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• Preview Links and Images in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Anyone who has used the CoolPreviews extension in Firefox knows how wonderful that preview window can be. Now you can get the same kind of functionality in Chrome with the ezLinkPreview extension. Note: Extension will not work on websites containing “frame buster” code (navigation to the actual URL will occur). Before Normally if you want to have a better look at a particular webpage the only option you have is to go ahead and open it in a new tab or window. But it would certainly be nice to be able to take a quick “sneak peek” before-hand… After As soon as you have finished installing the extension everything is ready to go…just refresh any pages open prior to installation and enjoy the preview goodness. When you hover your mouse near any link you will notice a small “Preview Button” appear with the letters “EZ” inside. A closer look at the “Preview Button”. Click on the “Preview Button” to open the popup window. Now you can get a very good idea of whether the page is worth visiting or not. Here is a closer look at the popup window. Notice that you can see the URL for the webpage and access a convenient set of buttons on the right side (Open to new tab, Pin to keep overlay open, and Close). You can even resize the window as desired to best suit your needs (you can actually grab any of the four corners to resize the popup window). It is also possible to open a “preview window” inside the popup window…you can see the “Preview Button” here… If you have Chrome maximized you can enjoy using a large sized “preview window”. Now that is nice! For those who may be curious you can see that ezLinkPreview works nicely with images too. Conclusion The ezLinkPreview extension provides a quick and simple way to preview links and/or images while you are browsing. If you are looking for similar functionality in Firefox then be sure to read our article on CoolPreviews here. Links Download the ezLinkPreview extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Google Image Search Quick FixSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickFind a Website’s Actual Location with Chrome FlagsHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserEnable Auto-Paging Goodness in Google Chrome 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 QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job?

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• Split Internet Explorer into Dual-Panes

  - by Asian Angel

  If you have a wide screen monitor then you may want to make better use of Internet Explorer’s browser window area. Now you can split the browser window into dual-panes as needed with the IE Split browser plugin. Note: Requires .NET Framework 2.0 or higher (link provided below). IE Split in Action If you are using an older version of this software here is something to keep in mind before upgrading to the 2.0 release. Once you have installed IE Split you will notice a new toolbar added to your browser. As seen here, you can condense it down tightly and access it using the drop-down bar. A closer look at the drop-down bar. Notice the address bar…this will be for the left pane when you split the browser window. Here is our browser split into dual-panes. There are two address bars and two tab/title bars each corresponding to their appropriate pane. It may look slightly backwards at first but is not hard to get used to. A better view of the left pane with the IE Split navigation & title bars showing. Note: The title bar can be hidden if desired. And the right pane. You can also have multiple “split” tabs open if needed. There is nothing quite like getting double the value for the same amount of space. When you no longer need dual-panes open just click on the “x” to close IE Split down. All back to normal again. Conclusion While might not be for everyone this can still be useful for those who need side-by-side access to websites without using multiple separate windows. Links Download IE-Split Download the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Standalone Installer) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set Up Multi-Pane Viewing in FirefoxWhy Can’t I Turn the Details/Preview Panes On or Off in Windows Vista Explorer?Split a text file in half (or any percentage) on Ubuntu LinuxMysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPMake Ctrl+Tab in Internet Explorer 7 Use Most Recent Order 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like)

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• What tools exist for assessing an organisation's development capability?

  - by Eric Smith

  I have a bit of a challenge at work at the moment. Presently (and in fact, for some time now), we have been experiencing the following problems with some in-house maintained applications: Defects (sometimes quite serious) being released into production; The Customer (that is, the relevant business unit) perpetually changing their minds (or appearing to do so) about what issue to work on next; A situation where everyone seems to be in a "fire-fighting" mode a lot of the time; Development staff responding to operational requests from business users; ("operational" here means something that needs to be done in order to continue with business, or perhaps just to make a business user's life a little less painful, as opposed to fixing a bug in the application, or enhancing the application); Now I'm sure this doesn't sound particularly new or surprising to most of the participants on this Q&A site and no prizes for identifying the "usual suspects" when it comes to root causes. My challenge is that I have to persuade the higher-ups to do uncomfortable things in order to address all of this. The folk I need to persuade come from a mixture of the following two cultures: Accounting; IT Infrastructure. I have therefore opted for a strategy that draws from things with-which folk from such a culture would be most comfortable (at least, in my estimation), namely: numbers and tangibles. Of course modern development practitioners know all too well that this sort of thing isn't easily solved using an analytical mindset (some would argue that that mindset is, in fact, entirely inappropriate). Never-the-less, this is the dichotomy with-which I am faced, so that's the stake that I've put in the ground. I would like to be able to do research and use the outputs to present findings in the form of metrics and measures. I am finding it quite difficult, though, to find an agreed-upon methodology and set of templates for assessing an organisations development capability--the only thing that seems applicable is the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. The latter, however, seems dated and even then rather vague. So, the question is: Do any tools or methodologies (free or commercial) exist that would assist me in completing this assessment?

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• Is there an appropriate coding style for implementing an algorithm during an interview?

  - by GlenPeterson

  I failed an interview question in C years ago about converting hex to decimal by not exploiting the ASCII table if (inputDigitByte > 9) hex = inputDigitByte - 'a'. The rise of Unicode has made this question pretty silly, but the point was that the interviewer valued raw execution speed above readability and error handling. They tell you to review algorithms textbooks to prepare for these interviews, yet these same textbooks tend to favor the implementation with the fewest lines of code, even if it has to rely on magic numbers (like "infinity") and a slower, more memory-intensive implementation (like a linked list instead of an array) to do that. I don't know what is right. Coding an algorithm within the space of an interview has at least 3 constraints: time to code, elegance/readability, and efficiency of execution. What trade-offs are appropriate for interview code? How much do you follow the textbook definition of an algorithm? Is it better to eliminate recursion, unroll loops, and use arrays for efficiency? Or is it better to use recursion and special values like "infinity" or Integer.MAX_VALUE to reduce the number of lines of code needed to write the algorithm? Interface: Make a very self-contained, bullet-proof interface, or sloppy and fast? On the one extreme, the array to be sorted might be a public static variable. On the other extreme, it might need to be passed to each method, allowing methods to be called individually from different threads for different purposes. Is it appropriate to use a linked-list data structure for items that are traversed in one direction vs. using arrays and doubling the size when the array is full? Implementing a singly-linked list during the interview is often much faster to code and easier remember for recursive algorithms like MergeSort. Thread safety - just document that it's unsafe, or say so verbally? How much should the interviewee be looking for opportunities for parallel processing? Is bit shifting appropriate? x / 2 or x >> 1 Polymorphism, type safety, and generics? Comments? Variable and method names: qs(a, p, q, r) vs: quickSort(theArray, minIdx, partIdx, maxIdx) How much should you use existing APIs? Obviously you can't use a java.util.HashMap to implement a hash-table, but what about using a java.util.List to accumulate your sorted results? Are there any guiding principals that would answer these and other questions, or is the guiding principal to ask the interviewer? Or maybe this should be the basis of a discussion while writing the code? If an interviewer can't or won't answer one of these questions, are there any tips for coaxing the information out of them?

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• Play a Webpage Display Prank in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you looking for a fun but innocent prank to play on someone who loves using Google Chrome? If so then you may want to have a closer look at the Upside Down extension for Chrome. Before Here is our example webpage before starting the prank…looking all “normal like”. Upside Down in Action As soon as the extension has been installed you are ready to go. If you had a webpage open before installing the extension you will only need to refresh the page. As soon as the page has been refreshed or a new one is opened everything is going to look messed up very quickly. With the default setting there are five different “looks” available. To cycle through the five “looks” use the “Windows Key + Semicolon” or “Command + Semicolon” to toggle through them. On the sixth toggle the webpage will revert to normal (toggling afterwards starts the whole process again). Here are the five “looks” available…         Options There are options available for the extension where you can focus on just a specific effect or a group of effects. You can also enable a “Grayscale Effect” and even set a delay timer (a definite “evil touch”)! Think of the fun and surprised looks that await… Conclusion If you have been looking for a fun and unexpected prank for your favorite Google Chrome fan then this just might be what you have been looking for. Get ready to sit back and watch the fun. Links Download the Upside Down extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Take Screenshots of Any Webpage in Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickActivate the Redesigned New-Tab Interface in Google ChromeFriday Fun: Play MineSweeper in Google Chrome 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 If Web Browsers Were Modes of Transportation Google Translate (for animals) Out of 100 Tweeters Roadkill’s Scan Port scans for open ports Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows

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• Project Euler 11: (Iron)Python

  - by Ben Griswold

  In my attempt to learn (Iron)Python out in the open, here’s my solution for Project Euler Problem 11.  As always, any feedback is welcome. # Euler 11 # http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=11 # What is the greatest product # of four adjacent numbers in any direction (up, down, left, # right, or diagonally) in the 20 x 20 grid? import time start = time.time() grid = [\ [8,02,22,97,38,15,00,40,00,75,04,05,07,78,52,12,50,77,91,8],\ [49,49,99,40,17,81,18,57,60,87,17,40,98,43,69,48,04,56,62,00],\ [81,49,31,73,55,79,14,29,93,71,40,67,53,88,30,03,49,13,36,65],\ [52,70,95,23,04,60,11,42,69,24,68,56,01,32,56,71,37,02,36,91],\ [22,31,16,71,51,67,63,89,41,92,36,54,22,40,40,28,66,33,13,80],\ [24,47,32,60,99,03,45,02,44,75,33,53,78,36,84,20,35,17,12,50],\ [32,98,81,28,64,23,67,10,26,38,40,67,59,54,70,66,18,38,64,70],\ [67,26,20,68,02,62,12,20,95,63,94,39,63,8,40,91,66,49,94,21],\ [24,55,58,05,66,73,99,26,97,17,78,78,96,83,14,88,34,89,63,72],\ [21,36,23,9,75,00,76,44,20,45,35,14,00,61,33,97,34,31,33,95],\ [78,17,53,28,22,75,31,67,15,94,03,80,04,62,16,14,9,53,56,92],\ [16,39,05,42,96,35,31,47,55,58,88,24,00,17,54,24,36,29,85,57],\ [86,56,00,48,35,71,89,07,05,44,44,37,44,60,21,58,51,54,17,58],\ [19,80,81,68,05,94,47,69,28,73,92,13,86,52,17,77,04,89,55,40],\ [04,52,8,83,97,35,99,16,07,97,57,32,16,26,26,79,33,27,98,66],\ [88,36,68,87,57,62,20,72,03,46,33,67,46,55,12,32,63,93,53,69],\ [04,42,16,73,38,25,39,11,24,94,72,18,8,46,29,32,40,62,76,36],\ [20,69,36,41,72,30,23,88,34,62,99,69,82,67,59,85,74,04,36,16],\ [20,73,35,29,78,31,90,01,74,31,49,71,48,86,81,16,23,57,05,54],\ [01,70,54,71,83,51,54,69,16,92,33,48,61,43,52,01,89,19,67,48]] # left and right max, product = 0, 0 for x in range(0,17): for y in xrange(0,20): product = grid[y][x] * grid[y][x+1] * \ grid[y][x+2] * grid[y][x+3] if product > max : max = product # up and down for x in range(0,20): for y in xrange(0,17): product = grid[y][x] * grid[y+1][x] * \ grid[y+2][x] * grid[y+3][x] if product > max : max = product # diagonal right for x in range(0,17): for y in xrange(0,17): product = grid[y][x] * grid[y+1][x+1] * \ grid[y+2][x+2] * grid[y+3][x+3] if product > max: max = product # diagonal left for x in range(0,17): for y in xrange(0,17): product = grid[y][x+3] * grid[y+1][x+2] * \ grid[y+2][x+1] * grid[y+3][x] if product > max : max = product print max print "Elapsed Time:", (time.time() - start) * 1000, "millisecs" a=raw_input('Press return to continue')

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• How to debug lag using Bluetooth connected mouse and A2DP headset?

  - by gertvdijk

  I own a Logitech M555b mouse (since a week) for use with my HP Elitebook 8570w laptop running Kubuntu 12.04. Works fine right after connecting using the KDE Bluetooth control module. However, after some time (seemingly random), it starts to lag. Movements are being delayed for roughly 500ms for a short period of time. Usually it recovers after some time too, but it can take minutes. All actions are being delayed: movements, click, scrolls. Additionally, the movements can be choppy during these times. A workaround that always works for the same short period of time is to disconnect an re-connect the mouse. This can be done using the same KDE Bluetooth control module. What did I try already? Running this at boot time: echo on > `readlink -f /sys/class/bluetooth/hci0`/../../../power/level To disable any power saving features on the Bluetooth hci0 device. Check the mouse's batteries (it's just a week old, other new batteries: same result) Checking logs and kernel messages about Bluetooth-related entries: none aside the expected messages on connect time. I'm running kernel 3.5.0-13-generic as provided in the xorg-edgers PPA. Booting the regular 3.2 Precise kernel results in the same behaviour. Some other information that may help: It happens when no other Bluetooth connections are active on the machine. Similar symptoms also occur on my Bluetooth stereo (A2DP) headset, but then it's audio lagging and skipping. Swapping Bluetooth profiles as described here then helps. Conclusion: it's not the mouse that's faulty. The headset always worked fine using my now dead Thinkpad T61p with built-in Bluetooth. The bluetooth module in my laptop is connected via USB and shows up as Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0a5c:21e1 Broadcom Corp. I'm mobile and several people around me are using Bluetooth at work (A2DP mostly). It also occurs at home, where my neighbours are probably using Bluetooth as well. It could just be radio interference, but I think Bluetooth connections should just hop to another channel. And, moreover, it just works properly instantly when re-connecting. Therefore I think it's a software driver issue and I'd like to debug it. Is there any way to get more verbose logging on the Bluetooth(-hid) modules?

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• Finding Z given X & Y coordinates on terrain?

  - by mrky

  I need to know what the most efficient way of finding Z given X & Y coordinates on terrain. My terrain is set up as a grid, each grid block consisting of two triangles, which may be flipped in any direction. I want to move game objects smoothly along the floor of the terrain without "stepping." I'm currently using the following method with unexpected results: double mapClass::getZ(double x, double y) { int vertexIndex = ((floor(y))*width*2)+((floor(x))*2); vec3ray ray = {glm::vec3(x, y, 2), glm::vec3(x, y, 0)}; vec3triangle tri1 = { glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex].v1), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex].v2), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex].v3) }; vec3triangle tri2 = { glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex+1].v1), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex+1].v2), glmFrom(vertices[vertexIndex+1].v3) }; glm::vec3 intersect; if (!intersectRayTriangle(tri1, ray, intersect)) { intersectRayTriangle(tri2, ray, intersect); } return intersect.z; } intersectRayTriangle() and glmFrom() are as follows: bool intersectRayTriangle(vec3triangle tri, vec3ray ray, glm::vec3 &worldIntersect) { glm::vec3 barycentricIntersect; if (glm::intersectLineTriangle(ray.origin, ray.direction, tri.p0, tri.p1, tri.p2, barycentricIntersect)) { // Convert barycentric to world coordinates double u, v, w; u = barycentricIntersect.x; v = barycentricIntersect.y; w = 1 - (u+v); worldIntersect.x = (u * tri.p0.x + v * tri.p1.x + w * tri.p2.x); worldIntersect.y = (u * tri.p0.y + v * tri.p1.y + w * tri.p2.y); worldIntersect.z = (u * tri.p0.z + v * tri.p1.z + w * tri.p2.z); return true; } else { return false; } } glm::vec3 glmFrom(s_point3f point) { return glm::vec3(point.x, point.y, point.z); } My convenience structures are defined as: struct s_point3f { GLfloat x, y, z; }; struct s_triangle3f { s_point3f v1, v2, v3; }; struct vec3ray { glm::vec3 origin, direction; }; struct vec3triangle { glm::vec3 p0, p1, p2; }; vertices is defined as: std::vector<s_triangle3f> vertices; Basically, I'm trying to get the intersect of a ray (which is positioned at the x, and y coordinates specified facing pointing downwards toward the terrain) and one of the two triangles on the grid. getZ() rarely returns anything but 0. Other times, the numbers it generates seem to be completely off. Am I taking the wrong approach? Can anyone see a problem with my code? Any help or critique is appreciated!

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• 24HOP gets off to a good start

  - by Rob Farley

  Session 11 is on as I write this – Ami Levin presenting about Primary Keys. It’s a good session. But actually, they’ve all been excellent so far, not just Ami’s. I’ve heard only good things about the content. So if you’re reading this and 24HOP is still on, then tune in and take part. If it’s finished, get yourself over to http://sqlpass.org/24hours and see if the sessions have been made available on-demand. Yes – you should be able to watch the sessions when you want to for a year. Watching live is best, because you can ask questions and have them answered during the session, but if there are ones you just couldn’t make, then watching them on-demand is a good option. Numbers have been “not bad”. At the moment it’s still the middle of the night for most Americans – about 6:30am in New York, and yet we’ve had well over a hundred at all the sessions so far, getting up to well over 300 for some sessions. And when I look through the list of names, I see a bunch of names that suggest we’re reaching people from all around the world. I’m seriously looking forward to seeing the stats about which countries have been represented in the audiences. There have been a few comments about the platform. Everyone seems to consider IBTalk an improvement on LiveMeeting, but the closed captioning has met a mixed reception. Some people are loving it, whereas other people are finding the translations leave quite a bit of space for improvement. If you have feedback on this, please feel free to drop me an email (my name with an underscore at hotmail.com, or with a dot at sqlpass.org should reach me just fine, or Twitter, etc). I don’t know how many of the sessions I’ll get to watch overnight – but I’m looking forward to seeing how things go as the day progresses. Big thanks to everyone who’s involved – the sponsors, PASS HQ team and the IBTalk folk who have stayed up overnight to facilitate, plus the moderators, the people doing the live captioning, and of course the speakers and attendees. I love how the SQL Community gets behind things like this. Earlier, the Adelaide SQL Server User Group gathered and watched Denny Lee’s session on BigData, and everyone in the group agreed that it worked really well. I took a picture of our cinema room, although you could only see a small section of the audience. @rob_farley

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• Polite busy-waiting with WRPAUSE on SPARC

  - by Dave

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

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• SQL SERVER – DELETE, TRUNCATE and RESEED Identity

  - by pinaldave

  Yesterday I had a headache answering questions to one of the DBA on the subject of Reseting Identity Values for All Tables. After talking to the DBA I realized that he has no clue about how the identity column behaves when there is DELETE, TRUNCATE or RESEED Identity is used. Let us run a small T-SQL Script. Create a temp table with Identity column beginning with value 11. The seed value is 11. USE [TempDB] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TestTable]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(11,1) NOT NULL, [var] [nchar](10) NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Build sample data INSERT INTO [TestTable] VALUES ('val') GO When seed value is 11 the next value which is inserted has the identity column value as 11. – Select Data SELECT * FROM [TestTable] GO Effect of DELETE statement -- Delete Data DELETE FROM [TestTable] GO When the DELETE statement is executed without WHERE clause it will delete all the rows. However, when a new record is inserted the identity value is increased from 11 to 12. It does not reset but keep on increasing. -- Build sample data INSERT INTO [TestTable] VALUES ('val') GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM [TestTable] Effect of TRUNCATE statement -- Truncate table TRUNCATE TABLE [TestTable] GO When the TRUNCATE statement is executed it will remove all the rows. However, when a new record is inserted the identity value is increased from 11 (which is original value). TRUNCATE resets the identity value to the original seed value of the table. -- Build sample data INSERT INTO [TestTable] VALUES ('val') GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM [TestTable] GO Effect of RESEED statement If you notice I am using the reseed value as 1. The original seed value when I created table is 11. However, I am reseeding it with value 1. -- Reseed DBCC CHECKIDENT ('TestTable', RESEED, 1) GO When we insert the one more value and check the value it will generate the new value as 2. This new value logic is Reseed Value + Interval Value – in this case it will be 1+1 = 2. -- Build sample data INSERT INTO [TestTable] VALUES ('val') GO -- Select Data SELECT * FROM [TestTable] GO Here is the clean up act. -- Clean up DROP TABLE [TestTable] GO Question for you: If I reseed value with some random number followed by the truncate command on the table what will be the seed value of the table. (Example, if original seed value is 11 and I reseed the value to 1. If I follow up with truncate table what will be the seed value now? Here is the complete script together. You can modify it and find the answer to the above question. Please leave a comment with your answer. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Best Method For Evaluating Existing Software or New Software

  How many of us have been faced with having to decide on an off-the-self or a custom built component, application, or solution to integrate in to an existing system or to be the core foundation of a new system? What is the best method for evaluating existing software or new software still in the design phase? One of the industry preferred methodologies to use is the Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs (ARID) evaluation process.  ARID is a hybrid mixture of the Active Design Review (ADR) methodology and the Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). So what is ARID? ARD’s main goal is to ensure quality, detailed designs in software. One way in which it does this is by empowering reviewers by assigning generic open ended survey questions. This approach attempts to remove the possibility for allowing the standard answers such as “Yes” or “No”. The ADR process ignores the “Yes”/”No” questions due to the fact that they can be leading based on how the question is asked. Additionally these questions tend to receive less thought in comparison to more open ended questions. Common Active Design Review Questions What possible exceptions can occur in this component, application, or solution? How should exceptions be handled in this component, application, or solution? Where should exceptions be handled in this component, application, or solution? How should the component, application, or solution flow based on the design? What is the maximum execution time for every component, application, or solution? What environments can this component, application, or solution? What data dependencies does this component, application, or solution have? What kind of data does this component, application, or solution require? Ok, now I know what ARID is, how can I apply? Let’s imagine that your organization is going to purchase an off-the-shelf (OTS) solution for its customer-relationship management software. What process would we use to ensure that the correct purchase is made? If we use ARID, then we will have a series of 9 steps broken up by 2 phases in order to ensure that the correct OTS solution is purchases. Phase 1 Identify the Reviewers Prepare the Design Briefing Prepare the Seed Scenarios Prepare the Materials When identifying reviewers for a design it is preferred that they be pulled from a candidate pool comprised of developers that are going to implement the design. The believe is that developers actually implementing the design will have more a vested interest in ensuring that the design is correct prior to the start of code. Design debriefing consist of a summary of the design, examples of the design solving real world examples put in to use and should be no longer than two hours typically. The primary goal of this briefing is to adequately summarize the design so that the review members could actually implement the design. In the example of purchasing an OTS product I would attempt to review my briefing prior to its distribution with the review facilitator to ensure that nothing was excluded that should have not been. This practice will also allow me to test the length of the briefing to ensure that can be delivered in an appropriate about of time. Seed Scenarios are designed to illustrate conceptualized scenarios when applied with a set of sample data. These scenarios can then be used by the reviewers in the actual evaluation of the software, All materials needed for the evaluation should be prepared ahead of time so that they can be reviewed prior to and during the meeting. Materials Included: Presentation Seed Scenarios Review Agenda Phase 2 Present ARID Present Design Brainstorm and prioritize scenarios Apply scenarios Summarize Prior to the start of any ARID review meeting the Facilitator should define the remaining steps of ARID so that all the participants know exactly what they are doing prior to the start of the review process. Once the ARID rules have been laid out, then the lead designer presents an overview of the design which typically takes about two hours. During this time no questions about the design or rational are allowed to be asked by the review panel as a standard, but they are written down for use latter in the process. After the presentation the list of compiled questions is then summarized and sent back to the lead designer as areas that need to be addressed further. In the example of purchasing an OTS product issues could arise regarding security, the implementation needed or even if this is this the correct product to solve the needed solution. After the Design presentation a brainstorming and prioritize scenarios process begins by reducing the seed scenarios down to just the highest priority scenarios.  These will then be used to test the design for suitability. Once the selected scenarios have been defined the reviewers apply the examples provided in the presentation to the scenarios. The intended output of this process is to provide code or pseudo code that makes use of the examples provided while solving the selected seed scenarios. As a standard rule, the designers of the systems are not allowed to help the review board unless they all become stuck. When this occurs it is documented and along with the reason why the designer needed to help the review panel back on track. Once all of the scenarios have been completed the review facilitator reviews with the group issues that arise during the process. Then the reviewers will be polled as to efficacy of the review experience. References: Clements, Paul., Kazman, Rick., Klien, Mark. (2002). Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley

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• Platformer Starter Kit - Collision Issues

  - by Cyral

  I'm having trouble with my game that is based off the XNA Platformer starter kit. My game uses smaller tiles (16x16) then the original (32x40) which I'm thinking may be having an effect on collision (Being it needs to be more precise). Standing on the edge of a tile and jumping causes the player to move off the the tile when he lands. And 80% of the time, when the player lands, he goes flying though SOLID tiles in a diagonal fashion. This is very annoying as it is almost impossible to test other features, when spawning and jumping will result in the player landing in another part of the level or falling off the edge completely. The code is as follows: /// <summary> /// Updates the player's velocity and position based on input, gravity, etc. /// </summary> public void ApplyPhysics(GameTime gameTime) { float elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; Vector2 previousPosition = Position; // Base velocity is a combination of horizontal movement control and // acceleration downward due to gravity. velocity.X += movement * MoveAcceleration * elapsed; velocity.Y = MathHelper.Clamp(velocity.Y + GravityAcceleration * elapsed, -MaxFallSpeed, MaxFallSpeed); velocity.Y = DoJump(velocity.Y, gameTime); // Apply pseudo-drag horizontally. if (IsOnGround) velocity.X *= GroundDragFactor; else velocity.X *= AirDragFactor; // Prevent the player from running faster than his top speed. velocity.X = MathHelper.Clamp(velocity.X, -MaxMoveSpeed, MaxMoveSpeed); // Apply velocity. Position += velocity * elapsed; Position = new Vector2((float)Math.Round(Position.X), (float)Math.Round(Position.Y)); // If the player is now colliding with the level, separate them. HandleCollisions(); // If the collision stopped us from moving, reset the velocity to zero. if (Position.X == previousPosition.X) velocity.X = 0; if (Position.Y == previousPosition.Y) velocity.Y = 0; } /// <summary> /// Detects and resolves all collisions between the player and his neighboring /// tiles. When a collision is detected, the player is pushed away along one /// axis to prevent overlapping. There is some special logic for the Y axis to /// handle platforms which behave differently depending on direction of movement. /// </summary> private void HandleCollisions() { // Get the player's bounding rectangle and find neighboring tiles. Rectangle bounds = BoundingRectangle; int leftTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Left / Tile.Width); int rightTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Right / Tile.Width)) - 1; int topTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Top / Tile.Height); int bottomTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Bottom / Tile.Height)) - 1; // Reset flag to search for ground collision. isOnGround = false; // For each potentially colliding tile, for (int y = topTile; y <= bottomTile; ++y) { for (int x = leftTile; x <= rightTile; ++x) { // If this tile is collidable, ItemCollision collision = Level.GetCollision(x, y); if (collision != ItemCollision.Passable) { // Determine collision depth (with direction) and magnitude. Rectangle tileBounds = Level.GetBounds(x, y); Vector2 depth = RectangleExtensions.GetIntersectionDepth(bounds, tileBounds); if (depth != Vector2.Zero) { float absDepthX = Math.Abs(depth.X); float absDepthY = Math.Abs(depth.Y); // Resolve the collision along the shallow axis. if (absDepthY < absDepthX || collision == ItemCollision.Platform) { // If we crossed the top of a tile, we are on the ground. if (previousBottom <= tileBounds.Top) isOnGround = true; // Ignore platforms, unless we are on the ground. if (collision == ItemCollision.Impassable || IsOnGround) { // Resolve the collision along the Y axis. Position = new Vector2(Position.X, Position.Y + depth.Y); // Perform further collisions with the new bounds. bounds = BoundingRectangle; } } else if (collision == ItemCollision.Impassable) // Ignore platforms. { // Resolve the collision along the X axis. Position = new Vector2(Position.X + depth.X, Position.Y); // Perform further collisions with the new bounds. bounds = BoundingRectangle; } } } } } // Save the new bounds bottom. previousBottom = bounds.Bottom; } It also tends to jitter a little bit sometimes, I'm solved some of this with some fixes I found here on stackexchange, But Ive only seen one other case of the flying though blocks problem. This question seems to have a similar problem in the video, but mine is more crazy. Again this is a very annoying bug! Any help would be greatly appreciated! EDIT: Speed stuff // Constants for controling horizontal movement private const float MoveAcceleration = 13000.0f; private const float MaxMoveSpeed = 1750.0f; private const float GroundDragFactor = 0.48f; private const float AirDragFactor = 0.58f; // Constants for controlling vertical movement private const float MaxJumpTime = 0.35f; private const float JumpLaunchVelocity = -3500.0f; private const float GravityAcceleration = 3400.0f; private const float MaxFallSpeed = 550.0f; private const float JumpControlPower = 0.14f;

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• Library to fake intermittent failures according to tester-defined policy?

  - by crosstalk

  I'm looking for a library that I can use to help mock a program component that works only intermittently - usually, it works fine, but sometimes it fails. For example, suppose I need to read data from a file, and my program has to avoid crashing or hanging when a read fails due to a disk head crash. I'd like to model that by having a mock data reader function that returns mock data 90% of the time, but hangs or returns garbage otherwise. Or, if I'm stress-testing my full program, I could turn on debugging code in my real data reader module to make it return real data 90% of the time and hang otherwise. Now, obviously, in this particular example I could just code up my mock manually to test against a random() routine. However, I was looking for a system that allows implementing any failure policy I want, including: Fail randomly 10% of the time Succeed 10 times, fail 4 times, repeat Fail semi-randomly, such that one failure tends to be followed by a burst of more failures Any policy the tester wants to define Furthermore, I'd like to be able to change the failure policy at runtime, using either code internal to the program under test, or external knobs or switches (though the latter can be implemented with the former). In pig-Java, I'd envision a FailureFaker interface like so: interface FailureFaker { /** Return true if and only if the mocked operation succeeded. Implementors should override this method with versions consistent with their failure policy. */ public boolean attempt(); } And each failure policy would be a class implementing FailureFaker; for example there would be a PatternFailureFaker that would succeed N times, then fail M times, then repeat, and a AlwaysFailFailureFaker that I'd use temporarily when I need to simulate, say, someone removing the external hard drive my data was on. The policy could then be used (and changed) in my mock object code like so: class MyMockComponent { FailureFaker faker; public void doSomething() { if (faker.attempt()) { // ... } else { throw new RuntimeException(); } } void setFailurePolicy (FailureFaker policy) { this.faker = policy; } } Now, this seems like something that would be part of a mocking library, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's been done before. (In fact, I got the idea from Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code, where he discusses this exact idea on pages 228-231, saying that such facilities were common in Microsoft code of that early-90's era.) However, I'm only familiar with EasyMock and jMockit for Java, and neither AFAIK have this function, or something similar with different syntax. Hence, the question: Do such libraries as I've described above exist? If they do, where have you found them useful? If you haven't found them useful, why not?

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• How To Completely Disable Subtitles in VLC

  - by The Geek

  If you watch a lot of videos using VLC, you might have noticed that it enables subtitles by default if they are there, which can be pretty annoying at times. Here’s the quick tip to disable them entirely. Of course, you can always turn them back on if you want on an individual video basis. Disable Subtitles Head into the VLC preferences, and then click the All button at the bottom of the screen. On the left-hand side, choose Video –> Subtitles/OSD, and then uncheck the boxes for “Autodetect subtitle files”, Enable sub-pictures, and On Screen Display. That should do it, unless the subtitles are forced in the video for some reason. Note: Certain video formats like MKV can sometimes have subtitles enabled even though there isn’t a separate subtitles file. This is why you need to remove “Enable sub-pictures” as well, which totally disables the on-screen text. You can choose to only uncheck the autodetecting of subtitles instead if you’d prefer. And of course, you can simply right-click on the video, head to Video –> Subtitles Track and then choose the subtitles if you still wanted them. Note: this only works if the “enable sub-pictures” option is still enabled. And thus ends the tale of disabling those fracking subtitles. Starbuck approves. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips You Really Want to Completely Disable Tabs in Firefox?Disable ProFTP on CentOSDisable Notification Balloons in XPHow To (Really) Completely Disable UAC on Windows 7Disable User Account Control (UAC) the Easy Way on Win 7 or Vista 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 Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition

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• Choose Custom New Tab Pages in Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  For most people the default New Tab Page in Chrome works perfectly well for their purposes. But if you would prefer to choose what opens in a new tab for yourself then you will definitely want to have a look at the “Define your own new tab!” extension for Google Chrome. Before Unless you are using a Speed Dial (or similar) extension each time you click on the “New Tab Button” you get the same old page. It would certainly be a lot more satisfying if you could choose custom webpage(s) to open as new tabs. After Once you have the extension installed the best thing to do is click on the “New Tab Button”. That will open up the “Options Page” where you can enter one or two custom website URLs of your choosing. Once you have your custom URLs entered click on “Save”. As soon as you click on the “New Tab Button” your new custom webpage(s) will open. If you chose two webpages the first choice will open focused on the “right side” instead of the “left”. Clicking on the “Home Button” will also open the webpage(s) that you chose. The webpage(s) that you chose will also open as your starting “Home Pages” each time that you start your browser. Conclusion If you have wanted to choose your own custom “New Tab Page” then this is the extension that you have been waiting for. Links Download the Define your own new tab! extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Find Similar Websites in Google ChromeAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy WayEnable Vista Black Style Theme for Google Chrome in XPSet Custom Reload Times for Individual Webpages in ChromeEnable Auto-Paging Goodness in Google Chrome 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• String contains trailing zeroes when converted from decimal [migrated]

  - by Locke

  I've run into an unusual quirk in a program I'm writing, and I was trying to figure out if anyone knew the cause. Note that fixing the issue is easy enough. I just can't figure out why it is happening in the first place. I have a WinForms program written in VB.NET that is displaying a subset of data. It contains a few labels that show numeric values (the .Text property of the labels are being assigned directly from the Decimal values). These numbers are being returned by a DLL I wrote in C#. The DLL calls a webservice which initially returns the values in question. It returns one as a string, the other as a decimal (I don't have any control over the webservice, I just consume it). The DLL assigns these to properties on an object (both of which are decimals) then returns that object back to the WinForm program that called the DLL. Obviously, there's a lot of other data being consumed from the webservice, but no other operations are happening which could modify these properties. So, the short version is: WinForm requests a new Foo from the DLL. DLL creates object Foo. DLL calls webservice, which returns SomeOtherFoo. //Both Foo.Bar1 and Foo.Bar2 are decimals Foo.Bar1 = decimal.Parse(SomeOtherFoo.Bar1); //SomeOtherFoo.Bar1 is a string equal to "2.9000" Foo.Bar2 = SomeOtherFoo.Bar2; //SomeOtherFoo.Bar2 is a decimal equal to 2.9D DLL returns Foo to WinForm. WinForm.lblMockLabelName1.Text = Foo.Bar1 //Inspecting Foo.Bar1 indicates my value is 2.9D WinForm.lblMockLabelName2.Text = Foo.Bar2 //Inspecting Foo.Bar2 also indicates I'm 2.9D So, what's the quirk? WinForm.lblMockLabelName1.Text displays as "2.9000", whereas WinForm.lblMockLabelname2.Text displays as "2.9". Now, everything I know about C# and VB indicates that the format of the string which was initially parsed into the decimal should have no bearing on the outcome of a later decimal.ToString() operation called on the same decimal. I would expect that decimal.Parse(someDecimalString).ToString() would return the string without any trailing zeroes. Everything I find online seems to corroborate this (there are countless Stack Overflow questions asking exactly the opposite...how to keep the formatting from the initial parsing). At the moment, I've just removed the trailing zeroes from the initial string that gets parsed, which has hidden the quirk. However, I'd love to know why it happens in the first place.

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• atkbd.c spamming the logs. How to get rid? what is this?

  - by turbo

  On my Vostro 1000 notebook the following messages spam my dmesg: [18678.728936] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0). [18678.728941] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known. [18679.831109] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0). [18679.831119] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known. [18679.841607] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0). [18679.841615] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known. [18680.901733] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0). [18680.901744] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known. [18680.911536] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0). [18680.911546] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known. It's most probably not from an actual key because it appears in regular intervals. First what is it? It could be my battery since it's nearly dead, as in loadable to 11 % of the initial capacity, but I have no evidence for that. What is this / how can I find out where this comes from? How can I get rid of it? Is there a 'dud' keycode? When I assign a keycode with sudo setkeycode e00d $(random keycode) the key does actually get pressed. That makes it impossible to enter sudo password for example. So any 'real' keycode is not an option. It hasn't been like that half a year ago. Even better than the dud keycode would be a real fix. It happens from 10.04 to 12.04 (before that I don't know). I did read zcat /usr/share/doc/udev/README.keymap.txt.gz |less as suggested in the Ubuntu Wiki. /lib/udev/findkeyboards && sudo /lib/udev/keymap -i input/event5 produces what appears to be newlines in rapid succession. sudo udevadm monitor doesn't show the event.

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• What can I do to make sure my code gets maintained in a developer light environment?

  - by asjohnson

  I am a contract data analyst, so I bounce between jobs every 3-6 months, which I find to be a good fit for me, but it leads to some problems when it comes to coding. I mostly do statistics (I've asked a similar question on cross validated, but the answers there are not relevant here), but I have also found out that the business world loves excel and loves copying and pasting the same thing over and over again even more. This led me to learn how to write VBA scripts and then VB.NET programs to automate as many of these reports as I can. I am certain my programs are not the most elegant, but I put a good bit of effort into making sure they work under as many cases as I can test, I add in exceptions and try to code so the program can handle changes in the files that it processes, but there is a limit, if you remove a huge portion of the data, there is a good chance my program is going to trip up, which I accept will inevitably happen. Usually a pretty minor change in the code fixes the problem and I do try and comment my code and make it readable under the assumption that some other person will have to read it some day. My problem is that I generally get put on teams of folks with essentially no experience with programming (like VBA would be a huge stretch for anyone I work directly with). I am wondering what I should be doing as the person that wrote the code to do my best to keep it maintained. I have two approaches in mind (outlined next), but would be very happy to get any advice. Solution 1: Find the more tech savvy coworkers and run them through the programs and what basic changes can be made. Honestly automating excel is about as easy as it can get when it comes to programming, so I feel like I could teach someone the basics of maintaining it pretty quick. Solution 2: Get in touch with the IT department and show them what is going on and maybe they will be able to help. The problem here is that the IT department is constantly swamped (as I'm sure many of you know) and I feel like kind of a jerk for dumping more things on them. I do leave my personal email address with places and am willing to answer quick questions via email, but I view the need for more exhaustive maintenance as something of an inevitability and would like to make sure I do my due diligence to make sure it gets done. I imagine some combination of the two approaches outlined there, but is there any kind of heads up I should give IT? I feel like I would be annoyed if I started getting requests to fix a program that I had never seen from some random guy that is no longer there.

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• Turn Chrome’s New Tab Page into an Ubuntu Forums Powerhouse

  - by Asian Angel

  There’s a lot of start page plug-ins for Google Chrome, but if you’re an Ubuntu Forums enthusiast, you might be interested in the powerful UbuntuForums.org Start Page extension. Using the Ubuntu Forums Chrome Start Page Once you’ve installed the extension and opened a new tab, you’ll notice quite a difference from the boring default “New Tab Page”. While you may look at this and wonder if what you see is all that there is to it, there’s actually a lot of hidden customization and functionality. The upper left corner is where you will control the content displayed in the “Ubuntu New Tab Page”. The “Buttons Toolbar” that you see at the top lets you shift between the types of content viewed, from RSS feeds to bookmarks and more. This entire set of links provides direct links to the appropriate section in the Ubuntu Forums. As with the set of links pictured above each of these will open in a new tab when clicked on. There’s even a feature to browse wallpapers from DesktopNexus with categories on the left and pictures to the right. If you want to return to the regular layout you should use the “Start Page Link” highlighted here. Options The options will allow you to customize the colors shown in the “Ubuntu New Tab Page” to create a very nice match to your current browser and/or system theme if desired. You can also do some customization to the fonts, “Bookmark Shortcuts”, and populate the “Custom Links Section” in the main page. Conclusion If you are an Ubuntu enthusiast then this will be a very useful extension to add to your browser. The wealth of direct links and built-in functionality make this extension worth trying. Links Download the Ubuntuforums.org Start Page extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Turn Off Auto-Play of Audio and Video CDs and DVDs in UbuntuScroll Backwards From the Ubuntu Server Command LineAnnouncing the How-To Geek ForumsDisable the System Beep on Ubuntu EdgyEnable Smooth fonts on Ubuntu Linux 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 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 Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• Make Browsing Safer for Children in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  If you are worried about the websites that your children could accidentally visit while browsing, then you may want to have a look at the Kid Safe – LinkExtend extension for Google Chrome. Kid Safe – LinkExtend in Action Before going any further you may want to have a quick look at the options. Everything is enabled by default but it is recommended that you disable the “Allow entering unsafe sites Option”. For our first example we visited “chatroulette.com”. As you can see in the screenshot WOT and McAfee SiteAdvisor gave the website a “green rating” but when it came specifically to its’ level of appropriateness for children LinkExtend gave it a “yellow rating”. Our second example was “hotbabes.com”…obviously not a good website for any child to visit. You can see that the entire window area has been totally “blacked out” and the available information for this site from each of the six ratings sources. The “Toolbar Button” is also displaying a “red rating”… Notice the two links at the bottom of the ratings screen…both will be visible if the “Allow entering unsafe sites Option” is not disabled (see Options above). You can see the difference for the links at the bottom of the ratings screen if you have the “Allow entering unsafe sites Option” disabled. Definitely much much better… Clicking on the “Find Kids Sites Link” will navigate the tab to the Yahoo! Kids website. The extension will also place “ratings buttons” beside search results at Google. As you can see in the screenshot below not all of the results had information available for them at this time. But it is certainly a lot better than nothing at all when it comes to keeping your children safe. A close-up look at the ratings for one of the search results. Conclusion While no browser add-in makes for a perfect solution the Kid Safe – LinkExtend extension will definitely be a helpful addition to your family’s Chrome browser. Links Download the Kid Safe – LinkExtend extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Browsing History in Google Chrome the Easy WayFocused New Tabs Quick-Fix for Google ChromeVisually Browse Through Your Open Tabs in Google ChromeSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single Click 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 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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• Puppet: Getting Started On Windows

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-getting-started-on-windows.aspxNow that we’ve talked a little about Puppet. Let’s see how easy it is to get started. Install Puppet Let’s get Puppet Installed. There are two ways to do that: With Chocolatey: Open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: choco install puppet Download and install Puppet manually - http://puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options Run Puppet Let’s make pasting into a console window work with Control + V (like it should): choco install wincommandpaste If you have a cmd.exe command shell open, (and chocolatey installed) type: RefreshEnv The previous command will refresh your environment variables, ala Chocolatey v0.9.8.24+. If you were running PowerShell, there isn’t yet a refreshenv for you (one is coming though!). If you have to restart your CLI (command line interface) session or you installed Puppet manually open an administrative/elevated command shell and type: puppet resource user Output should look similar to a few of these: user { 'Administrator': ensure => 'present', comment => 'Built-in account for administering the computer/domain', groups => ['Administrators'], uid => 'S-1-5-21-some-numbers-yo-500', } Let's create a user: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => present, groups => ['Users'], }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: created Run the 'puppet resource user' command again. Note the user we created is there! Let’s clean up after ourselves and remove that user we just created: puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => absent, }" Relevant output should look like: Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: removed Run the 'puppet resource user' command one last time. Note we just removed a user! Conclusion You just did some configuration management /system administration. Welcome to the new world of awesome! Puppet is super easy to get started with. This is a taste so you can start seeing the power of automation and where you can go with it. We haven’t talked about resources, manifests (scripts), best practices and all of that yet. Next we are going to start to get into more extensive things with Puppet. Next time we’ll walk through getting a Vagrant environment up and running. That way we can do some crazier stuff and when we are done, we can just clean it up quickly.

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• Data Generator Source Adapter

  This component needs little explanation. It generates random integer (DT_I4) and string (DT_WSTR) data and places them in the pipeline. You specify how many columns of each you would like and for any string columns you pass a fixed length value. You then need to specify how many rows in total you require to be generated. This component is used by us to do testing of the pipeline and components downstream. Previously we would have used a script component (as a source) to generate the rows but found ourselves rewriting the code too often so created this component. Screenshots SQL Server 2005 Integration Services SQL Server 2008/2012 Integration Services The component is provided as an MSI file, however to complete the installation, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Data Generator Source from the list. Downloads The Data Generator Source Adapter is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Data Generator Source Adapter for SQL Server 2005 Data Generator Source Adapter for SQL Server 2008 Data Generator Source Adapter for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.30 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.29 - SQL Server 2008 February 2008 CTP. Includes support for upgrade of 2005 packages. Simplified user interface. (4 Mar 2008) Version 2.0.0.27 - SQL Server 2008 November 2007 CTP. String columns will now use the default system code page. Previously string columns always used 1252. (15 Feb 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.23 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.0 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 16 Sept CTP. Public release. (6 Oct 2005)

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• How can I set the date format to my country setting?

  - by Jamina Meissner

  I am German, but I use only English software. Hence, I am also using English Ubuntu. It's not because I don't know how to install German Ubuntu. It's because I prefer to work with English software environment. However, I would like to keep date & time format in German format, just as I use a German keyboard layout in English Ubuntu. I can set the time format to 24h time. But how can I set the date format to German time format? It is irritating for me to have the day number before the time numbers: In other words, instead of "Oct 14 15:16" I want it to display "14 Okt" or (if only English language is available) "14 Oct 15:16" or "14th Oct 15:16". At least, the number of the day should be displayed before the month. In Windows, it was no problem to choose time/date/currency settings according to a chosen country. Where can I do this in Ubuntu? The best would be if I could freely enter the date/time format myself with variables (DD.MM hh.mm.ss etc). I found answers for Ubuntu 11.04, but not for Ubuntu 12.04. I am using Ubuntu 12.04, 64-bit. Keep in mind that I am a beginner. So I'd like to be able to do this via GUI, if possible. EDIT: I found the answer in a forum. Go to System Settings... and choose Language Support. There are two tabs, Language and Reginal Formats. You are by default on the Language tab. On the Language tab, click Install / Remove Languages. A window with a list of languages opens. Mark the language(s) you want to add for your time/date/currency format. Click Apply Changes. Ubuntu will now download and install the additional language files, as well as help files of other applications in this language. So don't be irritated. When Ubuntu has finished applying the changes, switch to Regional Formats tab. (Do not change the Language for menus and windows on the Language tab if you only want to change the date/time/unit format). There you can choose from the dropdown list the language for your preferred format for date/time/currency/unit. Log out and log in again to have the changes take effect.

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• Data Auditor by Example

  - by Jinjin.Wang

  OWB has a node Data Auditors under Oracle Module in Projects Navigator. What is data auditor and how to use it? I will give an introduction to data auditor and show its usage by examples. Data auditor is an important tool in ensuring that data quality levels meet business requirements. Data auditor validates data against a set of data rules to determine which records comply and which do not. It gathers statistical metrics on how well the data in a system complies with a rule by auditing and marking how many errors are occurring against the audited table. Data auditors are typically scheduled for regular execution as part of a process flow, to monitor the quality of the data in an operational environment such as a data warehouse or ERP system, either immediately after updates like data loads, or at regular intervals. How to use data auditor to monitor data quality? Only objects with data rules can be monitored, so the first step is to define data rules according to business requirements and apply them to the objects you want to monitor. The objects can be tables, views, materialized views, and external tables. Secondly create a data auditor containing the objects. You can configure the data auditor and set physical deployment parameters for it as optional, which will be used while running the data auditor. Then deploy and run the data auditor either manually or as part of the process flow. After execution, the data auditor sets several output values, and records that are identified as not complying with the defined data rules contained in the data auditor are written to error tables. Here is an example. We have two tables DEPARTMENTS and EMPLOYEES (see pic-1 and pic-2. Click here for DDL and data) imported into OWB. We want to gather statistical metrics on how well data in these two tables satisfies the following requirements: a. Values of the EMPLOYEES.EMPLOYEE_ID attribute are three-digit numbers. b. Valid values for EMPLOYEES.JOB_ID are IT_PROG, SA_REP, SH_CLERK, PU_CLERK, and ST_CLERK. c. EMPLOYEES.EMPLOYEE_ID is related to DEPARTMENTS.MANAGER_ID. Pic-1 EMPLOYEES Pic-2 DEPARTMENTS 1. To determine legal data within EMPLOYEES or legal relationships between data in different columns of the two tables, firstly we define data rules based on the three requirements and apply them to tables. a. The first requirement is about patterns that an attribute is allowed to conform to. We create a Domain Pattern List data rule EMPLOYEE_PATTERN_RULE here. The pattern is defined in the Oracle Database regular expression syntax as ^([0-9]{3})$ Apply data rule EMPLOYEE_PATTERN_RULE to table EMPLOYEES.

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