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• Upgrading in java web development

  - by Vladimir Ivanov

  I'm a java web developer for nearly 3 years. Always trying to learn more and be better but still I feel that the amount of knowledge is not that good as I want. The knowledge in some places still seems to be non-systematic and don't provide a very strong base to solve the problems as good as I want to do it. The example I have is my senior developer, whose solutions are always more efficient and beautiful. So, the question is rather simple and hard the same time. What is the right way to get my knowlege be more systematic and therefore improve it's quality. I understand that there is no practically good answer for the all java programming, so let's focus on the modern java web or nearly web technologies: JSF 2.0 JPA2 and Hibernate as persistence provider Web services and Java SE as a core. What methodologies or books or learning technics lead to the strong knowledge base within the given knowledge area?

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• Troubleshoot broken ZFS

  - by BBK

  I have one zpool called tank in RaidZ1 with 5x1TB SATA HDDs. I'm using Ubuntu Server 11.10 Oneric, kernel 3.0.0-15-server. Installed ZFS from ppa also I'm using zfs-auto-snapshot. The ZFS file system when zfs module loaded to the kernel hangs my computer. Before it I created few new file systems: zfs create -V 10G tank/iscsi1 zfs create -V 10G tank/iscsi2 zfs create -V 10G tank/iscsi3 I shared them through iSCSI by /dev/tank/iscsiX path. And my computer started to hanging sometimes when I used tank/iscsiX by iSCSI, do not know why exactly. I switched off iSCSI and started to remove this file systems: zfs destroy tank/iscsi3 I'm also using zfs-auto-snapshot so I had snapshots and without -r key my command not destroying the FS. So I issued next command: zfs destroy tank/iscsi3 -r The tank/iscsi3 FS was clean and contain nothing - it was destroyed without an issue. But tank/iscsi2 and tank/iscsi1 contained a lot of information. I tried zfs destroy tank/iscsi2 -r After some time my computer hang out. I rebooted computer. It didn't boot very fast, HDDs starts working like a crazy making a lot of noise, after 15 minutes HDDs stopped go crazy and OS booted at last. All seems to be ok - tank/iscsi2 was destroyed. After file systems at the tank was accessible, zpool status showed no corruption. I issued new command: zfs destroy tank/iscsi1 -r Situation was repeated - after some time my computer hang out. But this time ZFS seams not to healed itself. After computer switched on it started to work: loading scripts and kernel modules, after zfs starting to work it hanging my computer. I need to recover else ZFS file systems which lying in the same zpool. Few month ago I backup OS to flash drive. Booting from backed-up OS and import have the same results - OS starts hanging. How to recover my data at ZFS tank?

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• Modeling distribution of performance measurements

  - by peterchen

  How would you mathematically model the distribution of repeated real life performance measurements - "Real life" meaning you are not just looping over the code in question, but it is just a short snippet within a large application running in a typical user scenario? My experience shows that you usually have a peak around the average execution time that can be modeled adequately with a Gaussian distribution. In addition, there's a "long tail" containing outliers - often with a multiple of the average time. (The behavior is understandable considering the factors contributing to first execution penalty). My goal is to model aggregate values that reasonably reflect this, and can be calculated from aggregate values (like for the Gaussian, calculate mu and sigma from N, sum of values and sum of squares). In other terms, number of repetitions is unlimited, but memory and calculation requirements should be minimized. A normal Gaussian distribution can't model the long tail appropriately and will have the average biased strongly even by a very small percentage of outliers. I am looking for ideas, especially if this has been attempted/analysed before. I've checked various distributions models, and I think I could work out something, but my statistics is rusty and I might end up with an overblown solution. Oh, a complete shrink-wrapped solution would be fine, too ;) Other aspects / ideas: Sometimes you get "two humps" distributions, which would be acceptable in my scenario with a single mu/sigma covering both, but ideally would be identified separately. Extrapolating this, another approach would be a "floating probability density calculation" that uses only a limited buffer and adjusts automatically to the range (due to the long tail, bins may not be spaced evenly) - haven't found anything, but with some assumptions about the distribution it should be possible in principle. Why (since it was asked) - For a complex process we need to make guarantees such as "only 0.1% of runs exceed a limit of 3 seconds, and the average processing time is 2.8 seconds". The performance of an isolated piece of code can be very different from a normal run-time environment involving varying levels of disk and network access, background services, scheduled events that occur within a day, etc. This can be solved trivially by accumulating all data. However, to accumulate this data in production, the data produced needs to be limited. For analysis of isolated pieces of code, a gaussian deviation plus first run penalty is ok. That doesn't work anymore for the distributions found above. [edit] I've already got very good answers (and finally - maybe - some time to work on this). I'm starting a bounty to look for more input / ideas.

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• Drawing territories border in 2d map

  - by Gabriel A. Zorrilla

  I'm programming a little web strategy game. In the country map I pretend to display each country with a national color. The issue is how to render the borders in a simple and efficient way. Right now I'm planning to set a field to each tile called "border" with values from 0 to 8. The algorithm would check for EVERY tile is its adjacent has a different "owner". If the tile is inside the territory, the border value would be 0, because would not have adjacent any tile with different owner, if not, would vary between 1 (north) clockwise to 9 (north-west) and then draw the border. I find this simple but too processor-intensive. Are there any other "pro" choices to render territories borders?

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• Paper Gold Rush

  - by Chris G. Williams

  The last few days at the shop have been reminiscent of a marathon of Pawn Stars. Quite a few people have come in wanting to trade for store credit. Most of them have left disappointed. We did pick up a few things here and there (which hopefully I can sell.) The problem, in a nutshell, is that people get it in their head that a (YuGiOh) card is worth X amount because they looked it up 2-3 years a...go, or someone told them it was valuable... then they play it in their deck for a year without sleeves, and cram it in a binder covered in duct tape. By the time they bring the cards in to me, new sets have come out which often de-value the tournament usefulness of the card from $20 to *maybe* 50 cents, in mint condition. Which means I can offer them about 10-15 cents... only they are almost never in mint condition, which means I usually offer them nothing at all. Most of the time, you can watch their smile fade as I start going through their cards. It's kinda sad, really, since I know they think they've spent the last two years walking around with the keys to their own personal gold mine. I don't really enjoy seeing that look on a child's face. I like kids and I remember those moments when perception and reality crashed headlong into each other. It was seldom pretty. So, when I'm talking to a child, I try to take it easy on them and give them some suggestions on how to better preserve their cards. Sometimes though, it's an adult. Depending on the situation, my response to them varies pretty broadly. Most of the time though, I still feel pretty bad when it doesn't go their way.

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• How can Swift be so much faster than Objective-C?

  - by Yellow

  Apple launched its new programming language Swift today. In the presentation, they made some performance comparisons between Objective-C and Python. The following is a picture of one of their slides, of a comparison of those three languages performing some complex object sort: There was an even more incredible graph about a performance comparison working on some encryption algorithm. Obviously this is a marketing talk, and they didn't go into detail on how this was implemented in each. I leaves me wondering though: how can a new programming language be so much faster? In this example, surely you just have a bad Objective-C compiler or you're doing something in a less efficient way? How else would you explain a 40% performance increase? I understand that garbage collection/automated reference control might produce some additional overhead, but this much?

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• gcc precompiled headers weird behaviour with -c option

  - by pachanga

  Folks, I'm using gcc-4.4.1 on Linux and before trying precompiled headers in a really large project I decided to test them on simple program. They "kinda work" but I'm not happy with results and I'm sure there is something wrong about my setup. First of all, I wrote a simple program(main.cpp) to test if they work at all: #include <boost/bind.hpp> #include <boost/function.hpp> #include <boost/type_traits.hpp> int main() { return 0; } Then I created the precompiled headers file pre.h(in the same directory) as follows: #include <boost/bind.hpp> #include <boost/function.hpp> #include <boost/type_traits.hpp> ...and compiled it: $ g++ -I. pre.h (pre.h.gch was created) After that I measured compile time with and without precompiled headers: with pch $ time g++ -I. -include pre.h main.cpp real 0m0.128s user 0m0.088s sys 0m0.048s without pch $ time g++ -I. main.cpp real 0m0.838s user 0m0.784s sys 0m0.056s So far so good! Almost 7 times faster, that's impressive! Now let's try something more realistic. All my sources are built with -c option and for some reason I can't make pch play nicely with it. You can reproduce this with the following steps below... I created the test module foo.cpp as follows: #include <boost/bind.hpp> #include <boost/function.hpp> #include <boost/type_traits.hpp> int whatever() { return 0; } Here are the timings of my attempts to build the module foo.cpp with and without pch: with pch $ time g++ -I. -include pre.h -c foo.cpp real 0m0.357s user 0m0.348s sys 0m0.012s without pch $ time g++ -I. -c foo.cpp real 0m0.330s user 0m0.292s sys 0m0.044s That's quite strange, looks like there is no speed up at all!(I ran timings for several times). It turned out precompiled headers were not used at all in this case, I checked it with -H option(output of "g++ -I. -include pre.h -c foo.cpp -H" didn't list pre.h.gch at all). What am I doing wrong?

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• What You Said: How You Keep Your Email SPAM Free and Tidy

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite tips and tricks for keeping your inbox tidy. Now we’re back to share your–rather aggressive–SPAM dodging tricks. HTG readers are serious about beating back SPAM. While some readers such as TechGeek01 took a fairly laid back approach to junk mail: I usually just read emails, and delete them when my inbox gets kinda full. As for spam, I mark it as such, and the automated spam filter usually catches it the next time. It’s a fairly simple method, I know, but it’s efficient, and takes almost no effort, other than a monthly cleaning. For other readers it was outright war. ArchersCall uses a system of layers and whitelists: I have a triple system and rarely see spam. How to Banish Duplicate Photos with VisiPic How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It?

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• Issue 15: SVP Focus

  - by rituchhibber

       SVP FOCUS FOCUS -- Chris Baker SVP Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners’ business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) OPN Solutions Catalog Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Cloud Computing Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle and Java SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES "By taking part in marketing activities, our partners accelerate their sales cycles." -- Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best—building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best-in-class application platform so ISVs are free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success. How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use of our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme. How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry. What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data—a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle. What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation. Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: "I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud". The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them. Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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• Partner Webcast - Oracle SOA Suite 12c: Connect 4 Cloud, Mobile, IoT with On-premise

  - by Thanos Terentes Printzios

  The pace of new business projects continues to grow from increasing customer self-service to seamlessly connecting all your back office and in-the-field applications. At the same time increased integration complexity may seem inevitable as organizations are suddenly faced with the requirement to support three new integration challenges:  » Cloud Integration - integrate with the cloud, rapidly integrate a growing list of cloud applications with existing applications » Mobile Integration - the urgency to mobile-enable existing applications » IoT Integration - begin development on the latest trend of connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices to your existing infrastructure. Oracle SOA Suite 12c, the latest version of the industry’s most complete and unified application integration and SOA solution, aims to simplify, accelerate and optimize integrations. Oracle SOA Suite 12c and its associated products, Oracle Managed File Transfer, Oracle Cloud and Application Adapters, B2B and healthcare integration, offer the industry’s most highly integrated platform for solving the increased integration challenges. Oracle SOA Suite 12c is a complete, integrated and best-of-breed platform. It enables next generation integration capabilities through: · A unified toolset for the development of services and composite applications.· A standards-based platform that is service enabled and easily consumable by modern web applications, allowing enterprises to quickly and easily adapt to changes in their business and IT environments.· Greater visibility, controls and analytics to govern how services and processes are deployed, reused and changed across their entire lifecycle. Join us to find out more about the new features of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and how it enables you to reduce time to market for new project integration and to reduce integration cost and complexity. Oracle SOA Suite is the ability to simplify by integrating the disparate requirements of cloud, mobile, and IoT devices with existing on-premise applications. Agenda: Oracle SOA Suite 12c new Features Cloud Integration Mobile Enablement Internet of Things (IoT) Summary - Q&A Delivery Format This FREE online LIVE eSeminar will be delivered over the Web. Registrations received less than 24hours prior to start time may not receive confirmation to attend. Presenter: Heba Fouad – FMW Specialist, Technology Adoption, ECEMEA Partner Business Development Date: Thursday, August 28th, 10pm CEST (8am UTC/11am EEST)Duration: 1 hour Register Here For any questions please contact us at partner.imc-AT-beehiveonline.oracle-DOT-com

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• Instructor Insight: Using the Container Database in Oracle Database 12 c

  - by Breanne Cooley

  The first time I examined the Oracle Database 12c architecture, I wasn’t quite sure what I thought about the Container Database (CDB). In the current release of the Oracle RDBMS, the administrator now has a choice of whether or not to employ a CDB. Bundling Databases Inside One Container In today’s IT industry, consolidation is a common challenge. With potentially hundreds of databases to manage and maintain, an administrator will require a great deal of time and resources to upgrade and patch software. Why not consider deploying a container database to streamline this activity? By “bundling” several databases together inside one container, in the form of a pluggable database, we can save on overhead process resources and CPU time. Furthermore, we can reduce the human effort required for periodically patching and maintaining the software. Minimizing Storage Most IT professionals understand the concept of storage, as in solid state or non-rotating. Let’s take one-to-many databases and “plug” them into ONE designated container database. We can minimize many redundant pieces that would otherwise require separate storage and architecture, as was the case in previous releases of the Oracle RDBMS. The data dictionary can be housed and shared in one CDB, with individual metadata content for each pluggable database. We also won’t need as many background processes either, thus reducing the overhead cost of the CPU resource. Improve Security Levels within Each Pluggable Database  We can now segregate the CDB-administrator role from that of the pluggable-database administrator as well, achieving improved security levels within each pluggable database and within the CDB. And if the administrator chooses to use the non-CDB architecture, everything is backwards compatible, too.  The bottom line: it's a good idea to at least consider using a CDB. -Christopher Andrews, Senior Principal Instructor, Oracle University

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• Data Quality Through Data Governance

  Data Quality Governance Data quality is very important to every organization, bad data cost an organization time, money, and resources that could be prevented if the proper governance was put in to place.  Data Governance Program Criteria: Support from Executive Management and all Business Units Data Stewardship Program  Cross Functional Team of Data Stewards Data Governance Committee Quality Structured Data It should go without saying but any successful project in today’s business world must get buy in from executive management and all stakeholders involved with the project. If management does not fully support a project because they see it is in there and the company’s best interest then they will remove/eliminate funding, resources and allocated time to work on the project. In essence they can render a project dead until it is official killed by the business. In addition, buy in from stake holders is also very important because they can cause delays increased spending in time, money and resources because they do not support a project. Data Stewardship programs are administered by a data steward manager who primary focus is to support, train and manage a cross functional data stewards team. A cross functional team of data stewards are pulled from various departments act to ensure that all systems work to ensure that an organization’s goals are achieved. Typically, data stewards are subject matter experts that act as mediators between their respective departments and IT. Data Quality Procedures Data Governance Committees are composed of data stewards, Upper management, IT Leadership and various subject matter experts depending on a company. The primary goal of this committee is to define strategic goals, coordinate activities, set data standards and offer data guidelines for the business. Data Quality Policies In 1997, Claudia Imhoff defined a Data Stewardship’s responsibility as to approve business naming standards, develop consistent data definitions, determine data aliases, develop standard calculations and derivations, document the business rules of the corporation, monitor the quality of the data in the data warehouse, define security requirements, and so forth. She further explains data stewards responsible for creating and enforcing polices on the following but not limited to issues. Resolving Data Integration Issues Determining Data Security Documenting Data Definitions, Calculations, Summarizations, etc. Maintaining/Updating Business Rules Analyzing and Improving Data Quality

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• Finding Those Pesky Unicode Characters in Visual Studio

  - by fallen888

  Sometimes I’m handed HTML that I need to wire up and I find these characters.  Usually there are only a couple on the page and, while annoying to find, it’s not a big deal.  Recently I found dozens and dozens of these guys on a page and wasn’t very happy at the prospect of having to manually search them all out and remove/replace them.  That is, until I did some research and found this very  helpful article by Aaron Jensen - Finding Non-ASCII Characters with Visual Studio. Aaron’s wonderful solution: Try searching your code with the following regular expression: [^\x00-\x7f] Open any of Visual Studio’s find windows and enter the regular expression above into the “Find what:” text box. Click the “Find Options” plus sign to expand the list of options. Check the last box “Use:” and choose “Regular expressions” from the drop down menu. Easy and efficient.  Thanks, Aaron!

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• Integrating different branches from external sources into a single Mercurial repository

  - by dukeofgaming

  I'm currently working in a company using Perforce and am making way for distributed version control with Mercurial. I've had success importing Perforce history using the perfarce (quite a suitable name, I laugh every time I see/say it) however, this only works with a single branch at a time. Here's how my P4 integration setup works: In perforce, create a "client", which is kind of a description of what you will be constantly updating/checking-out. This can only address one branch at a time (trunk or other). Once you do this, run hg clone p4://<server>/<client_name> Go to .hg/hgrc and put the perforce path line: perforce = p4://<server>/<client_name> Work normally with the code under mercurial, do hg pull perforce to sync up, hg push to export a changelist What I'd like to be able to do is have a perforce path per branch and have everything work in the same repository. Now, pushing is not a problem, however, if I pull the history from another branch it would end up at the default branch. I'd like to be able to do something like hg pull perforce-R5 and have it land in mercurial's R5 branch. Even if I have no merging history, it would be sweet enough to be able to preserve it. There are also other plugins for CVCSs that let you integrate mercurial, but AFAIK the subversion one has the same problem. I don't think there is a straight-through way of doing this, but as long as I could automate the process with some hooks and scripts in a single Mercurial machine, that would be good enough.

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• high performance with xen, vmware or virtualbox

  - by Marchosius

  I was wondering which is the best method to go about if I want to play win based games. I do not want to go with the dual boot method as this will cost me time to restart, login and run a os to do my work or pass the time, and some of my apps rely on win and my graphics to run. for example Daz3d, Photoshop, Flash etc. Now I read about HVM(hardware virtual machines) and then I know about the 3D virtualisation of VMware and VirtualBox. How ever the 2 later virtualise the 3D not using the full power of the GPU. So this option wont perform perfect for latest games like D3. I was wondering if anyone have experience in HVM(like xen if i am not mistaken) and tried something similar to access the full power of the GPU and successfully run newer games and other products relying on the GPU? Will be the first time setting up a HVM, no experience in this so don't know what to expect. This will help a lot as I do not want to revert back to win or as mentioned do dual boot.

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• Questioning pythonic type checking

  - by Pace

  I've seen countless times the following approach suggested for "taking in a collection of objects and doing X if X is a Y and ignoring the object otherwise" def quackAllDucks(ducks): for duck in ducks: try: duck.quack("QUACK") except AttributeError: #Not a duck, can't quack, don't worry about it pass The alternative implementation below always gets flak for the performance hit caused by type checking def quackAllDucks(ducks): for duck in ducks: if hasattr(duck,"quack"): duck.quack("QUACK") However, it seems to me that in 99% of scenarios you would want to use the second solution because of the following: If the user gets the parameters wrong then they will not be treated like a duck and there will be no indication. A lot of time will be wasted debugging why there is no quacking going on until the user finally realizes his silly mistake. The second solution would throw a stack trace as soon the user tried to quack. If the user has any bugs in their quack() method which cause an AttributeError then those bugs will be silently swallowed. Once again time will be wasted digging for the bug when the second solution would simply give a stack trace showing the immediate issue. In fact, it seems to me that the only time you would ever want to use the first method is when: The block of code in question is in an extremely performance critical section of your application. Following the principal of "avoid premature optimization" you would only realize this of course, after you had implemented the safer approach and found it to be a bottleneck. There are many types of quacking objects out there and you are only interested in quacking objects that quack with a very specific set of arguments (this seems to be a very rare case to me). Given this, why is it that so many people prefer the first approach over the second approach? What is it that I am missing? Also, I realize there are other solutions (such as using abcs) but these are the two solutions I seem to see most often for the basic case.

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• The Cloud is STILL too slow!

  - by harry.foxwell(at)oracle.com

  If you've been in the computing industry sufficiently long enough to remember dialup modems and other "ancient" technologies, you might be tempted to marvel at today's wonderfully powerful multicore PCs, ginormous disks, and blazingly fast networks.  Wow, you're in Internet Nirvana, right!  Well, no, not by a long shot.Considering the exponentially growing expectations of what the Web, that is, "the Cloud", is supposed to provide, today's Web/Cloud services are still way too slow.Already we are seeing cloud-enabled consumer devices that are stressing even the most advanced public network services.  Like the iPad and its competitors, ever more powerful smart-phones, and an imminent hoard of special purpose gadgets such as the proposed "cloud camera" (see http://gdgt.com/discuss/it-time-cloud-camera-found-out-cnr/ ).And at the same time that the number and type of cloud services are growing, user tolerance for even the slightest of download delays is rapidly decreasing.  Ten years ago Web developers followed the "8-Second Rule", (average time a typical Web user would tolerate for a page to download and render).  Not anymore; now it's less than 3 seconds, and only a bit longer for mobile devices (see http://www.technologyreview.com/files/54902/GoogleSpeed_charts.pdf).  How spoiled we've become!Google, among others, recognizes this problem and is working to encourage the development of a faster Web (see http://www.technologyreview.com/web/32338/). They, along with their competitors and ISPs, will have to encourage and support significantly better Web performance in order to provide the types of services envisioned for the Cloud.  How will they do this? Through the development of faster components, better use of caching technologies, and the really tough one - exploiting parallelism. Not that parallel technologies like multicore processors are hard to build...we already have them.  It's just that we're not that good yet at using them effectively.  And if we don't get better, users will abandon cloud-based services...in less than 3 seconds.

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• The Next RAC, ASM and Linux Forum. May 4, 2010 Beit HP Raanana

  - by alejandro.vargas

  The next RAC, ASM and Linux forum will take place next week, you are still on time to register : Israel Oracle Users Group RAC,ASM and Linux Forum This time we will have a panel formed by Principal Oracle Advanced Customer Services Engineers and RAC experts Galit Elad and Nickita Chernovski and Senior Oracle Advanced Customer Services Engineers and RAC experts Roy Burstein and Dorit Noga. They will address the subject: 5 years of experience with RAC at Israeli Customers, lessons learned. It is a wonderful opportunity to meet with the people that is present at most major implementations and helped to solve all major issues along the last years. In addition we will have 2 most interesting Customer Presentations: Visa Cal DBA Team Leader Harel Safra will tell about their experience with scalability using standard Linux Servers for their mission critical data warehouse. Bank Discount Infrastructure DBA Uril Levin, who is in charge of the Bank Backup and Recovery Project, will speak about their Corporate Backup Solution using RMAN; that includes an end to end solution for VLDBS and mission critical databases. One of the most interesting RMAN implementations in Israel. This time I will not be able to attend myself as I'm abroad on business, Galit Elad will greet you and will lead the meeting. I'm sure you will enjoy a very, very interesting meeting. Best Regards Alejandro

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• How to dealing with the "programming blowhard"?

  - by Peter G.

  (Repost, I posted this in the wrong section before, sorry) So I'm sure everyone has run into this person at one point or another, someone catches wind of your project or idea and initially shows some interest. You get to talking about some of your methods and usually around this time they interject stating how you should use method X instead, or just use library Y. But not as a friendly suggestion, but bordering on a commandment. Often repeating the same advice over and over like a overzealous parrot. Personally, I like to reinvent the wheel when I'm learning, or even just for fun, even if it turns out worse than what's been done before. But this person apparently cannot fathom recreating ANY utility for such purposes, or possibly try something that doesn't strictly follow traditional OOP practices, and will settle for nothing except their sense of perfection, and thus naturally heave their criticism sludge down my ears full force. To top it off, they eventually start justifying their advice (retardation) by listing all the incredibly complex things they've coded single-handedly (usually along the lines of "trust me, I've made/used program X for a long time, blah blah blah"). Now, I'm far from being a programming master, I'm probably not even that good, and as such I value advice and critique, but I think advice/critique has a time and place. There is also a big difference between being helpful and being narcissistic. In the past I probably would have used a somewhat stronger George Carlin style dismissal, but I don't think burning bridges is the best approach anymore. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but do you have any advice on how to deal with this kind of verbal flogging?

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• Redehost Transforms Cloud & Hosting Services with MySQL Enterprise Edition

  - by Mat Keep

  RedeHost are one of Brazil's largest cloud computing and web hosting providers, with more than 60,000 customers and 52,000 web sites running on its infrastructure. As the company grew, Redehost needed to automate operations, such as system monitoring, making the operations team more proactive in solving problems. Redehost also sought to improve server uptime, robustness, and availability, especially during backup windows, when performance would often dip. To address the needs of the business, Redehost migrated from the community edition of MySQL to MySQL Enterprise Edition, which has delivered a host of benefits: - Pro-active database management and monitoring using MySQL Enterprise Monitor, enabling Redehost to fulfil customer SLAs. Using the Query Analyzer, Redehost were able to more rapidly identify slow queries, improving customer support - Quadrupled backup speed with MySQL Enterprise Backup, leading to faster data recovery and improved system availability - Reduced DBA overhead by 50% due to the improved support capabilities offered by MySQL Enterprise Edition. - Enabled infrastructure consolidation, avoiding unnecessary energy costs and premature hardware acquisition You can learn more from the full Redehost Case Study Also, take a look at the recently updated MySQL in the Cloud whitepaper for the latest developments that are making it even simpler and more efficient to develop and deploy new services with MySQL in the cloud

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• Friday Fun: Christmas Tree Light Up

  - by Asian Angel

  Another week has thankfully passed by, so it is time to take a break and have some fun. This week’s game tests your ability to light up the whole Christmas tree…can you figure out the correct wiring configuration? Christmas Tree Light Up The object of the game is simple…light up all of the bulbs on the Christmas tree. While the game may look quick and easy at first you will need to do some thinking and experimenting to come up with the correct wiring configuration. The instructions are very simple…just click on any of the wiring sections or bulbs to rotate them. Keep in mind that you may have to click a few times to line the wiring sections or bulbs up as desired since the rotation is always clockwise. Note: You will need use all of the wiring sections available to completely light the tree up. Each time you will be presented with a different starting setup coming from your power source. Time to hook up the lights! Note: It is recommended that you disable the sound for the game since the “rotation” sounds can be slightly irritating. A nice start but there are still a lot of bulbs to light up. Getting closer… Almost there…only two more bulbs to light up. Success! Have fun playing! Play Christmas Tree Light Up Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

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• Exalogic&ndash;The One Day Installation Challenge

  - by james.bayer

  It’s a really exciting time for the extended WebLogic community as we are enjoying seeing the impressive results of Exalogic deployments.  At Oracle Open World, a lot of people I spoke with came away impressed with the raw performance.  However, Exalogic offers a lot more than just raw performance.  I had the pleasure of working with Ram Sivaram during one of the Exalogic training sessions in Santa Clara.  In this video diary, he shows the Exalogic machine arrive on the shipping dock, get unpacked, wired up, powered on, configured, and installed with a WebLogic Server cluster in just about 10 hours.  I’ve worked with customers in the past that have taken several weeks or longer to get an environment ready after the hardware arrives.  This typically involves many different specialized teams in their organization.  Mohamad Afshar just wrote a great explanation of the benefit of Engineered Systems and contrasting that to the status quo.  Being able to streamline deployment of middleware capacity will have a lot of value for customers shortening time to deployment.  Thanks for the video Ram, you’ve set a high bar, we’ll see if anyone can top your time!  

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• Windows being placed on wrong monitor

  - by osarusan

  I'm running a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04x64 (ATI Radeon HD4770 with open source drivers) and I am having trouble getting windows to appear on the right screen. Yesterday I plugged in my secondary monitor and it worked perfectly out of the box, except that for some reason, compiz wants to place windows on the secondary monitor rather than the first. This is a problem because I don't use the secondary monitor 100% of the time, and I don't want windows being placed on it when it is off. Also, it's only some windows that are getting placed there. For example, the "Edit Connections" window from the networking menu is always placed off my primary screen. There are a number of other windows that do the same. While some, like nautilus, always appear on the proper monitor. I played around with Compiz Config Settings Manager and found that if I disable the "Place Windows" plugin, all of the windows appear on the proper monitor -- except that they are placed underneath the Unity Panel, so I have to alt-drag them out each time in order to use them. With out without that plugin, I can't seem to get a sensible setup. The windows are supposed to appear only on the active display, but for some reason Compiz doesn't want to do that with some windows. Does anyone know a fix for this? I'd rather not have to disable and re-enable my monitor every single time I use it...

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• Why don't more games use vector art?

  - by Parris

  It would seem to me that vector art is more efficient in terms of resources/scalability; however, in most cases I have seen artists using bitmap/rasterized art. Is this a limitation put on the artists by the game programmers/designers? As a programmer I think vector art would be more ideal, since it allows for scaling up resolution without having to recreate the art, creating really large graphics or causing graphics to become blurry. The questions: why aren't more people using SVG/AI to create 2D game art? Would it actually be preferred (and who prefers it)? Are bitmap graphics a standard or a limitation (or maybe neither)? Background: I am working on an engine, and I had some kinda cool ideas for vector based graphics; however, I don't want to piss off artists in the future. I guess this is more a question centered around pragmatism and developing games.

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