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• Using SQL Source Control and Vault Professional Part 4

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  Two weeks ago I upgraded our installation of Fortress to the latest version, which is now named Vault Professional.  This is the version of Vault (i.e. Vault Standard 5.1 / Vault Professional 5.1) that will be officially supported with Red-Gate SQL Source Control 2.1.  While the folks at Red-Gate did a fantastic job of working with me to get SQL Source Control to work with the older Fortress version, we weren’t going to just sit on that.  There are a couple of things that Vault Professional cleaned up for us, such as improved integration with Visual Studio 2010, so it was a win all around. Shortly after that upgrade, I received notice from Red-Gate that they had a new Early Access version of SQL Source Control available that included the ability to source control static data.  The idea here is that you probably have a few fairly static lookup tables in your system, and those data values are similar in concept to source code, and should be versioned in your source control management system also.  I agree with this, but please be wise…somebody out there is bound to try to use this feature as their disaster recovery for their entire database, and that is NOT the purpose.  First off, you should never have your PROD (or LIVE, whatever you call it) system attached to source control.  Source Control is for development, not for PROD systems.  Second, use the features that are intended for this purpose, such as BACKUP and RESTORE. Laying that tangent aside, it is great that now you can include these critical values in your repository and make them part of a deployment process.  As you would guess, SQL Source Control uses SQL Data Compare to create the data change scripts just like it uses SQL Compare to create the schema change scripts.  Once again, they did a very good job with the integration to their other products.  At this point we are really starting to see some good payback on our investment in the full SQL Developer Bundle.  Those products were worth the investment back when we only used them sporadically for troubleshooting and DBA analysis, but now with SQL Source Control, they are becoming everyday-use products for the development team. I like this software (SQL Source Control) so much that I am about to break my own rules and distribute it to my team to use even though it is still in beta.  This is the first time that I have approved the use of any beta software in a production scenario (actively building our next versions of internal software) but I predict that the usability and productivity gain of using SQL Source Control over manual scripting is worth the risk.  Of course, I have also put this beta software through its paces pretty well to be comfortable with it, and Red-Gate has proven their responsiveness to issues that came up in my early beta testing, and so I am willing to bet on their continued support.  Likewise, SourceGear, the maker of Vault Professional, has proven itself to me as well, and so the combination of SQL Source Control with Vault Professional is the new standard for my development team.

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• Just another web startup - platform comparison

  - by Holland

  I'm looking to do a web startup which involves something along the lines of an ecommerce site, yet a little more in depth than that. While it's something that I would rather not go into detail with in terms of the initial idea, I can specify (on a basic level) what would be required of the website. If you have any observations or opinions derived from personal experience, which relate to what you see here, I'd appreciate it if you could share these. Paypal's API interaction (definitely). From what I've read about their API, integration with it into their website is VERY expensive, so I'd probably hold off on that until I've (hopefully) generated money and write my own simple credit-card interaction system. SQL Backend (obviously) PostgreSQL seems like a pretty good choice, as from what I've read, it's structure is a bit more "object-oriented" than, say, MySQL. Then again, I've used MySQL before and haven't had much problem with it whatsoever. Would it be worth learning PostgreSQL for this purpose? Java or .Net implementation (Preferably Mono, so I can use .Net while hosting the website using Apache). The reason for this is because, frankly, while I know PHP is a great platform to develop websites with, I hate developing with it. Before someone chimes in and flames me for saying that, note that I have nothing against the language, I just don't like it for my purposes. While Mono may be good to go with, I'm aware that ASP.Net MVC 3 hasn't been released for Mono yet, which may be a pain to work with, without their Razor syntax. Ontop of that, it seems Java is completely FULL of class libraries which deal with web development, that can be downloaded from the web. If anyone has any experience with these, I'd appreciate if that were posted. From what I've read about Spring and Struts2, they seem to be the best out there - especially since they're (AFAIK) MVC. I've considered Python and Django, which do seem REALLY nice, but I don't know much Python, and I'd rather start with something that I already know (language-wise; not framework-wise) than dive into learning a language AND a new framework. I'd REALLY like to be able to host my website via Apache, rather than using Windows Server or anything like that, as, frankly, I hate their setup. I'm not dissing it in any way, shape, or form, I'm just saying I dislike it. <3 terminal config. If there is a good reason to with Windows Server, however, I'd be willing to learn it. C# has a lot of things that Java appears not to have, including Delegates, unsigned types, and LINQ. Is there anything that Java has which can counter these?

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• Achieving Zero Downtime Deployment

  - by MattW

  I am trying to achieve zero downtime deployments so I can deploy less during off hours and more during "slower" hours - or anytime, in theory. My current setup, somewhat simplified: Web Server A (.NET App) Web Server B (.NET App) Database Server (SQL Server) My current deployment process: "Stop" the sites on both Web Server A and B Upgrade the database schema for the version of the app being deployed Update Web Server A Update Web Server B Bring everything back online Current Problem This leads to a small amount of downtime each month - about 30 mins. I do this during off hours, so it isn't a huge problem - but it is something I'd like to get away from. Also - there is no way to really go 'back'. I don't generally make rollback DB scripts - only upgrade scripts. Leveraging The Load Balancer I'd love to be able to upgrade one Web Server at a time. Take Web Server A out of the load balancer, upgrade it, put it back online, then repeat for Web Server B. The problem is the database. Each version of my software will need to execute against a different version of the database - so I am sort of "stuck". Possible Solution A current solution I am considering is adopting the following rules: Never delete a database table. Never delete a database column. Never rename a database column. Never reorder a column. Every stored procedure must be versioned. Meaning - 'spFindAllThings' will become 'spFindAllThings_2' when it is edited. Then it becomes 'spFindAllThings_3' when edited again. Same rule applies to views. While, this seems a bit extreme - I think it solves the problem. Each version of the application will be hitting the DB in a non breaking way. The code expects certain results from the views/stored procedures - and this keeps that 'contract' valid. The problem is - it just seeps sloppy. I know I can clean up old stored procedures after the app is deployed for awhile, but it just feels dirty. Also - it depends on all of the developers following these rule, which will mostly happen, but I imagine someone will make a mistake. Finally - My Question Is this sloppy or hacky? Is anybody else doing it this way? How are other people solving this problem?

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• Separating physics and game logic from UI code

  - by futlib

  I'm working on a simple block-based puzzle game. The game play consists pretty much of moving blocks around in the game area, so it's a trivial physics simulation. My implementation, however, is in my opinion far from ideal and I'm wondering if you can give me any pointers on how to do it better. I've split the code up into two areas: Game logic and UI, as I did with a lot of puzzle games: The game logic is responsible for the general rules of the game (e.g. the formal rule system in chess) The UI displays the game area and pieces (e.g. chess board and pieces) and is responsible for animations (e.g. animated movement of chess pieces) The game logic represents the game state as a logical grid, where each unit is one cell's width/height on the grid. So for a grid of width 6, you can move a block of width 2 four times until it collides with the boundary. The UI takes this grid, and draws it by converting logical sizes into pixel sizes (that is, multiplies it by a constant). However, since the game has hardly any game logic, my game logic layer [1] doesn't have much to do except collision detection. Here's how it works: Player starts to drag a piece UI asks game logic for the legal movement area of that piece and lets the player drag it within that area Player lets go of a piece UI snaps the piece to the grid (so that it is at a valid logical position) UI tells game logic the new logical position (via mutator methods, which I'd rather avoid) I'm not quite happy with that: I'm writing unit tests for my game logic layer, but not the UI, and it turned out all the tricky code is in the UI: Stopping the piece from colliding with others or the boundary and snapping it to the grid. I don't like the fact that the UI tells the game logic about the new state, I would rather have it call a movePieceLeft() method or something like that, as in my other games, but I didn't get far with that approach, because the game logic knows nothing about the dragging and snapping that's possible in the UI. I think the best thing to do would be to get rid of my game logic layer and implement a physics layer instead. I've got a few questions regarding that: Is such a physics layer common, or is it more typical to have the game logic layer do this? Would the snapping to grid and piece dragging code belong to the UI or the physics layer? Would such a physics layer typically work with pixel sizes or with some kind of logical unit, like my game logic layer? I've seen event-based collision detection in a game's code base once, that is, the player would just drag the piece, the UI would render that obediently and notify the physics system, and the physics system would call a onCollision() method on the piece once a collision is detected. What is more common? This approach or asking for the legal movement area first? [1] layer is probably not the right word for what I mean, but subsystem sounds overblown and class is misguiding, because each layer can consist of several classes.

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• SQL SERVER – Inviting Ideas for SQL in Sixty Seconds – 12/12/12

  - by pinaldave

  Today is 12/12/12 – I am not sure when will I write this kind of date again – maybe never. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime when we have the same date, month and year all have same digit. December 12th is one of the most fantastic day in my personal life. Four years ago, this day I got married to my wife – Nupur Dave.  Here are photos of our wedding (Dec 12, 2008). Here is a very interesting photo of myself earlier this year. It is not photoshoped or modified photo. The only modification I have done here is to add arrow and speech bubble. Every Wednesday I tried to put one SQL in Sixty Seconds Video. The journey has been fantastic and so far I have put a total of 35 SQL in Sixty Seconds Video. The goal of the video is to learn something in 1 minute. In our daily life we are all very busy and hardly have time for anything. No matter how much we are busy – we all have one minute of time. Sometime we wait for a minute in elevators, at the escalator, at a coffee shop, or just waiting for our phone reboot. Today is a fantastic day – 12/12/12. Let me invite all of you submits SQL in Sixty Seconds idea. If I like your idea and create a sixty second video over it – you will win surprise learning material from me. There are two very simple rules of the contest: - I should have not have already recorded the tip. The tip should be descriptive. Do not just suggest to cover “Performance Tuning” or “How to Create Index” or “More of reporting services”. The tip should have around 100 words of description explaining SQL Tip. The contest is open forever. The winner will be announced whenever I use the tip to convert to video. If I use your tip, I will for sure mention in the blog post that it is inspired from your suggestion. Meanwhile, do not forget to subscribe YouTube Channel. Here are my latest three videos from SQL in Sixty Seconds. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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• Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

  - by Chris Stevens

  One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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• Responding to Invites

  - by Daniel Moth

  Following up from my post about Sending Outlook Invites here is a shorter one on how to respond. Whatever your choice (ACCEPT, TENTATIVE, DECLINE), if the sender has not unchecked the "Request Response" option, then send your response. Always send your response. Even if you think the sender made a mistake in keeping it on, send your response. Seriously, not responding is plain rude. If you knew about the meeting, and you are happy investing your time in it, and the time and location work for you, and there is an implicit/explicit agenda, then ACCEPT and send it. If one or more of those things don't work for you then you have a few options. Send a DECLINE explaining why. Reply with email to ask for further details or for a change to be made. If you don’t receive a response to your email, send a DECLINE when you've waited enough. Send a TENTATIVE if you haven't made up your mind yet. Hint: if they really require you there, they'll respond asking "why tentative" and you have a discussion about it. When you deem appropriate, instead of the options above, you can also use the counter propose feature of Outlook but IMO that feature has questionable interaction model and UI (on both sender and recipient) so many people get confused by it. BTW, two of my outlook rules are relevant to invites. The first one auto-marks as read the ACCEPT responses if there is no comment in the body of the accept (I check later who has accepted and who hasn't via the "Tracking" button of the invite). I don’t have a rule for the DECLINE and TENTATIVE cause typically I follow up with folks that send those.   The second rule ensures that all Invites go to a specific folder. That is the first folder I see when I triage email. It is also the only folder which I have configured to show a count of all items inside it, rather than the unread count - when sending a response to an invite the item disappears from the folder and hence it is empty and not nagging me. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How to Add Control Panel to “My Computer” in Windows 7 or Vista

  - by The Geek

  Back in the Windows XP days, you could easily add Control Panel to My Computer with a simple checkbox in the folder view settings. Windows 7 and Vista don’t make this quite as easy, but there’s still a way to get it back. To make this tweak, we’ll be doing a quick registry hack, but there’s a downloadable version provided as well. Manual Registry Tweak to Add Control Panel Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace Now that you’re there, you’ll need to right-click and create a new key… If you want to add the regular Control Panel view, with the categories, you’ll need to use one GUID as the name of the key. If you want the icon view instead, you can use the other key. Here they are: Category View:  {26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064C98683} Icon View: {21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D} Once you’re done, it should look like this: Now over in the Computer view, just hit the F5 key to refresh the panel, and you should see the new icon pop up in the list: Now when you click on the icon you’ll be taken to Control Panel. If you didn’t know how to change the view before, you can use the drop-down box on the right-hand side to switch between Category and icon view. Downloadable Registry Hack Rather than deal with manual registry editing, you can simply download the file, extract it, and then either double-click on the AddCategoryControlPanel.reg to add the Category view icon, or AddIconControlPanel.reg to add the other icon. There’s an uninstall script provided for each. Download ControlPanelMyComputer Registry Hack from howtogeek.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable User Account Control (UAC) the Easy Way on Win 7 or VistaHow To Figure Out Your PC’s Host Name From the Command PromptRestore Missing Desktop Icons in Windows 7 or VistaNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineAdd Registry Editor to Control Panel TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Cooking with Wessty: HTML 5 and Visual Studio

  - by David Wesst

  The hardest part about using a new technology, such as HTML 5, is getting to what features are available and the syntax. One way to learn how to use new technologies is to adapt your current development to help you use the technology in comfort of your own development environment. For .NET Web Developers, that environment is usually Visual Studio 2010. This technique intends on showing you how to get HTML 5 Intellisense working in your current version of Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, making it easier for you to start using HTML 5 features in your current .NET web development projects. Quick Note According to the Visual Web Developer team at Microsoft, the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta has support for both HTML 5 and CSS 3. If you are willing to try out the bleeding edge update from Microsoft, then you won’t need this technique. --- Ingredients Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 Your favourite HTML 5 compliant browser (e.g. Internet Explorer 9) Administrator privileges, or the ability to install Visual Studio Extensions in your development environment. Directions Download the HTML 5 Intellisense for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 extension from the Visual Studio Extension Gallery. Install it. Open Visual Studio. Open up a web file, such as an HTML or ASPX file. he HTML Source Editing toolbar should have appeared. (Optional) If it did not appear, you can activate it through the main menu by selecting View, then Toolbars, and then select HTML Source Editing if it does not have a checkbox beside it. (NOTE: If there is a checkbox, then the toolbar is enabled) In the HTML Source Editing toolbar, open up the validation schema drop box, and select HTML 5. Et voila! You now have HTML 5 intellisense enabled to help you get started in adding HTML 5 awesomeness to your web sites and web applications. Optional – Setting HTML 5 Validation Options At this point, you may want to select how Visual Studio shows validation errors. You can do that in the Options Menu. To get to the Options Menu… In the main menu select Tools, then Options. In the Options window, select and expand Text Editor, then HTML, followed by selecting Validation. Resources HTML 5 Intellisense for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 extenstion Visual Studio Extension Gallery Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

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• SQL SERVER – Difference Between CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and GETDATE() – CURRENT_TIMESTAMP Equivalent in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  A common question – I often get from Oracle/MySQL Professionals: “What is the Equivalent to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP in SQL Server?” Here is a common question I often get from SQL Server Professionals: “What are differences between Difference Between CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and GETDATE ()?” Very simple question but have showed up so frequently that I feel like to write about it. Well in SQL Server GETDATE() is Equivalent to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. However, if you use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP in your select statement it will work fine. You can see in the above example – both of them returns the same value. Now let us go to next question regarding difference between GETDATE and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. Well, the matter of the fact, there is no difference between them in SQL Server (Reference Link). CURRENT_TIMESTAMP is an ANSI SQL function, whereas GETDATE is T-SQL implementation of the same function. Both of them derive value from the operating system of the computer on which SQL Server instance is running. Above discussion prompts another question – in this case, what should one use GETDATE or CURRENT_TIMESTAMP? Well, this is indeed tricky and interesting question. I think I am very comfortable using the GETDATE () so I will go to use it but a matter of the fact there is no right or wrong answer. If you want to follow ancient saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”, I suggest using the GETDATE (), or continue using CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. With that said, there is one very important property we all need to keep in mind. If you use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP while creating an object, they are automatically converted to GETDATE() and stored internally. To illustrate what I am suggesting here is the example - Create a table using the following script CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TestTable]( [Cold2] [datetime] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[TestTable] ADD DEFAULT (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) FOR [Cold2] GO Now go to SSMS and generate the script for the table and you will notice following syntax. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TestTable]( [Cold2] [datetime] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[TestTable] ADD DEFAULT (GETDATE()) FOR [Cold2] GO You can notice that SQL Server have automatically converted CURRENT_TIMESTAMP to GETDATE(). I guess this gives us an idea how they behave. Now go ahead and make your choice! Do let me know which one will you use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP or GETDATE () in the comments area. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DateTime, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Can you Trust Search?

  - by David Dorf

  An awful lot of referrals to e-commerce sites come from web searches. Retailers rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to correctly position their website so they can be found. Search on "blue jeans" and the results are determined by a semi-secret algorithm -- in my case Levi.com, Banana Republic, and ShopStyle show up. The NY Times recently uncovered a situation where JCPenney, via third-parties hired to help with SEO, was caught manipulating search results so they were erroneously higher in page rankings. No doubt this helped drive additional sales during this part Christmas. The article, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, is well worth reading. My friend Ron Kleinman started an interesting discussion at the ARTS Linkedin forum. He posed the question: The ability of a single company to "punish" any retailer (by significantly impacting their on-line sales volume) who does not play by their rules ... is this a good thing or a bad thing? Clearly JCP was in the wrong and needed to be punished, but should that decision lie with Google alone? Don't get me wrong -- I'm certainly not advocating we create a Department of Search where bureaucrats think of ways to spend money, but Google wields an awful lot of power in this situation, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Now Google is incorporating more social aspects into their search results. For example, when Google knows its me (i.e. I'm logged in when using Google) search results will be influenced by my Twitter network. In an effort to increase relevance, the blogs and re-tweeted articles from my network will be higher in the search results than they otherwise would be. So in the case of product searches, things discussed in my network will rise to the top. Continuing my blue jean example, if someone in my network had been discussing Macy's perhaps they would now be higher in the result set. soapbox: I already have lots of spammers posting bogus comments to this blog in an effort to create additional links to their sites and thus increase their search ranking. Should I expect a similar situation in Twitter and eventually Facebook? Now retailers need to expand their SEO efforts to incorporate social media as well, but do us all a favor and please don't cheat.

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• Automated build platform for .NET portfolio - best choice?

  - by jkohlhepp

  I am involved with maintaining a fairly large portfolio of .NET applications. Also in the portfolio are legacy applications built on top of other platforms - native C++, ECLIPS Forms, etc. I have a complex build framework on top of NAnt right now that manages the builds for all of these applications. The build framework uses NAnt to do a number of different things: Pull code out of Subversion, as well as create tags in Subversion Build the code, using MSBuild for .NET or other compilers for other platforms Peek inside AssemblyInfo files to increment version numbers Do deletes of certain files that shouldn't be included in builds / releases Releases code to deployment folders Zips code up for backup purposes Deploy Windows services; start and stop them Etc. Most of those things can be done with just NAnt by itself, but we did build a couple of extension tasks for NAnt to do some things that were specific to our environment. Also, most of those processes above are genericized and reused across a lot of our different application build scripts, so that we don't repeat logic. So it is not simple NAnt code, and not simple build scripts. There are dozens of NAnt files that come together to execute a build. Lately I've been dissatisfied with NAnt for a couple reasons: (1) it's syntax is just awful - programming languages on top of XML are really horrific to maintain, (2) the project seems to have died on the vine; there haven't been a ton of updates lately and it seems like no one is really at the helm. Trying to get it working with .NET 4 has cause some pain points due to this lack of activity. So, with all of that background out of the way, here's my question. Given some of the things that I want to accomplish based on that list above, and given that I am primarily in a .NET shop, but I also need to build non-.NET projects, is there an alternative to NAnt that I should consider switching to? Things on my radar include Powershell (with or without psake), MSBuild by itself, and rake. These all have pros and cons. For example, is MSBuild powerful enough? I remember using it years ago and it didn't seem to have as much power as NAnt. Do I really want to have my team learn Ruby just to do builds using rake? Is psake really mature enough of a project to pin my portfolio to? Is Powershell "too close to the metal" and I'll end up having to write my own build library akin to psake to use it on its own? Are there other tools that I should consider? If you were involved with maintaining a .NET portfolio of significant complexity, what build tool would you be looking at? What does your team currently use?

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• System Variables, Stored Procedures or Functions for Meta Data

  - by BuckWoody

  Whenever you want to know something about SQL Server’s configuration, whether that’s the Instance itself or a database, you have a few options. If you want to know “dynamic” data, such as how much memory or CPU is consumed or what a particular query is doing, you should be using the Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) that you can read about here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188754.aspx  But if you’re looking for how much memory is installed on the server, the version of the Instance, the drive letters of the backups and so on, you have other choices. The first of these are system variables. You access these with a SELECT statement, and they are useful when you need a discrete value for use, say in another query or to put into a table. You can read more about those here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173823.aspx You also have a few stored procedures you can use. These often bring back a lot more data, pre-formatted for the screen. You access these with the EXECUTE syntax. It is a bit more difficult to take the data they return and get a single value or place the results in another table, but it is possible. You can read more about those here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187961.aspx Yet another option is to use a system function, which you access with a SELECT statement, which also brings back a discrete value that you can use in a test or to place in another table. You can read about those here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187812.aspx  By the way, many of these constructs simply query from tables in the master or msdb databases for the Instance or the system tables in a user database. You can get much of the information there as well, and there are even system views in each database to show you the meta-data dealing with structure – more on that here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186778.aspx  Some of these choices are the only way to get at a certain piece of data. But others overlap – you can use one or the other, they both come back with the same data. So, like many Microsoft products, you have multiple ways to do the same thing. And that’s OK – just research what each is used for and how it’s intended to be used, and you’ll be able to select (pun intended) the right choice. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• top tweets SOA Partner Community – June 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Oracle SOA Learn how Business Rules are used in Oracle SOA Suite. New free self-study course - Oracle Univ. #soa #oraclesoa http://pub.vitrue.com/ll9B OPITZ CONSULTING ?Wie #BPM und #SOA zusammengehören? Watch 100-Seconds-Video-Lesson by @Rolfbaer - http://ow.ly/luSjK @soacommunity Andrejus Baranovskis ?Customized BPM 11g PS6 Workspace Application http://fb.me/2ukaSBXKs Mark Nelson ?Case Management Samples Released http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lv Mark Nelson Instance Patching Demo for BPM 11.1.1.7 http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lx Simone Geib Antony Reynolds: Target Verification #oraclesoa https://blogs.oracle.com/reynolds/ OPITZ CONSULTING ?"It's all about Integration - Developing with Oracle #Cloud Services" @t_winterberg files: http://ow.ly/ljtEY #cloudworld @soacommunity Arun Pareek ?Functional Testing Business Processes In Oracle BPM Suite 11g http://wp.me/pkPu1-pc via @arrunpareek SOA Proactive Want to get started with Human Workflow? Check out the introductory video on OTN, http://pub.vitrue.com/enIL C2B2 Consulting Free tech workshop,London 6th of Jun Diagnosing Performance & Scalability Problems in Oracle SOASuite http://www.c2b2.co.uk/oracle_fusion_middleware_performance_seminar … @soacommunity Oracle BPM Must have technologies for delivering effective #CX : #BPM #Social #Mobile > #OracleBPM Whitepaper http://pub.vitrue.com/6pF6 OracleBlogs ?Introduction to Web Forms -Basic Tutorial http://ow.ly/2wQLTE OTNArchBeat ?Complete State of SOA podcast now available w/ @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/PZFw Ronald Luttikhuizen VENNSTER Blog | Article published - Fault Handling and Prevention - Part 2 | http://blog.vennster.nl/2013/05/article-published-fault-handling-and.html … Mark Nelson ?Getting to know Maven http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lk gschmutz ?Cool! Our 2nd article has just been published: "Fault Handling and Prevention for Services in Oracle Service Bus" http://pub.vitrue.com/jMOy David Shaffer Interesting SOA Development and Delivery post on A-Team Redstack site - http://bit.ly/18oqrAI . Would be great to get others to contribute! Mark Nelson BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle in more detail (30min) http://wp.me/pgVeO-Ko SOA Proactive ?Webcast: 'Introduction and Troubleshooting of the SOA 11g Database Adapter', May 9th. Register now at http://pub.vitrue.com/8In7 Mark Nelson ?SOA Development and Delivery http://wp.me/pgVeO-Kd Oracle BPM Manoj Das, VP Product Mangement talks about new #OracleBPM release #BPM #processmanagement http://pub.vitrue.com/FV3R OTNArchBeat Podcast: The State of SOA w/ @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/OK2M gschmutz New article series on Industrial SOA started on OTN and Service Technology Magazine: http://guidoschmutz.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/first-two-chapters-of-industrial-soa-articles-series-have-been-published-both-on-otn-and-service-technology-magazine/ … #industrialSOA Danilo Schmiedel ?Article series #industrialSOA published on OTN and Service Technology Magazine http://inside-bpm-and-soa.blogspot.de/2013/04/industrial-soa_22.html … @soacommunity @OC_WIRE SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Announcing MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.7.1

  - by Hema Sridharan

  The MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) Team is pleased to announce the release of MEB 3.7.1, a maintenance release version that includes bug fixes and enhancements to some of the existing features. The most important feature introduced in this release is Automatic Incremental Backup. The new  argument syntax for the --incremental-base option is introduced which makes it simpler to perform automatic incremental backups. When the options --incremental & --incremental-base=history:last_backup are combined, the mysqlbackup command  uses the metadata in the mysql.backup_history table to determine the LSN to use as the lower limit of the incremental backup. You no longer need to keep track of the actual LSN (as in the option --start-lsn=LSN) or even the location of the previous backup (as in the option --incremental-base=dir:directory_path)This release also incudes various bug fixes related to some options used in MEB. The most important are few of them as listed below,1. The option --force now allows overwriting InnoDB data and log files in  combination with the apply-log and apply-incremental-backup options, and replacing the image file in combination with the backup-to-image and backup-dir-to-image options. 2. Resolved a bug that prevented MEB to interface with third-party storage managers to execute backup and restore jobs in combination with the SBT interface and associated --sbt* options for mysqlbackup. 3. When MEB is run with the copy-back option,  it now displays warnings as existing files are overwritten.For more information about other bug fixes, please refer to the change-log in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-enterprise-backup/3.7/en/meb-news.html The complete MEB documentation is located at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-enterprise-backup/3.7/en/index.html. You will find the binaries for the new release in My Oracle Support,  https://support.oracle.comChoose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then use the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" feature. If you haven't looked at MEB 3.7.1 recently, please do so now and let us know how MEB works for you. Send your feedback to [email protected].

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• My Package Version Number Appears Greater Yet apt-get Doesn't Select It

  - by nutznboltz

  Backstory: It was determined that when using lxc container VMs the Nagios nrpe shutdown script when run on the host of the containers would kill the nrpe processes inside the containers. This was remediated by changing the script to use pidfiles instead of searching the process table for the nrpe process. Regrettably start-stop-daemon is a C program that resulted from translating a Perl script and it shows. There are far too many global varibles in start-stop-daemon.c and although there are some nice blocks of comments there are far to few comments that explain the intent behind variable names such as "schedule" (the string "schedule" appears in many contexts.) The manual page for start-stop-daemon strongly suggests that unless you use the "--retry" option the start-stop-daemon program may return before the process it sent a signal to actually calls exit() and terminates, however it doesn't actually state this in plain English. The obtuseness of start-stop-daemon is most likely the reason that the "fixed" version of the script includes a dubious comment indicating that sometimes the pid file has not been removed. I can easily see why someone would not understand that he left the --retry option missing. This bug also causes failures when the script is given the "restart" option; the nrpe daemon will shutdown but not start up again. Did I mention that since applying the update our nrpe servers started crashing over and over? Repairing this is why I am doing this work. I have been working on remediating the fix. You can see my current work in this PPA. Actual Question: The upstream version number of nagios-nrpe-server in lucid-updates is 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.1 My PPA uses this version number 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.1.1~ppa1~lucid1 I check the rules here and use this test program and I am lead to believe that the version number I use in my PPA is greater than the one in lucid-updates yet when I ran: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nutznboltz/nrpe-unbreak-lp-600941 sudo apt-get update sudo aptitiude dist-upgrade The replacement package was not installed. I was able to install it using sudo aptitude install nagios-nrpe-server=2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.1.1~ppa1~lucid1 Can anyone explain this behavior? Why didn't my version number appear greater to "aptitude dist-upgrade"? Thanks $ cat /etc/apt/preferences Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-backports Pin-Priority: 400 Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-security Pin-Priority: 990 Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-updates Pin-Priority: 900 Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-proposed Pin-Priority: 400 $ ls /etc/apt/preferences.d/ $ Should not make any difference as a PPA cannot be in any of those pockets. I went ahead and bumped the version number in the PPA to 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.2~ppa1~lucid1. I'll see if that makes a difference. I do notice that lintian complains: W: nagios-nrpe-server: debian-revision-not-well-formed 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.2~ppa1~lucid1

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• Au revoir, Python?

  - by GuySmiley

  I'm an ex-C++ programmer who's recently discovered (and fallen head-over-heels with) Python. I've taken some time to become reasonably fluent in Python, but I've encountered some troubling realities that may lead me to drop it as my language of choice, at least for the time being. I'm writing this in the hopes that someone out there can talk me out of it by convincing me that my concerns are easily circumvented within the bounds of the python universe. I picked up python while looking for a single flexible language that will allow me to build end-to-end working systems quickly on a variety of platforms. These include: - web services - mobile apps - cross-platform client apps for PC Development speed is more of a priority at the time-being than execution speed. However, in order to improve performance over time without requiring major re-writes or architectural changes I think it's imperative to be able to interface easily with Java. That way, I can use Java to optimize specific components as the application scales, without throwing away any code. As far as I can tell, my requirement for an enterprise-capable, platform-independent, fast language with a large developer base means it would have to be Java. .NET or C++ would not cut it due to their respective limitations. Also Java is clearly de rigeur for most mobile platforms. Unfortunately, tragically, there doesn't seem to be a good way to meet all these demands. Jython seems to be what I'm looking for in principle, except that it appears to be practically dead, with no one developing, supporting, or using it to any great degree. And also Jython seems too married to the Java libraries, as you can't use many of the CPython standard libraries with it, which has a major impact on the code you end up writing. The only other option that I can see is to use JPype wrapped in marshalling classes, which may work although it seems like a pain and I wonder if it would be worth it in the long run. On the other hand, everything I'm looking for seems to be readily available by using JRuby, which seems to be much better supported. As things stand, I think this is my best option. I'm sad about this because I absolutely love everything about Python, including the syntax. The perl-like constructs in Ruby just feel like such a step backwards to me in terms of readability, but at the end of the day most of the benefits of python are available in Ruby as well. So I ask you - am I missing something here? Much of what I've said is based on what I've read, so is this summary of the current landscape accurate, or is there some magical solution to the Python-Java divide that will snuff these concerns and allow me to comfortably stay in my happy Python place?

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• AI for a mixed Turn Based + Real Time battle system - Something "Gambit like" the right approach?

  - by Jason L.

  This is maybe a question that's been asked 100 times 1,000 different ways. I apologize for that :) I'm in the process of building the AI for a game I'm working on. The game is a turn based one, in the vein of Final Fantasy but also has a set of things that happen in real time (reactions). I've experimented with FSM, HFSMs, and Behavior Trees. None of them felt "right" to me and all felt either too limiting or too generic / big. The idea I'm toying with now is something like a "Rules engine" that could be likened to the Gambit system from Final Fantasy 12. I would have a set of predefined personalities. Each of these personalities would have a set of conditions it would check on each event (Turn start, time to react, etc). These conditions would be priority ordered, and the first one that returns true would be the action I take. These conditions can also point to a "choice" action, which is just an action that will make a choice based on some Utility function. Sort of a mix of FSM/HFSM and a Utility Function approach. So, a "gambit" with the personality of "Healer" may look something like this: (ON) Ally HP = 0% - Choose "Relife" spell (ON) Ally HP < 50% - Choose Heal spell (ON) Self HP < 65% - Choose Heal spell (ON) Ally Debuff - Choose Debuff Removal spell (ON) Ally Lost Buff - Choose Buff spell Likewise, a "gambit" with the personality of "Agressor" may look like this: (ON) Foe HP < 10% - Choose Attack skill (ON) Foe any - Choose target - Choose Attack skill (ON) Self Lost Buff - Choose Buff spell (ON) Foe HP = 0% - Taunt the player What I like about this approach is it makes sense in my head. It also would be extremely easy to build an "AI Editor" with an approach like this. What I'm worried about is.. would it be too limiting? Would it maybe get too complicated? Does anyone have any experience with AIs in Turn Based games that could maybe provide me some insight into this approach.. or suggest a different approach? Many thanks in advance!!!

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• Using CTAS & Exchange Partition Replace IAS for Copying Partition on Exadata

  - by Bandari Huang

  Usage Scenario: Copy data&index from one partition to another partition in a partitioned table. Solution: Create a partition definition Copy data from one partition to another partiton by 'Insert as select (IAS)' Create a nonpartitioned table by 'Create table as select (CTAS)' Convert a nonpartitioned table into a partition of partitoned table by exchangng their data segments. Rebuild unusable index Exchange Partition Convertion Mutual convertion between a partition (or subpartition) and a nonpartitioned table Mutual convertion between a hash-partitioned table and a partition of a composite *-hash partitioned table Mutual convertiton a [range | list]-partitioned table into a partition of a composite *-[range | list] partitioned table. Exchange Partition Usage Scenario High-speed data loading of new, incremental data into an existing partitioned table in DW environment Exchanging old data partitions out of a partitioned table, the data is purged from the partitioned table without actually being deleted and can be archived separately Exchange Partition Syntax ALTER TABLE schema.table EXCHANGE [PARTITION|SUBPARTITION] [partition|subprtition] WITH TABLE schema.table [INCLUDE|EXCLUDING] INDEX [WITH|WITHOUT] VALIDATION UPDATE [INDEXES|GLOBAL INDEXES] INCLUDING | EXCLUDING INDEXES Specify INCLUDING INDEXES if you want local index partitions or subpartitions to be exchanged with the corresponding table index (for a nonpartitioned table) or local indexes (for a hash-partitioned table). Specify EXCLUDING INDEXES if you want all index partitions or subpartitions corresponding to the partition and all the regular indexes and index partitions on the exchanged table to be marked UNUSABLE. If you omit this clause, then the default is EXCLUDING INDEXES. WITH | WITHOUT VALIDATION Specify WITH VALIDATION if you want Oracle Database to return an error if any rows in the exchanged table do not map into partitions or subpartitions being exchanged. Specify WITHOUT VALIDATION if you do not want Oracle Database to check the proper mapping of rows in the exchanged table. If you omit this clause, then the default is WITH VALIDATION.  UPADATE INDEX|GLOBAL INDEX Unless you specify UPDATE INDEXES, the database marks UNUSABLE the global indexes or all global index partitions on the table whose partition is being exchanged. Global indexes or global index partitions on the table being exchanged remain invalidated. (You cannot use UPDATE INDEXES for index-organized tables. Use UPDATE GLOBAL INDEXES instead.) Exchanging Partitions&Subpartitions Notes Both tables involved in the exchange must have the same primary key, and no validated foreign keys can be referencing either of the tables unless the referenced table is empty.  When exchanging partitioned index-organized tables: – The source and target table or partition must have their primary key set on the same columns, in the same order. – If key compression is enabled, then it must be enabled for both the source and the target, and with the same prefix length. – Both the source and target must be index organized. – Both the source and target must have overflow segments, or neither can have overflow segments. Also, both the source and target must have mapping tables, or neither can have a mapping table. – Both the source and target must have identical storage attributes for any LOB columns. 

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• Oracle ERP Cloud Solution Defines Revenue Recognition Software Market

  - by Steve Dalton

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Revenue is a fundamental yardstick of a company's performance, and one of the most important metrics for investors in the capital markets. So it’s no surprise that the accounting standard boards have devoted significant resources to this topic, with a key goal of ensuring that companies use a consistent method of recognizing revenue. Due to the myriad of revenue-generating transactions, and the divergent ways organizations recognize revenue today, the IFRS and FASB have been working for 12 years on a common set of accounting standards that apply to all industries in virtually all countries. Through their joint efforts on May 28, 2014 the FASB and IFRS released the IFRS 15 / ASU 2014-9 (Revenue from Contracts with Customers) converged accounting standard. This standard applies to revenue in all public companies, but heavily impacts organizations in any industry that might have complex sales contracts with multiple distinct deliverables (obligations). For example, an auto dealer who bundles free service with the sale of a car can only recognize the service revenue once the owner of the car brings it in for work. Similarly, high-tech companies that bundle software licenses, consulting, and support services on a sales contract will recognize bundled service revenue once the services are delivered. Now all companies need to review their revenue for hidden bundling and implicit obligations. Numerous time-consuming and judgmental activities must be performed to properly recognize revenue for complex sales contracts. To illustrate, after the contract is identified, organizations must identify and examine the distinct deliverables, determine the estimated selling price (ESP) for each deliverable, then allocate the total contract price to each deliverable based on the ESPs. In terms of accounting, organizations must determine whether the goods or services have been delivered or performed to the customer’s satisfaction, then either book revenue in the current period or record a liability for the obligation if revenue will be recognized in a future accounting period. Oracle Revenue Management Cloud was architected and developed so organizations can simplify and streamline revenue recognition. Among other capabilities, the solution uses business rules to efficiently identify and examine contracts, intelligently calculate and allocate deliverable prices based on prescribed inputs, and accurately recognize revenue for each deliverable based on customer satisfaction. "Oracle works very closely with our customers, the Big 4 accounting firms, and the accounting standard boards to deliver an adaptive, comprehensive, new generation revenue recognition solution,” said Rondy Ng, Senior Vice President, Applications Development. “With the recently announced IFRS 15 / ASU 2014-9, Oracle is ready to support customer adoption of the new standard with our Revenue Management Cloud,” said Rondy. Oracle Revenue Management Cloud, an integral part of Oracle Financials Cloud, helps organizations comply with accounting standards, provides them with confidence that reported revenue is materially accurate, and simplifies the accounting process for revenue recognition. Stay tuned to this blog for regular updates on Oracle Revenue Management Cloud. We also invite you to review our new oracle.com ERP pages @ oracle.com/erp. We will be updating these pages very soon with more information about Oracle Revenue Management Cloud.

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• Best pathfinding for a 2D world made by CPU Perlin Noise, with random start- and destinationpoints?

  - by Mathias Lykkegaard Lorenzen

  I have a world made by Perlin Noise. It's created on the CPU for consistency between several devices (yes, I know it takes time - I have my techniques that make it fast enough). Now, in my game you play as a fighter-ship-thingy-blob or whatever it's going to be. What matters is that this "thing" that you play as, is placed in the middle of the screen, and moves along with the camera. The white stuff in my world are walls. The black stuff is freely movable. Now, as the player moves around he will constantly see "monsters" spawning around him in a circle (a circle that's larger than the screen though). These monsters move inwards and try to collide with the player. This is the part that's tricky. I want these monsters to constantly spawn, moving towards the player, but avoid walls entirely. I've added a screenshot below that kind of makes it easier to understand (excuse me for my bad drawing - I was using Paint for this). In the image above, the following rules apply. The red dot in the middle is the player itself. The light-green rectangle is the boundaries of the screen (in other words, what the player sees). These boundaries move with the player. The blue circle is the spawning circle. At the circumference of this circle, monsters will spawn constantly. This spawncircle moves with the player and the boundaries of the screen. Each monster spawned (shown as yellow triangles) wants to collide with the player. The pink lines shows the path that I want the monsters to move along (or something similar). What matters is that they reach the player without colliding with the walls. The map itself (the one that is Perlin Noise generated on the CPU) is saved in memory as two-dimensional bit-arrays. A 1 means a wall, and a 0 means an open walkable space. The current tile size is pretty small. I could easily make it a lot larger for increased performance. I've done some path algorithms before such as A*. I don't think that's entirely optimal here though.

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• How to Quickly Add Multiple IP Addresses to Windows Servers

  - by Sysadmin Geek

  If you have ever added multiple IP addresses to a single Windows server, going through the graphical interface is an incredible pain as each IP must be added manually, each in a new dialog box. Here’s a simple solution. Needless to say, this can be incredibly monotonous and time consuming if you are adding more than a few IP addresses. Thankfully, there is a much easier way which allows you to add an entire subnet (or more) in seconds. Adding an IP Address from the Command Line Windows includes the “netsh” command which allows you to configure just about any aspect of your network connections. If you view the accepted parameters using “netsh /?” you will be presented with a list of commands each which have their own list of commands (and so on). For the purpose of adding IP addresses, we are interested in this string of parameters: netsh interface ipv4 add address Note: For Windows Server 2003/XP and earlier, “ipv4″ should be replaced with just “ip” in the netsh command. If you view the help information, you can see the full list of accepted parameters but for the most part what you will be interested in is something like this: netsh interface ipv4 add address “Local Area Connection” 192.168.1.2 255.255.255.0 The above command adds the IP Address 192.168.1.2 (with Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0) to the connection titled “Local Area Network”. Adding Multiple IP Addresses at Once When we accompany a netsh command with the FOR /L loop, we can quickly add multiple IP addresses. The syntax for the FOR /L loop looks like this: FOR /L %variable IN (start,step,end) DO command So we could easily add every IP address from an entire subnet using this command: FOR /L %A IN (0,1,255) DO netsh interface ipv4 add address “Local Area Connection” 192.168.1.%A 255.255.255.0 This command takes about 20 seconds to run, where adding the same number of IP addresses manually would take significantly longer. A Quick Demonstration Here is the initial configuration on our network adapter: ipconfig /all Now run netsh from within a FOR /L loop to add IP’s 192.168.1.10-20 to this adapter: FOR /L %A IN (10,1,20) DO netsh interface ipv4 add address “Local Area Connection” 192.168.1.%A 255.255.255.0 After the above command is run, viewing the IP Configuration of the adapter now shows: Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Create Your Own Custom ASCII Art from Any Image How To Process Camera Raw Without Paying for Adobe Photoshop How Do You Block Annoying Text Message (SMS) Spam? How to Use and Master the Notoriously Difficult Pen Tool in Photoshop HTG Explains: What Are the Differences Between All Those Audio Formats? How To Use Layer Masks and Vector Masks to Remove Complex Backgrounds in Photoshop Bring Summer Back to Your Desktop with the LandscapeTheme for Chrome and Iron The Prospector – Home Dash Extension Creates a Whole New Browsing Experience in Firefox KinEmote Links Kinect to Windows Why Nobody Reads Web Site Privacy Policies [Infographic] Asian Temple in the Snow Wallpaper 10 Weird Gaming Records from the Guinness Book

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• Should I be looking for an alternative to Zen Cart as my business grows?

  - by MarkS

  I created a business website for a family business which is growing. It's my family, and I'm a software developer, but I don't want to rebuild the wheels or be a shopping cart programmer. For this business, I need the web store to "just work", but... it gets complicated... There are two parts of this business website. One of them is driven by Wordpress and I use the awesome Thesis theme. This is modern, flexible, and saves me a lot of time from doing custom coding and styling. I couldn't be more pleased with this arrangement. The other part of the site is a Zen Cart store. It's administration and it's flexibility is frustrating and archaic Web 1.0. For the past few years, I keep hearing that the developers are working on a 2.0 version of Zen Cart, but they haven't communicated anything significant in the past few years other than to say, "When it's ready, we'll let you know." What I'm looking for in a cart, I would need to install 6-10 additional mods, and would need to do a lot of custom coding. I'm now willing to pay for a top-notch e-commerce solution for a small business that we can grow up into a larger business over time. Requirements: Extremely flexible shipping that let's us set up rules per product/category, tables of rates, calculated rates, max package weighs, etc. (flexibility like that available with CEON Advance Shipping Module for Zen Cart Coupons and gift certificates Manual order entry for phone orders Multi-channel support (We also sell on Amazon, eBay, use Google Base and we want to maintain one set of inventory and have it kept current) Decent SEO features Reviews and star-ratings on products Easy social networking features for sharing, following, liking, etc) Easy integration with AdWords and analytics tracking Modern and very usable product and store administration (Like I was saying, I'm spoiled by Wordpress and Thesis) At the end of the day, I don't care if it's a hosted solution or if I have to host it myself. I just want something that is going to stay up-to-date, regularly be maintained and improved, and if I have to update it, things like the one-click update present in Wordpress is something it has to have. Professional Webmasters, if you had to run a store / website, but you had to spend your time focusing on your sales and marketing efforts rather than diffing php files and copying and tweaking them to change even the slightest details of your site, what would you choose?

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• Should I be put off a junior role that uses an online development test?

  - by Ninefingers

  I've applied for a junior development role, or rather been found by a recruiter looking for a developer. In order to get to a telephone interview stage I've been asked to sit one of those online coding assessments. This wasn't quite what I expected. I consider myself a fairly good developer for my age and experience, but I've no illusions about being Don Knuth or anything. The test was a series of incredibly obtuse questions asking about the results of various obscure evaluations. About 30 minutes in I was thinking to myself I hadn't intended to enter an obfuscated code contest/code golf exercise. After my last telephone interview I was asked to build something. I did. That seemed fair. Go away and work this out is more my in office experience of programming than "please evaluate this combination of lambdas, filters, maps, lists, tuples etc". So I'm a little put off, to be honest. I never claimed to know the language inside out or all the little corner cases. My questions, then: Should I be put off? Why? Why not? Are these kinds of tests what I should be expecting for junior roles? Should I learn stuff exam style? That seems to be the objective of these tests, for which you are timed and not supposed to use references or books? Normally, in the course of development I have a fairly good idea of basic types, rules, flow control and whatever. Occasionally I'll come up on something I need to use a regex for and have to go and remind myself of the exact piece of syntax I need if trying what I think should work doesn't. Or I'll come up against a module I've not used before and go and look it up. For example, if I wanted to write a server using sockets in C right now, I'd probably check the last piece of code I wrote doing that (and or the various books I have) and work from there. Chances are I probably couldn't do it exactly from scratch and from memory, although I can tell you you'd need a socket(), bind(), listen() and accept() call and you might also want select() depending on whether you intend to pthread_create or not. So I know what the calls are, but not their specific parameter list. What are your experiences if you are a recruiting manager? Are you after programmers who can quote you the API or do you not mind if your programmers have a few books on their desk and google function calls every so often?

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• Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

  - by J Swaroop

  Cross-posting Dain Hansen's excellent recap of the Big Data/Fast Data announcement during OOW: For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details.

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