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• Advice for a computer science sophomore in college?

  - by RDas

  Hi Everyone! I'm a sophomore in college majoring in Computer Science and Math. I have always loved programming. I started programming in C when I was nine years old and over the years I've picked up Visual Basic, C#, Java, C++, JavaScript, Objective-C, Python, Ruby, elementary Haskell and elementary Erlang, and I learned Perl back in the day which I've mostly forgotten. I have not done much network programming. I have done CGI programming, but that was about six/seven years ago. I've done some socket programming and written (school) programs to do interprocess communication, which I understood and liked. I'm taking a course on client/server programming and another one on network security next semester, which I am really looking forward to. I'm seeking advice on how to proceed with future learning. I've mostly done application (mobile and desktop) development, not much of web development. I'd like to pick up some web development this coming semester. Since I know Ruby and Python, should I start by learning Django and/or Rails? Any other suggestions on starting web development? I have a good understanding of HTML and CSS. Also, I'd also like to know how hard it is to pick up and be good (read: productive) in functional programming languages coming from a purely structured/object oriented background? I've been reading up on Erlang and Haskell, and I'd like to know your opinions on whether it's worth my time trying to learn them. What about Lisp, Scheme and other functional languages? Any help/ideas would be really appreciated.

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• Silverlight Cream for May 30, 2010 -- #873

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Matthias Shapiro, Colin Blair(-2-), Mike Snow, Marlon Grech, Victor Gaudioso. Shoutout: If you're going to be anywhere near Mission Viejo, California on June 19th, set your calendar for this Victor Gaudioso event: New Speaking Event: Microsoft Book Signing/Silverlight 4 Presentation SilverLaw has another example of his Flexible surface app up: Drag & Drop Flexible Surface - Silverlight 4 From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 Binding and StringFormat in XAML Matthias Shapiro has a discussion posted about StringFormat binding in Silverlight 4 ... he dug in hard on this... well worth a read. View Model Collection Properties for WCF RIA Services Colin Blair is discussing some possibilities for exposing collections of entities from the ViewModel... his favorite: PagedCollectionView. The next post discusses this deeper. Advanced Paged Collection View Colin Blair continues in more depth on the PagedCollectionView, this time handling paging, sorting, and multiple loads. Silverlight Tip of the day #25 – Detecting Validation Errors on Submit Mike Snow's latest Tip of the Day is up and is about validation - specifically validating after your user has pressed "OK" INotifyPropertyChanged… I am fed up of handling events just to know when a property changed Marlon Grech has an Rx-less solution to code notifications of properties changing... this is a WPF and Silverlight solution and all the code is downloadable. New Silverlight Video Tutorial: How to Add Multiple BitmapEffects to One Object Victor Gaudioso's latest outing is in response to a query from a reader and is a video tutorial showing how to add multiple bitmap effects to one object. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Announcing Sesame Data Browser

  - by Fabrice Marguerie

  At the occasion of MIX10, which is currently taking place in Las Vegas, I'd like to announce Sesame Data Browser.Sesame will be a suite of tools for dealing with data, and Sesame Data Browser will be the first tool from that suite.Today, during the second MIX10 keynote, Microsoft demonstrated how they are pushing hard to get OData adopted. If you don't know about OData, you can visit the just revamped dedicated website: http://odata.org. There you'll find about the OData protocol, which allows you to publish and consume data on the web, the OData SDK (with client libraries for .NET, Java, Javascript, PHP, iPhone, and more), a list of OData producers, and a list of OData consumers.This is where Sesame Data Browser comes into play. It's one of the tools you can use today to consume OData.I'll let you have a look, but be aware that this is just a preview and many additional features are coming soon.Sesame Data Browser is part of a bigger picture than just OData that will take shape over the coming months. Sesame is a project I've been working on for many months now, so what you see now is just a start :-)I hope you'll enjoy what you see. Let me know what you think.

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• Can&rsquo;t eject external USB or Firewire drive in Windows 7

  - by Kelly Jones

  As a SharePoint developer, I work a lot with Virtual Machines (presently using Windows Virtual PC, with Windows 7).  I’m using these VMs with my laptop, and in order to get better performance, I’ve moved them to external hard drives.  (These drives have faster RPMs, larger caches, and a larger capacity, than the internal drive.)  I have one large external drive at home, another similar drive at the office, and a small, slow portable drive that I carry with me. So, at the end of each day at the office, I copy the files from the external drive to my portable drive and then once I get home, I copy them from the portable to the larger external drive I leave at home.  I do this for a couple of reasons: so I can work at home and secondly, so I have backup copies.  (Often, I feel like I’m in the movie “Office Space” when copying the files before I leave the office). Anyway, after the files are copied, I safely eject the external drives, and then hibernate my laptop.  I’ve been doing this for over a year now, but within the last couple of months I started to have issues disconnecting the drives.  Intermittently, some application/process would have a lock on some file on the drive that would keep Windows from safely ejecting it. After looking into it, I found that it was actually the Windows search service that was accessing the drive! Since I wasn’t using Windows search to look for stuff on these drives, I removed them as locations to index. To do this in Windows 7, you need to go to Indexing Options (just type “Indexing” into the search box in the Start menu…).  One of the choices displayed will then be Indexing Options, so click on it and you should then see a window similar to this:   Click on the Modify button and you’ll see this window: Notice the different drives listed above.  My “FreeAgent XTreme (F:)” drive was checked for some reason, which was causing the indexing service to scan the drive looking for new files to make available in the search results.  Ever since I unchecked this box, I’ve been able to safely eject the drive.

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• Help with a simple incremental backup script

  - by Evan

  I'd like to run the following incomplete script weekly in as a cron job to backup my home directory to an external drive mounted as /mnt/backups #!/bin/bash # TIMEDATE=$(date +%b-%d-%Y-%k:%M) LASTBACKUP=pathToDirWithLastBackup rsync -avr --numeric-ids --link-dest=$LASTBACKUP /home/myfiles /mnt/backups/myfiles$TIMEDATE My first question is how do I correctly set LASTBACKUP to the the the directory in /backs most recently created? Secondly, I'm under the impression that using --link-desk will mean that files in previous backups will not will not copied in later backups if they still exist but will rather symbolically link back to the originally copied files? However, I don't want to retain old files forever. What would be the best way to remove all the backups before a certain date without losing files that may think linked in those backups by currents backups? Basically I'm looking to merge all the files before a certain date to a certain date if that makes more sense than the way I initially framed the question :). Can --link-dest create hard links, and if so, just deleting previous directories wouldn't actually remove linked file? Finally I'd like to add a line to my script that compresses each newly created backup folder (/mnt/backups/myfiles$TIMEDATE). Based on reading this question, I was wondering if I could just use this line gzip --rsyncable /backups/myfiles$TIMEDATE after I run rsync so that sequential rsync --link-dest executions would find already copied and compressed files? I know that's a lot, so many thanks in advance for your help!!

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• What's the value of a Facebook fan?

  - by David Dorf

  In his blog posting titled "Why Each Facebook Fan Is Worth $2,000 to J. Crew," Joe Skorupa lays out a simplistic calculation for assigning a value to social media efforts within Facebook. While I don't believe the metric, at least its a metric that can be applied consistently. Trying to explain the ROI to management to start a program, then benchmarking to show progress isn't straightforward at all. Social media isn't really mature enough to have hard-and-fast rules around valuation (yet). When I'm asked by retailers how to measure social media efforts, I usually fess-up and say I can't show an ROI but the investment is so low you might was well take a risk. Intuitively, it just seems like a good way to interact with consumers, and since your competition is doing it, you better do it as well. Vitrue, a social media management company, has calculated a fan as being worth $3.60 per year based on impressions generated in Facebook's news feed. That means a fan base of 1 million translates into at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year. Don't believe that number either? Fine, Vitrue now has a tool that let's you adjust the earned media value of a fan. Jump over to http://evaluator.vitrue.com/ and enter your brand's Facebook URL to get an assessment of the current value and potential value. For fun, I compared Abercrombie & Fitch (1,077,480 fans), Gap (567,772 fans), and Wet Seal (294,479 fans). The image below shows the results assuming the default $5 earned media value for a fan. The calculation is more complicated than just counting fans. It also accounts for postings and comments. Its possible for a brand with fewer fans to have a higher value based on frequency and relevancy of posts. The tool gathers data via the Social Graph API for the past 30 days of activity. I'm not sure this tool assigns the correct value either, but hey, its a great start.

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• How to write PowerShell code part 1 (Using external xml configuration file)

  - by ybbest

  In this post, I will show you how to use external xml file with PowerShell. The advantage for doing so is that you can avoid other people to open up your PowerShell code to make the configuration changes; instead all they need to do is to change the xml file. I will refactor my site creation script as an example; you can download the script here and refactored code here. 1. As you can see below, I hard code all the variables in the script itself. $url = "http://ybbest" $WebsiteName = "Ybbest" $WebsiteDesc = "Ybbest test site" $Template = "STS#0" $PrimaryLogin = "contoso\administrator" $PrimaryDisplay = "administrator" $PrimaryEmail = "[email protected]" $MembersGroup = "$WebsiteName Members" $ViewersGroup = "$WebsiteName Viewers" 2. Next, I will show you how to manipulate xml file using PowerShell. You can use the get-content to grab the content of the file. [xml] $xmlconfigurations=get-content .\SiteCollection.xml 3. Then you can set it to variable (the variable has to be typed [xml] after that you can read the content of the xml content, PowerShell also give you nice IntelliSense by press the Tab key. [xml] $xmlconfigurations=get-content .\SiteCollection.xml $xmlconfigurations.SiteCollection $xmlconfigurations.SiteCollection.SiteName 4. After refactoring my code, I can set the variables using the xml file as below. #Set the parameters $siteInformation=$xmlinput.SiteCollection $url = $siteInformation.URL $siteName = $siteInformation.SiteName $siteDesc = $siteInformation.SiteDescription $Template = $siteInformation.SiteTemplate $PrimaryLogin = $siteInformation.PrimaryLogin $PrimaryDisplay = $siteInformation.PrimaryDisplayName $PrimaryEmail = $siteInformation.PrimaryLoginEmail $MembersGroup = "$WebsiteName Members" $ViewersGroup = "$WebsiteName Viewers"

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• Failure to toubleshoot a juju charm deployment

  - by Bruno Pereira

  My environments.yaml looks like this: environments: test: type: local control-bucket: juju-a14dfae3830142d9ac23c499395c2785999 admin-secret: 6608267bbd6b447b8c90934167b2a294999 default-series: oneiric juju-origin: distro data-dir: /home/bruno/projects/juju juju bootstrap runs perfect: 2011-11-22 19:19:31,999 INFO Bootstrapping environment 'test' (type: local)... 2011-11-22 19:19:32,004 INFO Checking for required packages... 2011-11-22 19:19:33,584 INFO Starting networking... 2011-11-22 19:19:34,058 INFO Starting zookeeper... 2011-11-22 19:19:34,283 INFO Starting storage server... 2011-11-22 19:19:40,051 INFO Initializing zookeeper hierarchy 2011-11-22 19:19:40,247 INFO Starting machine agent (origin: distro)... [sudo] password for bruno: 2011-11-22 19:23:16,054 INFO Environment bootstrapped 2011-11-22 19:23:16,079 INFO 'bootstrap' command finished successfully Deploy from a known good charm is accepted (tried it with one that I am trying to create): juju deploy --repository=/home/bruno/projects/charms_repo/ local:teamspeak 2011-11-22 19:28:49,929 INFO Charm deployed as service: 'teamspeak' 2011-11-22 19:28:49,962 INFO 'deploy' command finished successfully After this I can see that juju debug-log shows activity and I can see the network indicator going on and off and activity on my hard-disk. Wait... Looking at juju status I get: services: teamspeak: charm: local:oneiric/teamspeak-1 relations: {} units: teamspeak/0: machine: 0 public-address: 192.168.122.226 relations: {} state: start_error juju debug-log does not help and I have no files under /var/log/juju or /var/lib/juju. Last juju debug-log only shows this: 2011-11-22 19:45:20,790 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Units changed old:set(['wordpress/0']) new:set(['wordpress/0', 'teamspeak/0']) 2011-11-22 19:45:20,823 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Starting service unit: teamspeak/0 ... 2011-11-22 19:45:21,137 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Downloading charm local:oneiric/teamspeak-1 to /home/bruno/projects/juju/bruno-test/charms 2011-11-22 19:45:22,115 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Starting service unit teamspeak/0 2011-11-22 19:45:22,133 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Creating container teamspeak-0... 2011-11-22 19:47:04,586 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Container created for teamspeak/0 2011-11-22 19:47:04,781 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Charm extracted into container 2011-11-22 19:47:04,801 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting container... 2011-11-22 19:47:07,086 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started container for teamspeak/0 2011-11-22 19:47:07,107 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine INFO: Started service unit teamspeak/0 How can I troubleshot what is happening here?

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• Implement Budget Allocation in DAX for Power Pivot and Tabular #powerpivot #tabular #ssas #dax

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Comparing sales and budget, or costs and budget, is a very common operation. However, it is often the case that you have different granularities for different tables containing budget and the data to compare with. There are two ways to do that: you can limit the comparison to the granularity that is common to the two tables, or you can allocate the budget where it’s not defined. For example, if you have a budget defined by quarter and category, you might want to allocate it by month and product. In this way, you will do the comparison as you had a more granular definition of the budget, without actually having to do the manual job of allocating data (usually in an Excel worksheet!). If you want to do budget allocation in DAX, you can use the Budget Patterns we published on DAX Patterns. If you come from and MDX/OLAP background, at first you might find it hard to solve the problem of not having attribute hierarchies that helps you in propagating the budget values to lower hierarchical levels. However, I think that once you get used to DAX, you will find the behavior very predictable and easy to “debug” also for more complex allocation formula. You just have to be careful in writing the DAX formula, but probably the pattern we wrote should help you designing the right data model, without creating physical relationships to the budget table! This pattern is also based on the Handling Different Granularities scenario I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

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• Fixing unbootable installation on LVM root from Desktop LiveCD

  - by intuited

  I just did an installation from the 10.10 Desktop LiveCD, making the root volume an LVM LV. Apparently this is not supported; I managed it by taking these steps before starting the GUI installer app: installing the lvm2 package on the running system creating an LVM-type partition on the system hard drive creating a physical volume, a volume group and a root LV using the LVM tools. I also created a second LV for /var; this I don't think is relevant. creating a filesystem (ext4) on each of the two LVs. After taking these steps, the GUI installer offered the two LVs as installation targets; I gladly accepted, also putting /boot on a primary partition separate from the LVM partition. Installation seemed to go smoothly, and I've verified that both the root and var volumes do contain acceptable-looking directory structures. However, booting fails; if I understood correctly what happened, I was dropped into a busybox running in the initrd filesystem. Although I haven't worked through the entirety of the grub2 docs yet, it looks like the entry that tries to boot my new system is correct: menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-22-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set $UUID_OF_BOOT_FILESYSTEM linux /vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=/dev/mapper/$LVM_VOLUME_GROUP-root ro quiet splash initrd /initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic } Note that $VARS are replaced in the actual grub.cfg with their corresponding values. I rebooted back into the livecd and have unpacked the initrd image into a temp directory. It looks like the initrd image lacks LVM functionality. For example, if I'm reading /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/lvm2 (installed with lvm2 on the livecd-booted system, not present on the installed one) correctly, an lvm executable should be situated in /sbin; that is not the case. What's the best way to remedy this situation? I realize that it would be easier to just use the alternate install CD, which apparently supports LVM, but I don't want to wait for it to download and then have to reinstall.

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• Windows 8, the biggest struggle&hellip;.

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  As always, it’s hard to be original. It’s easy to copy great stuff others have done but to think of something nice that others might have done is not trivial. The number of applications in the Windows 8 Store is growing rappidly. That was to be expected; a lot of developers already have the skills needed to build Win8 apps so all it took was some ideas. And they have ideas. Another factor that helps with the growing number of apps in the store is the availability of the project templates in Visual Studio 2012. When you start a new project you are given a ready to run sample that you can adapt to your needs. All the stuff needed to navigate through the app, to display data, to do semantic zoom, it’s all available. So what do we do? We tweak, change, adapt and modify these samples to fit our application. However, the underlying structure of the app remains the same. Somehow developers can’t seem to break free from the structure that the sample apps give you. Result: all apps looks alike. My tip for the day: take the samples and use them to learn. Don’t use them as a foundation of your app. Make you app different from those others and you’ll find you will have something special. I’m curious to see what you come up with!

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• Iterative Conversion

  - by stuart ramage

  Question Received: I am toying with the idea of migrating the current information first and the remainder of the history at a later date. I have heard that the conversion tool copes with this, but haven't found any information on how it does. Answer: The Toolkit will support iterative conversions as long as the original master data key tables (the CK_* tables) are not cleared down from Staging (the already converted Transactional Data would need to be cleared down) and the Production instance being migrated into is actually Production (we have migrated into a pre-prod instance in the past and then unloaded this and loaded it into the real PROD instance, but this will not work for your situation. You need to be migrating directly into your intended environment). In this case the migration tool will still know all about the original keys and the generated keys for the primary objects (Account, SA, etc.) and as such it will be able to link the data converted as part of a second pass onto these entities. It should be noted that this may result in the original opening balances potentially being displayed with an incorrect value (if we are talking about Financial Transactions) and also that care will have to be taken to ensure that all related objects are aligned (eg. A Bill must have a set to bill segments, meter reads and a financial transactions, and these entities cannot exist independantly). It should also be noted that subsequent runs of the conversion tool would need to be 'trimmed' to ensure that they are only doing work on the objects affected. You would not want to revalidate and migrate all Person, Account, SA, SA/SP, SP and Premise details since this information has already been processed, but you would definitely want to run the affected transactional record validation and keygen processes. There is no real "hard-and-fast" rule around this processing since is it specific to each implmentations needs, but the majority of the effort required should be detailed in the Conversion Tool section of the online help (under Adminstration/ The Conversion Tool). The major rule is to ensure that you only run the steps and validation/keygen steps that you need and do not do a complete rerun for your subsequent conversion.

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• How to review code that you do not understand?

  - by John Isaacks

  I have been given the role to improve development in our company. The first thing I wanted to start was code reviews since that has never been done here before. There are 3 programmers in our company. I am a web programmer, my known languages are mainly PHP, ActionScript and JavaScript. The other 2 developers write internal applications in VB.net We have been doing code reviews for a couple weeks now. I find it hard to understand VB code. So when they say what its doing, for the most part I just have to take their word for it. If I do see something that looks wrong, I explain my opinion and I explain how I would address it in one of the languages I know. Sometimes my suggestions are welcomed but many times I am told things like "this is the best way of doing it in this language" or "that doesn't apply to this language" or similar things of that nature. This may be true, but without knowing the language I am not sure how to confirm or refute these claims. I know one possible solution would be to learn vb so I can do better code reviews. I really have no interest in learning vb (especially since I have a list of other technologies I am trying to learn for my own projects) and would like to keep this as a last resort but it is an option. Another idea that came to me is, they both have interest in C# and so do I. Its relative to them because its .net and relative to me because its more similar to the languages I know. Yet it is new to all of us. I thought about the benefits of us all collaborating on a pet C#.net project and reviewing each others code from that. I guess theres also the possibility hiring a consultant to come in and give us some code reviews. What would you recommend I do in this situation.

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• Accessing and Updating Data in ASP.NET: Filtering Data Using a CheckBoxList

  Filtering Database Data with Parameters, an earlier installment in this article series, showed how to filter the data returned by ASP.NET's data source controls. In a nutshell, the data source controls can include parameterized queries whose parameter values are defined via parameter controls. For example, the SqlDataSource can include a parameterized SelectCommand, such as: SELECT * FROM Books WHERE Price > @Price. Here, @Price is a parameter; the value for a parameter can be defined declaratively using a parameter control. ASP.NET offers a variety of parameter controls, including ones that use hard-coded values, ones that retrieve values from the querystring, and ones that retrieve values from session, and others. Perhaps the most useful parameter control is the ControlParameter, which retrieves its value from a Web control on the page. Using the ControlParameter we can filter the data returned by the data source control based on the end user's input. While the ControlParameter works well with most types of Web controls, it does not work as expected with the CheckBoxList control. The ControlParameter is designed to retrieve a single property value from the specified Web control, but the CheckBoxList control does not have a property that returns all of the values of its selected items in a form that the CheckBoxList control can use. Moreover, if you are using the selected CheckBoxList items to query a database you'll quickly find that SQL does not offer out of the box functionality for filtering results based on a user-supplied list of filter criteria. The good news is that with a little bit of effort it is possible to filter data based on the end user's selections in a CheckBoxList control. This article starts with a look at how to get SQL to filter data based on a user-supplied, comma-delimited list of values. Next, it shows how to programmatically construct a comma-delimited list that represents the selected CheckBoxList values and pass that list into the SQL query. Finally, we'll explore creating a custom parameter control to handle this logic declaratively. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• ADF Bounded Taskflow Activation

  - by Vijay Mohan

  hey guys, It's really been a while since I last blogged. Just came across a hard-to-debug scenario, so thought of sharing it for the benefit of ADF developers.I had a page fragment(jsff) wrapped inside a  bounded taskflow, for which the activation was conditional and was based on a requestScope property (be it a requestScope variable or a property coming from a requestScope bean). As soon as the taskflow activates and page renders the requestScope parameters life span ends. After that, when you raise an event inside the page (click of commandLink, moseHover, valueChange event etc) then for the first time the event gets fired but it fails to affect the change in the page, moreover, for the subsequent times the event itself doesn't get fired. Any guesses as to what could be the culprit..?I guess, I already gave the reason in the initial paragraph. For the first time when the event gets fired, the fwk sees that the page is already lying in inactivate state, so it fails to affect the change and for subsequent times it doesn't even fire the event because it already knew that the page/region is inactive. So, in such a scenario we must use either a pageFlowScope property or transientVO property which could exist till the page's life span.

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• My software is hosted on a "bad" website. Can I do anything about it?

  - by Abluescarab

  The software I've created is hosted on what you could call a "bad" website. It's hard to explain, so I'll just provide an example. I've made a free password generator. This, along with most of my other FREE software, is available on this website. This is their description of my software: Platform: 7/7 x64/Windows 2K/XP/2003/Vista Size: 61.6 Mb License: Trial File Type: .7z Last Updated: June 4th, 2011, 15:38 UTC Avarage Download Speed: 6226 Kb/s Last Week Downloads: 476 Toatal Downloads: 24908 Not only is the size completely skewed, it is not trial software, it's free software. The thing is that it's not the description I'm worried about--it's the download links. The website is a scam website. They apparently link to "cracks" and "keygens", but not only is that in itself illegal, they actually link to fake download websites that give you viruses and charge your credit card. Just to list things that are wrong with this website: they claim all software is paid software then offer downloads for keygens and cracks; they fake all details about the program and any program reviews and ratings; they and the downloads site they link to are probably run by the same person, so they make money off of these lies. I'm only a teenager with no means to pursue legal action. This means that, unfortunately, I can't do anything that will actually get results. I'd like my software to only be downloaded off my personal website. I have links to four legitimate locations to download my software and that's it. Essentially, is there anything I can do about this? As I said above, I can't pursue legal action, but is there some way I can discourage traffic to that website by blacklisting it or something? Can I make a claim on MY website to only download my software from the links I provide? Or should I just pay no mind? Because, honestly, it's a bit of a ways back in Google results. Thank you ahead of time.

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• How can I transition from being a "9-5er" to being self-employed?

  - by Stephen Furlani

  Hey, I posted this question last fall about moonlighting, and I feel like I've got a strong case to make to start transitioning from being a Full-Time Employee to being self-employed. So much so, that I find it hard to concentrate at work on the things I'm supposed to be doing. However, self-employment comes with things like no health benefits or guaranteed income... so I don't feel like I can just quit. (At least not in this economy with a house and family). I'm already working 40hrs/wk on my main job, going to school to get my MS, and trying to freelance on weekends and evenings, but I want to give it more time. If I can't take LWOP or just work less than 40hrs/wk I feel like I have to give up self-employment because I just can't give my day job all my best. Would it be reasonable to ask my employer if they can cut my hours (and pay)? Is there something else I can/should do? Has anyone done this transition and had it turn out well? or bad? I am in the USA and I understand answers are not legal advice. Thanks!

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• Pivotal Announces JSR-352 Compliance for Spring Batch

  - by reza_rahman

  Pivotal, the company currently funding development of the popular Spring Framework, recently announced JSR 352 (aka Batch Applications for the Java Platform) compliance for the Spring Batch project. More specifically, Spring Batch targets JSR-352 Java SE runtime compatibility rather than Java EE runtime compatibility. If you are surprised that APIs included in Java EE can pass TCKs targeted for Java SE, you should not be. Many other Java EE APIs target compatibility in Java SE environments such as JMS and JPA. You can read about Spring Batch's support for JSR-352 here as well as the Spring configuration to get JSR-352 working in Spring (typically a very low level implementation concern intended to be completely transparent to most JSR-352 users). JSR 352 is one of the few very encouraging cases of major active contribution to the Java EE standard from the Spring development team (the other major effort being Rod Johnson's co-leadership of JSR 330 along with Bob Lee). While IBM's Christopher Vignola led the spec and contributed IBM's years of highly mission critical batch processing experience from products like WebSphere Compute Grid and z/OS batch, the Spring team provided major influences to the API in particular for the chunk processing, listeners, splits and operational interfaces. The GlassFish team's own Mahesh Kannan also contributed, in particular by implementing much of the Java EE integration work for the reference implementation. This was an excellent example of multilateral engineering collaboration through the standards process. For many complex reasons it is not too hard to find evidence of less than amicable interaction between the Spring ecosystem and the Java EE standard over the years if one cares to dig deep enough. In reality most developers see Spring and Java EE as two sides of the same server-side Java coin. At the core Spring and Java EE ecosystems have always shared deep undercurrents of common user bases, bi-directional flows of ideas and perhaps genuine if not begrudging mutual respect. We can all hope for continued strength for both ecosystems and graceful high notes of collaboration via efforts like JSR 352.

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• Oracle’s FY14 Partner Kickoff Recap & New OPN Website

  - by Kristin Rose

  There is no doubt that we are off to a strong FY14! Now that Oracle’s Global Partner Kickoff has come and gone, it’s time to take what we have learned and focus on having the strongest year ever! To quote Oracle pilot, Sean D. Tucker, “FY14, it’s all about growth baby!” Here are some of the ways you can grow with Oracle! Sell into accounts where Oracle isn’t selling directly Offer customer added value solutions leveraging our technology Offer deep market capabilities that leverage transformative technology Be aggressive, sell the entire stack, engage with Oracle in the marketplace and get engineered for growth! With this being said, we also know that to have the strongest year ever, you also need the strongest tools ever! Ladies and gentleman, in case you missed its debut during Oracle’s Global Partner Kickoff, let OPN introduce you to the newly redesigned, Oracle PartnerNetwork website, providing  easy access to key business processes, systems and resources! We took your advice and implemented the following enhancements: A new OPN home page, highlighting paths to top tasks Streamlined top navigation New business process focused pages Restructured Knowledge Zone areas (currently applied to select pages) Learn more about the new Oracle PartnerNetwork website and all that Oracle has to offer, by watching the FY14 Global Partner Kickoff replay video below! Thank you for your hard work and partnership in FY13, here’s to an even stronger FY14! Good Selling, The OPN Communications Team

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• ext4 jbd2 journaling active even on empty filesystem

  - by Paul

  I have been having several issues with my ext4 filesystems that seem to be due to jbd2 journaling. I made a related post here and am rephrasing it with the hope that someone may be able to help. For a minimal example, I start with an empty 8gb USB stick and use gparted to create one ext4 partition. The command used by gparted when creating the ext4 file system is: mkfs.ext4 -j -O extent -L DataTraveler8gb /dev/sde1 I check the filesystem with gparted: e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sde1 and I mount it: sudo mount /dev/sde1 /media/test The disk is empty, but the journaling is very active on this disk (/dev/sde1). The other disks are ext4 SSDs formatted similarly. A snapshot of iotop: % sudo iotop -oPa Total DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 2027.21 K/s PID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO COMMAND 262 be/3 root 0.00 B 56.00 K 0.00 % 0.18 % [jbd2/sda1-8] 29069 be/3 root 0.00 B 0.00 B 0.00 % 0.16 % [jbd2/sde1-8] 891 be/3 root 0.00 B 4.00 K 0.00 % 0.03 % [jbd2/sdc1-8] What is jbd2 doing with /dev/sde1? If I follow the same steps with a larger 2Tb disk, iotop indicates this empty disk is constantly being written to by jbd2 at the rate of Mb/s as soon as I mount it. On the other disks, which have the OS and /home, I have tried to find if any files are being modified by processes to cause this behavior but couldn't find any. I also moved many of the disk intensive process to use a tmpfs. And used noatime. I have another non-SSD hard disk on this machine, /dev/sdb, that is also ext4 but was not formatted by gparted (given to me by a coworker). It does not appear in iotop. So I am assuming there an issue with gparted. Any suggestions are appreciated. Also any tips on how to modify existing partitions to fix the issue without having to start from scratch would be great. There are some posts related to jbd2 but they didn't help (eg. here).

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• GPLv2 - Multiple AI chess engines to bypass GPL

  - by Dogbert

  I have gone through a number of GPL-related questions, the most recent being this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3248823/legal-question-about-the-gpl-license-net-dlls/3249001#3249001 I'm trying to see how this would work, so bear with me. I have a simple GUI interface for a game of Chess. It essentially can send/receive commands to/from an external chess engine (ie: Tong, Fruit, etc). The application/GUI is similar in nature to XBoard ( http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/ ), but was independently designed. After going through a number of threads on this topic, it seems that the FSF considers dynamically linking against a GPLv2 library as a derivative work, and that by doing so, the GPLv2 extends to my proprietary code, and I must release the source to my entire project. Other legal precedents indicate the opposite, and that dynamic linking doesn't cause the "viral" effect of the GPL to propagate to my proprietary code. Since there is no official consensus that can give a "hard-and-fast" answer to the dynamic linking question, would this be an acceptable alternative: I build my chess GUI so that it sends/receives the chess engine AI logic as text commands from an external interface library that I write The interface library I wrote itself is then released under the GPL The interface library is only used to communicate via a generic text pipe to external command-line chess engines The chess engine itself would be built as a command-line utility rather than as a library of any sort, and just sends strings in the Universal Chess Interface of Chess Engine Communication Protocol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Engine_Communication_Protocol ) format. The one "gotcha" is that the interface library should not be specific to one single GPL'ed chess engine, otherwise the entire GUI would be "entirely dependent" on it. So, I just make my interface library so that it is able to connect to any command-line chess engine that uses a specific format, rather than just one unique engine. I could then include pre-built command-line-app versions of any of the chess engines I'm using. Would that sort of approach allow me to do the following: NOT release the source for my UI Release the source of the interface library I built (if necessary) Use one or more chess engines and bundle them as external command-line utilities that ship with a binary version of my UI Thank you.

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• Leaving Microsoft

  - by Stephen Walther

  After two and a half years working with the ASP.NET team, I’ve decided that this is the right time to leave Microsoft and, with the help of some friends, re-launch my ASP.NET training and consulting company. The company has the modest name Superexpert. While working on my Ph.D. at MIT, I was surrounded by professors and students who were passionate about knowledge. During the Internet boom, I was lucky enough to work side-by-side with some very smart and hard-working people to create several successful startups. However, the people I worked with at Microsoft were among the smartest and hardest working. Microsoft hires a small number of people and gives them huge responsibilities. It continues to amaze me that so few people work on the ASP.NET team when you consider how much the team produces. I had the opportunity to work with a number of inspiring people at Microsoft. I’ll miss working with Scott Hunter, Dave Reed, Boris Moore, Eilon Lipton, Scott Guthrie, James Senior, Jim Wang, Phil Haack, Damian Edwards, Vishal Joshi, Mike Pope, Jon Young, Dmitry Robsman, Simon Calvert, Stefan Schackow, and many others. I’m proud of what we accomplished while I was working at Microsoft. We reached out to the jQuery team and changed direction from Microsoft Ajax to jQuery. We successfully contributed several important new features to the open-source jQuery project including jQuery Templates, jQuery Data-Linking, jQuery Globalization, and (as John Resig announced at the last jQuery conference) jQuery Require. I’m looking forward to returning to training and consulting. We want to focus on providing consulting on the “right way” of building ASP.NET websites, which we call Modern ASP.NET applications. By Modern ASP.NET applications, I mean applications built with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, HTML5, and Visual Studio ALM. Additionally, we want to help companies that have existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications migrate to ASP.NET MVC. If you are interested in having us provide training for your company or you need help building a custom ASP.NET application then please contact us at [email protected] or visit our website at Superexpert.com.

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• Organizing an entity system with external component managers?

  - by Gustav

  I'm designing a game engine for a top-down multiplayer 2D shooter game, which I want to be reasonably reuseable for other top-down shooter games. At the moment I'm thinking about how something like an entity system in it should be designed. First I thought about this: I have a class called EntityManager. It should implement a method called Update and another one called Draw. The reason for me separating Logic and Rendering is because then I can omit the Draw method if running a standalone server. EntityManager owns a list of objects of type BaseEntity. Each entity owns a list of components such as EntityModel (the drawable representation of an entity), EntityNetworkInterface, and EntityPhysicalBody. EntityManager also owns a list of component managers like EntityRenderManager, EntityNetworkManager and EntityPhysicsManager. Each component manager keeps references to the entity components. There are various reasons for moving this code out of the entity's own class and do it collectively instead. For example, I'm using an external physics library, Box2D, for the game. In Box2D, you first add the bodies and shapes to a world (owned by the EntityPhysicsManager in this case) and add collision callbacks (which would be dispatched to the entity object itself in my system). Then you run a function which simulates everything in the system. I find it hard to find a better solution to do this than doing it in an external component manager like this. Entity creation is done like this: EntityManager implements the method RegisterEntity(entityClass, factory) which registers how to create an entity if that class. It also implements the method CreateEntity(entityClass) which would return an object of type BaseEntity. Well now comes my problem: How would the reference to a component be registered to the component managers? I have no idea how I would reference the component managers from a factory/closure.

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• dpkg E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error

  - by user81269

  I decided to shift around my partitions on my hard drive for a fresh install of Kubuntu. I booted my Ubuntu 10.10 live disc, shifted everything around and attempted to install grub and it didn't work, so I burnt an Ubuntu 12.04 disc and installed it. I got the computer working and wanted to install some packages, but didn't have an internet connection at the time. So (I know this was stupid) I got some debs from previous versions of Ubuntu, as I needed my music, and the other install took a long of time to boot. Once I got my internet connection back, everything worked ok, for a little while. Then I stumbled upon this problem after removing ten broken packages using synaptic: drhax@Spamotard:~$ sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: libgtk2.0-cil 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 417 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 2,638 kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y (Reading database ... 103052 files and directories currently installed.) Removing libgtk2.0-cil ... E: File does not exist: /usr/share/cli-common/packages.d/policy.2.6.gtk-dotnet.installcligac dpkg: error processing libgtk2.0-cil (--remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: libgtk2.0-cil E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Help would be appreciated. This is my first post, but I do know fair bit about Ubuntu, so feel free to point out any stupid mistakes I have made.

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