0 0 5px;    color:#92171a;}.image-overlay p{    text-indent: 0;    margin: 10px;    font-size: 1.2em;} It couldn't be any simpler than that. I view my simple page in Internet Explorer 10 and it works as expected. I have tested this simple solution in all major browsers and it works fine.Have a look at the picture below. You can test it yourself and see the results in your favorite browser. Hope it helps!!!

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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• Seven Random Thoughts on JavaOne

  - by HecklerMark

  As most people reading this blog may know, last week was JavaOne. There are a lot of summary/recap articles popping up now, and while I didn't want to just "add to pile", I did want to share a few observations. Disclaimer: I am an Oracle employee, but most of these observations are either externally verifiable or based upon a collection of opinions from Oracle and non-Oracle attendees alike. Anyway, here are a few take-aways: The Java ecosystem is alive and well, with a breadth and depth that is impossible to adequately describe in a short post...or a long post, for that matter. If there is any one area within the Java language or JVM that you would like to - or need to - know more about, it's well-represented at J1. While there are several IDEs that are used to great effect by the developer community, NetBeans is on a roll. I lost count how many sessions mentioned or used NetBeans, but it was by far the dominant IDE in use at J1. As a recent re-convert to NetBeans, I wasn't surprised others liked it so well, only how many. OpenJDK, OpenJFX, etc. Many developers were understandably concerned with the change of sponsorship/leadership when Java creator and longtime steward Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle. The read I got from attendees regarding Oracle's stewardship was almost universally positive, and the push for "openness" is deep and wide within the current Java environs. Few would probably have imagined it to be this good, this soon. Someone observed that "Larry (Ellison) is competitive, and he wants to be the best...so if he wants to have a community, it will be the best community on the planet." Like any company, Oracle is bound to make missteps, but leadership seems to be striking an excellent balance between embracing open efforts and innovating in competitive paid offerings. JavaFX (2.x) isn't perfect or comprehensive, but a great many people (myself included) see great potential, are developing for it, and are really excited about where it is and where it may be headed. This is another part of the Java ecosystem that has impressive depth for being so new (JavaFX 1.x aside). If you haven't kicked the tires yet, give it a try! You'll be surprised at how capable and versatile it is, and you'll probably catch yourself smiling while coding again.  :-) JavaEE is everywhere. Not exactly a newsflash, but there is a lot of buzz around EE still/again/anew. Sessions ranged from updated component specs/technologies to Websockets/HTML5, from frameworks to profiles and application servers. Programming "server-side" Java isn't confined to the server (as you no doubt realize), and if you still consider JavaEE a cumbersome beast, you clearly haven't been using the last couple of versions. Download GlassFish or the WebLogic Zip distro (or another JavaEE 6 implementation) and treat yourself. JavaOne is not inexpensive, but to paraphrase an old saying, "If you think that's expensive, you should try ignorance." :-) I suppose it's possible to attend J1 and learn nothing, but you'd have to really work at it! Attending even a single session is bound to expand your horizons and make you approach your code, your problem domain, differently...even if it's a session about something you already know quite well. The various presenters offer vastly different perspectives and challenge you to re-think your own approach(es). And finally, if you think the scheduled sessions are great - and make no mistake, most are clearly outstanding - wait until you see what you pick up from what I like to call the "hallway sessions". Between the presentations, people freely mingle in the hallways, go to lunch and dinner together, and talk. And talk. And talk. Ideas flow freely, sparking other ideas and the "crowdsourcing" of knowledge in a way that is hard to imagine outside of a conference of this magnitude. Consider this the "GO" part of a "BOGO" (Buy One, Get One) offer: you buy the ticket to the "structured" part of JavaOne and get the hallway sessions at no additional charge. They're really that good. If you weren't able to make it to JavaOne this year, you can still watch/listen to the sessions online by visiting the JavaOne course catalog and clicking the media link(s) in the right column - another demonstration of Oracle's commitment to the Java community. But make plans to be there next year to get the full benefit! You'll be glad you did. All the best,Mark P.S. - I didn't mention several other exciting developments in areas like the embedded space and the "internet of things" (M2M), robotics, optimization, and the cloud (among others), but I think you get the idea. JavaOne == brainExpansion;  Hope to see you there next year!

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• await, WhenAll, WaitAll, oh my!!

  - by cibrax

  If you are dealing with asynchronous work in .NET, you might know that the Task class has become the main driver for wrapping asynchronous calls. Although this class was officially introduced in .NET 4.0, the programming model for consuming tasks was much more simplified in C# 5.0 in .NET 4.5 with the addition of the new async/await keywords. In a nutshell, you can use these keywords to make asynchronous calls as if they were sequential, and avoiding in that way any fork or callback in the code. The compiler takes care of the rest. I was yesterday writing some code for making multiple asynchronous calls to backend services in parallel. The code looked as follow, var allResults = new List<Result>(); foreach(var provider in providers) { var results = await provider.GetResults(); allResults.AddRange(results); } return allResults; You see, I was using the await keyword to make multiple calls in parallel. Something I did not consider was the overhead this code implied after being compiled. I started an interesting discussion with some smart folks in twitter. One of them, Tugberk Ugurlu, had the brilliant idea of actually write some code to make a performance comparison with another approach using Task.WhenAll. There are two additional methods you can use to wait for the results of multiple calls in parallel, WhenAll and WaitAll. WhenAll creates a new task and waits for results in that new task, so it does not block the calling thread. WaitAll, on the other hand, blocks the calling thread. This is the code Tugberk initially wrote, and I modified afterwards to also show the results of WaitAll. class Program { private static Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] funcs = new Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] { async (watch) => { watch.Start(); await Task.Delay(1000); Console.WriteLine("1000 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(1500); Console.WriteLine("1500 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(2000); Console.WriteLine("2000 one has been completed."); watch.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(watch.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms has been elapsed."); } }; static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Await in loop work starts..."); DoWorkAsync().ContinueWith(task => { Console.WriteLine("Parallel work starts..."); DoWorkInParallelAsync().ContinueWith(t => { Console.WriteLine("WaitAll work starts..."); WaitForAll(); }); }); Console.ReadLine(); } static async Task DoWorkAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); foreach (var func in funcs) { await func(watch); } } static async Task DoWorkInParallelAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); await Task.WhenAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } static void WaitForAll() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); Task.WaitAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } } After running this code, the results were very concluding. Await in loop work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 4532ms has been elapsed. Parallel work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2007ms has been elapsed. WaitAll work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2009ms has been elapsed. The await keyword in a loop does not really make the calls in parallel.

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• 24 Hours of PASS – first reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  A few days after the end of 24HOP, I find myself reflecting on it. I’m still waiting on most of the information. I want to be able to discover things like where the countries represented on each of the sessions, and things like that. So far, I have the feedback scores and the numbers of attendees. The data was provided in a PDF, so while I wait for it to appear in a more flexible format, I’ve pushed the 24 attendee numbers into Excel. This chart shows the numbers by time. Remember that we started at midnight GMT, which was 10:30am in my part of the world and 8pm in New York. It’s probably no surprise that numbers drooped a bit at the start, stayed comparatively low, and then grew as the larger populations of the English-speaking world woke up. I remember last time 24HOP ran for 24 hours straight, there were quite a few sessions with less than 100 attendees. None this time though. We got close, but even when it was 4am in New York, 8am in London and 7pm in Sydney (which would have to be the worst slot for attracting people), we still had over 100 people tuning in. As expected numbers grew as the UK woke up, and even more so as the US did, with numbers peaking at 755 for the “3pm in New York” session on SQL Server Data Tools. Kendra Little almost reached those numbers too, and certainly contributed the biggest ‘spike’ on the chart with her session five hours earlier. Of all the sessions, Kendra had the highest proportion of ‘Excellent’s for the “Overall Evaluation of the session” question, and those of you who saw her probably won’t be surprised by that. Kendra had one of the best ranked sessions from the 24HOP event this time last year (narrowly missing out on being top 3), and she has produced a lot of good video content since then. The reports indicate that there were nearly 8.5 thousand attendees across the 24 sessions, averaging over 350 at each one. I’m looking forward to seeing how many different people that was, although I do know that Wil Sisney managed to attend every single one (if you did too, please let me know). Wil even moderated one of the sessions, which made his feat even greater. Thanks Wil. I also want to send massive thanks to Dave Dustin. Dave probably would have attended all of the sessions, if it weren’t for a power outage that forced him to take a break. He was also a moderator, and it was during this session that he earned special praise. Part way into the session he was moderating, the speaker lost connectivity and couldn’t get back for about fifteen minutes. That’s an incredibly long time when you’re in a live presentation. There were over 200 people tuned in at the time, and I’m sure Dave was as stressed as I was to have a speaker disappear. I started chasing down a phone number for the speaker, while Dave spoke to the audience. And he did brilliantly. He started answering questions, and kept doing that until the speaker came back. Bear in mind that Dave hadn’t expected to give a presentation on that topic (or any other), and was simply drawing on his SQL expertise to get him through. Also consider that this was between midnight at 1am in Dave’s part of the world (Auckland, NZ). I would’ve been expecting just to welcome people, monitor questions, probably read some out, and in general, help make things run smoothly. He went far beyond the call of duty, and if I had a medal to give him, he’d definitely be getting one. On the whole, I think this 24HOP was a success. We tried a different platform, and I think for the most part it was a popular move. We didn’t ask the question “Was this better than LiveMeeting?”, but we did get a number of people telling us that they thought the platform was very good. Some people have told me I get a chance to put my feet up now that this is over. As I’m also co-ordinating a tour of SQLSaturday events across the Australia/New Zealand region, I don’t quite get to take that much of a break (plus, there’s the little thing of squeezing in seven SQL 2012 exams over the next 2.5 weeks). But I am pleased to be reflecting on this event rather than anticipating it. There were a number of factors that could have gone badly, but on the whole I’m pleased about how it went. A massive thanks to everyone involved. If you’re reading this and thinking you wish you could’ve tuned in more, don’t worry – they were all recorded and you’ll be able to watch them on demand very soon. But as well as that, PASS has a stream of content produced by the Virtual Chapters, so you can keep learning from the comfort of your desk all year round. More info on them at sqlpass.org, of course.

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• The Apple iPad &ndash; I&rsquo;m gonna get it!

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Well, heck, here comes another non-techie blogpost. You know I’m a geek, so I love gadgets! I found it RATHER interesting to see all the negative news on the blogosphere about the iPad. The main bitch points are - No Multi tasking No Flash Just a bigger iPhone. So here’s the deal! My view is, the above 3 are EXACTLY what I had personally hoped for in the Apple iPad. Before the release, I had gone on the record saying - “If the Apple Tablet is able to run full fledged iTunes (so I can get rid of iTunes on my desktop, I don’t like iTunes on Windows), can browse the net, can read PDFs, and will be under $1000, I’ll buy it”. Well, so, the released iPad wasn’t exactly like my dream tablet. The biggest downer IMO was it’s inability to run full iTunes. But, really, in retrospect, I like the newly released iPad. And here is why. No Multi tasking and No Flash, means much better battery life. Frankly, I rarely multi task on my laptop/desktop .. yeah I know my OS does .. but ME – I don’t multi task, and I don’t think you do either!! As I type this blogpost, I have a few windows running behind the scenes, but they are simply waiting for me to get back to them. The only thing truly running and I am making use of, other than this blogost, is media player playing some music – which the iPad can do. Also, I am logged into IM/Email – which again, iPad can do via notifications. It does the limited multitasking I need, without chewing down on batteries. Smart thinking, precisely the reason I love the iPhone. I don’t want a bulky battery consuming machine. Lack of flash? Okay sure, I can’t see Hulu on my iPad. That’s some loss. I can see youtube. Also, per Adobe I can’t see some porn sites, which I don’t want to see on my iPad. But, Flash is heavy. Especially flash video. My dream is to see silverlight run on the iPhone and iPad. No flash = not such a big loss. Speaking of battery life – 10 hours is plenty. I haven’t been away from electricity for that long usually, so I’m okay with charging it up when it runs low. It’s really not such a big deal honestly. Finally, eBook functionality – wow! I went on the record saying, eBook readers are not for me, but seriously, the iPad is perfect for my eBook needs at least. And as far it being just a bigger iPhone? I’ve always wanted a bigger iPhone, precisely for the eBook reading experience. I love my iPhone, I love the apps on it. The only thing that sucks about the iPhone is battery life, but other than that, it is the best gadget I have ever bought! And something that runs on mobile chips, is that thin, and those newly written apps .. mail, calendar .. I am very very excited to get my iPad, which will be the 64gig 3G version. The biggest plus in an iPad ……… no contract on data. I am *hoping*, this means that I can buy a SIM card in Europe, and use the iPad here. That would be killer awesome! But hey, if I had to pick downers in the iPad, they would be - - I wish they had a 128G Version. Now that we have a good video viewing machine, I know I’d chew up space quickly.- Sync over WIFI, seriously Apple.  Both for iPhone and iPad.- 3 month wait!!- Existing iPhone users should get a discount on the iPad data plan. Comment on the article ....

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• Adaptive Layout for ADF Faces on Tablets

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  In the 11.1.16 version of Oracle ADF we started adding specific features to the ADF Faces components so they'll work better on iPad tablets. In this entry I'm going to highlight some new capabilities that we have added to the 11.1.2.3 release. (note if you are still on the 11.1.1.* branch - you'll need to wait for 11.1.1.7 to get the features discussed here). The two key additions in the 11.1.2.3 version compared to the 11.1.1.6 features for iPad support include: pagination for tables and adaptive flow layout. The pagination for table is self explanatory, basically since iPad don't support scroll bars, we automatically switch the table component to render with a pagination toolbar that allow you to scroll set of records or directly jump to a specific set. See the image below. The adaptive flow layout takes a bit more explanation. On regular desktops the UI that you usually build for ADF Faces screens is going to use stretch layout - meaning that it stretches to fill the whole area of the browser window. If you resize the browser windoe, the ADF Faces page resizes with it. If your browser window is too small, scroll bars will appear to allow you to scroll to areas that are "hidden". However on an iPad, this is probably not the type of layout you want - you would rather have a flow layout that eliminates scroll bars and instead allows you to scroll down the page. Basically your want the page to be sized based on its content, rather then based on the browser window size. In ADF Faces terminology this can be done with the dimensionsFrom property set to "children". And here comes the tricky part, since in the past(and also today) when you create an ADF Faces page and add a stretchable component to it, the dimensionsFrom property is set to parent by default. This will be true to other layout components you'll add as well. At this point you might be wondering "Does this mean I'll need to go to each of the layout components in my page and modify the dimensionsFrom property value to be children?" ADF Faces to the rescue... To eliminate the need to do this tedious manual changes, we introduced a new web.xml parameter "oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS" You'll basically add the following to your web.xml <context-param>    <description>      This parameter controls the default value for component geometry on the page.      Supported values are:        legacy - component attributes use the default values as specified for the attributes                 in the tag documentation (default value)        auto   - component attributes use the correct default value given the value of their                 parent component. For example, with this setting, the panelStretchLayout                 will use "auto" as the default value for its "dimensionsFrom" attribute                 instead of "parent".    </description>    <param-name>oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS</param-name>    <param-value>auto</param-value>  </context-param> Once you set this parameter, you only need to set the dimensionsFrom attribute for the top level layout component on your page, and the rest of the components will adjust accordingly. One trick that you can use, and that is used in the demo below, is to have the dimensionsFrom property depend on the type of client that access your application. This way you can switch between stretch or flow layout based on the device accessing your application. For example I use the following in my page: <af:panelStretchLayout topHeight="70px" startWidth="0px" endWidth="0px"                                       dimensionsFrom="#{adfFacesContext.agent.capabilities['touchScreen'] eq 'none'  ? 'parent' : 'children' }"> Which results in a flow layout for iPads and a stretch layout for regular browsers. Check out the result in the below demo: &amp;lt;span id=&amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;

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• Data Binding to Attached Properties

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/06/14/data-binding-to-attached-properties.aspx When I was working on my C#/XAML game framework, I discovered I wanted to try to data bind my sprites to background objects. That way, I could update my objects and the draw functionality would take care of the work for me. After a little experimenting and web searching, it appeared this concept was an impossible dream. Of course, when has that ever stopped me? In my typical way, I started to massively dive down the rabbit hole. I created a sprite on a canvas, and I bound it to a background object. <Canvas Name="GameField" Background="Black"> <Image Name="PlayerStrite" Source="Assets/Ship.png" Width="50" Height="50" Canvas.Left="{Binding X}" Canvas.Top="{Binding Y}"/> </Canvas> Now, we wire the UI item to the background item. public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); this.Loaded += StartGame; }   void StartGame( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { BindingPlayer _Player = new BindingPlayer(); _Player.X = Window.Current.Bounds.Height - PlayerSprite.Height; _Player.X = ( Window.Current.Bounds.Width - PlayerSprite.Width ) / 2.0; } Of course, now we need to actually have our background object. public class BindingPlayer : INotifyPropertyChanged { private double m_X; public double X { get { return m_X; } set { m_X = value; NotifyPropertyChanged(); } }   private double m_Y; public double Y { get { return m_Y; } set { m_Y = value; NotifyPropertyChanged(); } }   public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; protected void NotifyPropertyChanged( [CallerMemberName] string p_PropertyName = null ) { if( PropertyChanged != null ) PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs( p_PropertyName ) ); } } I fired this baby up, and my sprite was correctly positioned on the screen. Maybe the sky wasn't falling after all. Wouldn't it be great if that was the case? I created some code to allow me to move the sprite, but nothing happened. This seems odd. So, I start debugging the application and stepping through code. Everything appears to be working. Time to dig a little deeper. After much profanity was spewed, I stumbled upon a breakthrough. The code only looked like it was working. What was really happening is that there was an exception being thrown in the background thread that I never saw. Apparently, the key call was the one to PropertyChanged. If PropertyChanged is not called on the UI thread, the UI thread ignores the call. Actually, it throws an exception and the background thread silently crashes. Of course, you'll never see this unless you're looking REALLY carefully. This seemed to be a simple problem. I just need to marshal this to the UI thread. Unfortunately, this object has no knowledge of this mythical UI Thread in which we speak. So, I had to pull the UI Thread out of thin air. Let's change our PropertyChanged call to look this. public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; protected void NotifyPropertyChanged( [CallerMemberName] string p_PropertyName = null ) { if( PropertyChanged != null ) Windows.ApplicationModel.Core.CoreApplication.MainView.CoreWindow.Dispatcher.RunAsync( Windows.UI.Core.CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, new Windows.UI.Core.DispatchedHandler( () => { PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs( p_PropertyName ) ); } ) ); } Now, we raised our notification on the UI thread. Everything is fine, people are happy, and the world moves on. You may have noticed that I didn't await my call to the dispatcher. This was intentional. If I am trying to update a slew of sprites, I don't want thread being hung while I wait my turn. Thus, I send the message and move on. It is worth nothing that this is NOT the most efficient way to do this for game programming. We'll get to that in another blog post. However, it is perfectly acceptable for a business app that is running a background task that would like to notify the UI thread of progress on a periodic basis. It is worth noting that this code was written for a Windows Store App. You can do the same thing with WP8 and WPF. The call to the marshaler changes, but it is the same idea.

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• A Patent for Workload Management Based on Service Level Objectives

  - by jsavit

  I'm very pleased to announce that after a tiny :-) wait of about 5 years, my patent application for a workload manager was finally approved. Background Many operating systems have a resource manager which lets you control machine resources. For example, Solaris provides controls for CPU with several options: shares for proportional CPU allocation. If you have twice as many shares as me, and we are competing for CPU, you'll get about twice as many CPU cycles), dedicated CPU allocation in which a number of CPUs are exclusively dedicated to an application's use. You can say that a zone or project "owns" 8 CPUs on a 32 CPU machine, for example. And, capped CPU in which you specify the upper bound, or cap, of how much CPU an application gets. For example, you can throttle an application to 0.125 of a CPU. (This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of Solaris RM controls.) Workload management Useful as that is (and tragic that some other operating systems have little resource management and isolation, and frighten people into running only 1 app per OS instance - and wastefully size every server for the peak workload it might experience) that's not really workload management. With resource management one controls the resources, and hope that's enough to meet application service objectives. In fact, we hold resource distribution constant, see if that was good enough, and adjust resource distribution if that didn't meet service level objectives. Here's an example of what happens today: Let's try 30% dedicated CPU. Not enough? Let's try 80% Oh, that's too much, and we're achieving much better response time than the objective, but other workloads are starving. Let's back that off and try again. It's not the process I object to - it's that we to often do this manually. Worse, we sometimes identify and adjust the wrong resource and fiddle with that to no useful result. Back in my days as a customer managing large systems, one of my users would call me up to beg for a "CPU boost": Me: "it won't make any difference - there's plenty of spare CPU to be had, and your application is completely I/O bound." User: "Please do it anyway." Me: "oh, all right, but it won't do you any good." (I did, because he was a friend, but it didn't help.) Prior art There are some operating environments that take a stab about workload management (rather than resource management) but I find them lacking. I know of one that uses synthetic "service units" composed of the sum of CPU, I/O and memory allocations multiplied by weighting factors. A workload is set to make a target rate of service units consumed per second. But this seems to be missing a key point: what is the relationship between artificial 'service units' and actually meeting a throughput or response time objective? What if I get plenty of one of the components (so am getting enough service units), but not enough of the resource whose needed to remove the bottleneck? Actual workload management That's not really the answer either. What is needed is to specify a workload's service levels in terms of externally visible metrics that are meaningful to a business, such as response times or transactions per second, and have the workload manager figure out which resources are not being adequately provided, and then adjust it as needed. If an application is not meeting its service level objectives and the reason is that it's not getting enough CPU cycles, adjust its CPU resource accordingly. If the reason is that the application isn't getting enough RAM to keep its working set in memory, then adjust its RAM assignment appropriately so it stops swapping. Simple idea, but that's a task we keep dumping on system administrators. In other words - don't hold the number of CPU shares constant and watch the achievement of service level vary. Instead, hold the service level constant, and dynamically adjust the number of CPU shares (or amount of other resources like RAM or I/O bandwidth) in order to meet the objective. Instrumenting non-instrumented applications There's one little problem here: how do I measure application performance in a way relating to a service level. I don't want to do it based on internal resources like number of CPU seconds it received per minute - We need to make resource decisions based on externally visible and meaningful measures of performance, not synthetic items or internal resource counters. If I have a way of marking the beginning and end of a transaction, I can then measure whether or not the application is meeting an objective based on it. If I can observe the delay factors for an application, I can see which resource shortages are slowing an application enough to keep it from meeting its objectives. I can then adjust resource allocations to relieve those shortages. Fortunately, Solaris provides facilities for both marking application progress and determining what factors cause application latency. The Solaris DTrace facility let's me introspect on application behavior: in particular I can see events like "receive a web hit" and "respond to that web hit" so I can get transaction rate and response time. DTrace (and tools like prstat) let me see where latency is being added to an application, so I know which resource to adjust. Summary After a delay of a mere few years, I am the proud creator of a patent (advice to anyone interested in going through the process: don't hold your breath!). The fundamental idea is fairly simple: instead of holding resource constant and suffering variable levels of success meeting service level objectives, properly characterise the service level objective in meaningful terms, instrument the application to see if it's meeting the objective, and then have a workload manager change resource allocations to remove delays preventing service level attainment. I've done it by hand for a long time - I think that's what a computer should do for me.

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• Optimizing a thread safe Java NIO / Serialization / FIFO Queue [migrated]

  - by trialcodr

  I've written a thread safe, persistent FIFO for Serializable items. The reason for reinventing the wheel is that we simply can't afford any third party dependencies in this project and want to keep this really simple. The problem is it isn't fast enough. Most of it is undoubtedly due to reading and writing directly to disk but I think we should be able to squeeze a bit more out of it anyway. Any ideas on how to improve the performance of the 'take'- and 'add'-methods? /** * <code>DiskQueue</code> Persistent, thread safe FIFO queue for * <code>Serializable</code> items. */ public class DiskQueue<ItemT extends Serializable> { public static final int EMPTY_OFFS = -1; public static final int LONG_SIZE = 8; public static final int HEADER_SIZE = LONG_SIZE * 2; private InputStream inputStream; private OutputStream outputStream; private RandomAccessFile file; private FileChannel channel; private long offs = EMPTY_OFFS; private long size = 0; public DiskQueue(String filename) { try { boolean fileExists = new File(filename).exists(); file = new RandomAccessFile(filename, "rwd"); if (fileExists) { size = file.readLong(); offs = file.readLong(); } else { file.writeLong(size); file.writeLong(offs); } } catch (FileNotFoundException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } channel = file.getChannel(); inputStream = Channels.newInputStream(channel); outputStream = Channels.newOutputStream(channel); } /** * Add item to end of queue. */ public void add(ItemT item) { try { synchronized (this) { channel.position(channel.size()); ObjectOutputStream s = new ObjectOutputStream(outputStream); s.writeObject(item); s.flush(); size++; file.seek(0); file.writeLong(size); if (offs == EMPTY_OFFS) { offs = HEADER_SIZE; file.writeLong(offs); } notify(); } } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } /** * Clears overhead by moving the remaining items up and shortening the file. */ public synchronized void defrag() { if (offs > HEADER_SIZE && size > 0) { try { long totalBytes = channel.size() - offs; ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect((int) totalBytes); channel.position(offs); for (int bytes = 0; bytes < totalBytes;) { int res = channel.read(buffer); if (res == -1) { throw new IOException("Failed to read data into buffer"); } bytes += res; } channel.position(HEADER_SIZE); buffer.flip(); for (int bytes = 0; bytes < totalBytes;) { int res = channel.write(buffer); if (res == -1) { throw new IOException("Failed to write buffer to file"); } bytes += res; } offs = HEADER_SIZE; file.seek(LONG_SIZE); file.writeLong(offs); file.setLength(HEADER_SIZE + totalBytes); } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } } /** * Returns the queue overhead in bytes. */ public synchronized long overhead() { return (offs == EMPTY_OFFS) ? 0 : offs - HEADER_SIZE; } /** * Returns the first item in the queue, blocks if queue is empty. */ public ItemT peek() throws InterruptedException { block(); synchronized (this) { if (offs != EMPTY_OFFS) { return readItem(); } } return peek(); } /** * Returns the number of remaining items in queue. */ public synchronized long size() { return size; } /** * Removes and returns the first item in the queue, blocks if queue is empty. */ public ItemT take() throws InterruptedException { block(); try { synchronized (this) { if (offs != EMPTY_OFFS) { ItemT result = readItem(); size--; offs = channel.position(); file.seek(0); if (offs == channel.size()) { truncate(); } file.writeLong(size); file.writeLong(offs); return result; } } return take(); } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } /** * Throw away all items and reset the file. */ public synchronized void truncate() { try { offs = EMPTY_OFFS; file.setLength(HEADER_SIZE); size = 0; } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } /** * Block until an item is available. */ protected void block() throws InterruptedException { while (offs == EMPTY_OFFS) { try { synchronized (this) { wait(); file.seek(LONG_SIZE); offs = file.readLong(); } } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } } /** * Read and return item. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") protected ItemT readItem() { try { channel.position(offs); return (ItemT) new ObjectInputStream(inputStream).readObject(); } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } catch (IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } }

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• Smooth animation on a persistently refreshing canvas

  - by Neurofluxation

  Yo everyone! I have been working on an Isometric Tile Game Engine in HTML5/Canvas for a little while now and I have a complete working game. Earlier today I looked back over my code and thought: "hmm, let's try to get this animated smoothly..." And since then, that is all I have tried to do. The problem I would like the character to actually "slide" from tile to tile - but the canvas redrawing doesn't allow this - does anyone have any ideas....? Code and fiddle below... Fiddle with it! http://jsfiddle.net/neuroflux/n7VAu/ <html> <head> <title>tileEngine - Isometric</title> <style type="text/css"> * { margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; cursor: default; } </style> <script type="text/javascript"> var map = Array( //land [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]], [[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0],[0,0,0]] ); var tileDict = Array("http://www.wikiword.co.uk/release-candidate/canvas/tileEngine/land.png"); var charDict = Array("http://www.wikiword.co.uk/release-candidate/canvas/tileEngine/mario.png"); var objectDict = Array("http://www.wikiword.co.uk/release-candidate/canvas/tileEngine/rock.png"); //last is one more var objectImg = new Array(); var charImg = new Array(); var tileImg = new Array(); var loaded = 0; var loadTimer; var ymouse; var xmouse; var eventUpdate = 0; var playerX = 0; var playerY = 0; function loadImg(){ //preload images and calculate the total loading time for(var i=0;i<tileDict.length;i++){ tileImg[i] = new Image(); tileImg[i].src = tileDict[i]; tileImg[i].onload = function(){ loaded++; } } i = 0; for(var i=0;i<charDict.length;i++){ charImg[i] = new Image(); charImg[i].src = charDict[i]; charImg[i].onload = function(){ loaded++; } } i = 0; for(var i=0;i<objectDict.length;i++){ objectImg[i] = new Image(); objectImg[i].src = objectDict[i]; objectImg[i].onload = function(){ loaded++; } } } function checkKeycode(event) { //key pressed var keycode; if(event == null) { keyCode = window.event.keyCode; } else { keyCode = event.keyCode; } switch(keyCode) { case 38: //left if(!map[playerX-1][playerY][1] > 0){ playerX--; } break; case 40: //right if(!map[playerX+1][playerY][1] > 0){ playerX++; } break; case 39: //up if(!map[playerX][playerY-1][1] > 0){ playerY--; } break; case 37: //down if(!map[playerX][playerY+1][1] > 0){ playerY++; } break; default: break; } } function loadAll(){ //load the game if(loaded == tileDict.length + charDict.length + objectDict.length){ clearInterval(loadTimer); loadTimer = setInterval(gameUpdate,100); } } function drawMap(){ //draw the map (in intervals) var tileH = 25; var tileW = 50; mapX = 80; mapY = 10; for(i=0;i<map.length;i++){ for(j=0;j<map[i].length;j++){ var drawTile= map[i][j][0]; var xpos = (i-j)*tileH + mapX*4.5; var ypos = (i+j)*tileH/2+ mapY*3.0; ctx.drawImage(tileImg[drawTile],xpos,ypos); if(i == playerX && j == playerY){ you = ctx.drawImage(charImg[0],xpos,ypos-(charImg[0].height/2)); } } } } function init(){ //initialise the main functions and even handlers ctx = document.getElementById('main').getContext('2d'); loadImg(); loadTimer = setInterval(loadAll,10); document.onkeydown = checkKeycode; } function gameUpdate() { //update the game, clear canvas etc ctx.clearRect(0,0,904,460); ctx.fillStyle = "rgba(255, 255, 255, 1.0)"; //assign color drawMap(); } </script> </head> <body align="center" style="text-align: center;" onload="init()"> <canvas id="main" width="904" height="465"> <h1 style="color: white; font-size: 24px;">I'll be damned, there be no HTML5 &amp; canvas support on this 'ere electronic machine!_{This game, jus' plain ol' won't work!}</h1> </canvas> </body> </html>

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• #OOW 2012 : IaaS, Private Cloud, Multitenant Database, and X3H2M2

  - by Eric Bezille

  The title of this post is a summary of the 4 announcements made by Larry Ellison today, during the opening session of Oracle Open World 2012... To know what's behind X3H2M2, you will have to wait a little, as I will go in order, beginning with the IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service - announcement. Oracle IaaS goes Public... and Private... Starting in 2004 with Fusion development, Oracle Cloud was launch last year to provide not only SaaS Application, based on standard development, but also the underlying PaaS, required to build the specifics, and required interconnections between applications, in and outside of the Cloud. Still, to cover the end-to-end Cloud  Services spectrum, we had to provide an Infrastructure as a Service, leveraging our Servers, Storage, OS, and Virtualization Technologies, all "Engineered Together". This Cloud Infrastructure, was already available for our customers to build rapidly their own Private Cloud either on SPARC/Solaris or x86/Linux... The second announcement made today bring that proposition a big step further : for cautious customers (like Banks, or sensible industries) who would like to benefits from the Cloud value of "as a Service", but don't want their Data out in the Cloud... We propose to them to operate the same systems, Exadata, Exalogic & SuperCluster, that are providing our Public Cloud Infrastructure, behind their firewall, in a Private Cloud model. Oracle 12c Multitenant Database This is also a major announcement made today, on what's coming with Oracle Database 12c : the ability to consolidate multiple databases with no extra additional  cost especially in terms of memory needed on the server node, which is often THE consolidation limiting factor. The principle could be compare to Solaris Zones, where, you will have a Database Container, who is "owning" the memory and Database background processes, and "Pluggable" Database in this Database Container. This particular feature is a strong compelling event to evaluate rapidly Oracle Database 12c once it will be available, as this is major step forward into true Database consolidation with Multitenancy on a shared (optimized) infrastructure. X3H2M2, enabling the new Exadata X3 in-Memory Database Here we are :  X3H2M2 stands for X3 (the new version of Exadata announced also today) Heuristic Hierarchical Mass Memory, providing the capability to keep most if not all the Data in the memory cache hierarchy. Of course, this is the major software enhancement of the new X3 Exadata machine, but as this is a software, our current customers would be able to benefit from it on their existing systems by upgrading to the new release. But that' not the only thing that we did with X3, at the same time we have upgraded everything : the CPUs, adding more cores per server node (16 vs. 12, with the arrival of Intel E5 / Sandy Bridge), the memory with 512GB memory as well per node,  and the new Flash Fire card, bringing now up to 22 TB of Flash cache. All of this 4TB of RAM + 22TB of Flash being use cleverly not only for read but also for write by the X3H2M2 algorithm... making a very big difference compare to traditional storage flash extension. But what does those extra performances brings to you on an already very efficient system: double your performances compare to the fastest storage array on the market today (including flash) and divide you storage price x10 at the same time... Something to consider closely this days... Especially that we also announced the availability of a new Exadata X3-2 8th rack : a good starting point. As you have seen a major opening for this year again with true innovation. But that was not the only thing that we saw today, as before Larry's talk, Fujitsu did introduce more in deep the up coming new SPARC processor, that they are co-developing with us. And as such Andrew Mendelsohn - Senior Vice President Database Server Technologies came on stage to explain that the next step after I/O optimization for Database with Exadata, was to accelerate the Database at execution level by bringing functions in the SPARC processor silicium. All in all, to process more and more Data... The big theme of the day... and of the Oracle User Groups Conferences that were also happening today and where I had the opportunity to attend some interesting sessions on practical use cases of Big Data one in Finances and Fraud profiling and the other one on practical deployment of Oracle Exalytics for Data Analytics. In conclusion, one picture to try to size Oracle Open World ... and you can understand why, with such a rich content... and this only the first day !

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