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• Monitoring C++ applications

  - by Scott A

  We're implementing a new centralized monitoring solution (Zenoss). Incorporating servers, networking, and Java programs is straightforward with SNMP and JMX. The question, however, is what are the best practices for monitoring and managing custom C++ applications in large, heterogenous (Solaris x86, RHEL Linux, Windows) environments? Possibilities I see are: Net SNMP Advantages single, central daemon on each server well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions we run Net SNMP daemons on our servers already Disadvantages: complex implementation (MIBs, Net SNMP library) new technology to introduce for the C++ developers rsyslog Advantages single, central daemon on each server well-known standard unknown integration into monitoring solutions (I know they can do alerts based on text, but how well would it work for sending telemetry like memory usage, queue depths, thread capacity, etc) simple implementation Disadvantages: possible integration issues somewhat new technology for C++ developers possible porting issues if we switch monitoring vendors probably involves coming up with an ad-hoc communication protocol (or using RFC5424 structured data; I don't know if Zenoss supports that without custom Zenpack coding) Embedded JMX (embed a JVM and use JNI) Advantages consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions somewhat simple implementation (we already do this today for other purposes) Disadvantages: complexity (JNI, thunking layer between native C++ and Java, basically writing the management code twice) possible stability problems requires a JVM in each process, using considerably more memory JMX is new technology for C++ developers each process has it's own JMX port (we run a lot of processes on each machine) Local JMX daemon, processes connect to it Advantages single, central daemon on each server consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions Disadvantages: complexity (basically writing the management code twice) need to find or write such a daemon need a protocol between the JMX daemon and the C++ process JMX is new technology for C++ developers CodeMesh JunC++ion Advantages consistent management interface for both Java and C++ well-known standard easy integration into monitoring solutions single, central daemon on each server when run in shared JVM mode somewhat simple implementation (requires code generation) Disadvantages: complexity (code generation, requires a GUI and several rounds of tweaking to produce the proxied code) possible JNI stability problems requires a JVM in each process, using considerably more memory (in embedded mode) Does not support Solaris x86 (deal breaker) Even if it did support Solaris x86, there are possible compiler compatibility issues (we use an odd combination of STLPort and Forte on Solaris each process has it's own JMX port when run in embedded mode (we run a lot of processes on each machine) possibly precludes a shared JMX server for non-C++ processes (?) Is there some reasonably standardized, simple solution I'm missing? Given no other reasonable solutions, which of these solutions is typically used for custom C++ programs? My gut feel is that Net SNMP is how people do this, but I'd like other's input and experience before I make a decision.

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• Merge sort. ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException [migrated]

  - by user94892

  When I execute the program I am getting an error as stated below the program. Please help me figure out the problem.. import java.util.*; class Mergesort { public static void main(String args[]) { Scanner in= new Scanner(System.in); System.out.println("Enter the number of elements"); int n= in.nextInt(); int a[]= new int[n]; System.out.println("Enter the contents"); for(int i=0; i<n; i++) { a[i]=in.nextInt(); } a = mergesort(a,n); for(int i=0; i<n; i++) { System.out.println(a[i]); } } public static int[] mergesort(int[] x, int z) { if(z==1) { return x; } int b[]=new int[z/2]; int c[]=new int[z-z/2]; int i,j,k; for(int p=0;p<z/2; p++) { b[p]= x[p]; c[p]= x[p+z/2]; } c[z-z/2-1]= x[z-1]; b= mergesort(b,z/2); c= mergesort(c,z-z/2); for(i=0,j=0,k=0; k<z; k++) { if(b[i]<=c[j]) { x[k]=b[i]; i++; } else if( b[i]>c[j]) { x[k]=c[j]; j++; } else if(i== z/2) { x[k]= c[j]; j++; } else if(j == z-z/2) { x[k]= b[i]; i++; } } return x; } } Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1 at Mergesort.mergesort(Mergesort.java:41) at Mergesort.mergesort(Mergesort.java:36) at Mergesort.main(Mergesort.java:16)

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• Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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• Mouse Clicks, Reactive Extensions and StreamInsight Mashup

  I had an hour spare this afternoon so I wanted to have another play with Reactive Extensions in .Net and StreamInsight.  I also didn’t want to simply use a console window as a way of gathering events so I decided to use a windows form instead. The task I set myself was this. Whenever I click on my form I want to subscribe to the event and output its location to the console window and also the timestamp of the event.  In addition to this I want to know for every mouse click I do, how many mouse clicks have happened in the last 5 seconds. The second point here is really interesting.  I have often found this when working with people on problems.  It is how you ask the question that determines how you tackle the problem.  I will show 2 ways of possibly answering the second question depending on how the question was interpreted. As a side effect of this example I will show how time in StreamInsight can stand still.  This is an important concept and we can see it in the output later. Now to the code.  I will break it all down in this blogpost but you can download the solution and see it all together. I created a Console application and then instantiate a windows form.   frm = new Form(); Thread g = new Thread(CallUI); g.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); g.Start();   Call UI looks like this   static void CallUI() { System.Windows.Forms.Application.Run(frm); frm.Activate(); frm.BringToFront(); }   Now what we need to do is create an observable from the MouseClick event on the form.  For this we use the Reactive Extensions.   var lblevt = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(frm, "MouseClick").Timestamp();   As mentioned earlier I have two objectives in this example and to solve the first I am going to again use the Reactive extensions.  Let’s subscribe to the MouseClick event and output the location and timestamp to the console. lblevt.Subscribe(evt => { Console.WriteLine("Clicked: {0}, {1} ", evt.Value.EventArgs.Location,evt.Timestamp); }); That should take care of obective #1 but what about the second objective.  For that we need some temporal windowing and this means StreamInsight.  First we need to turn our Observable collection of MouseClick events into a PointStream Server s = Server.Create("Default"); Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Application a = s.CreateApplication("MouseClicks"); var input = lblevt.ToPointStream( a, evt => PointEvent.CreateInsert( evt.Timestamp, new { loc = evt.Value.EventArgs.Location.ToString(), ts = evt.Timestamp.ToLocalTime().ToString() }), AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime);   Now that we have created out PointStream we need to do something with it and this is where we get to our second objective.  It is pretty clear that we want some kind of windowing but what? Here is one way of doing it.  It might not be what you wanted but again it is how the second objective is interpreted   var q = from i in input.TumblingWindow(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5), HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) select new { CountOfClicks = i.Count() };   The above code creates tumbling windows of 5 seconds and counts the number of events in the windows.  If there are no events in the window then no result is output.  Likewise until an event (MouseClick) is issued then we do not see anything in the output (that is not strictly true because it is the CTI strapped to our MouseClick events that flush the events through the StreamInsight engine not the events themselves).  This approach is centred around the windows and not the events.  Until the windows complete and a CTI is issued then no events are pushed through. An alternate way of answering our second question is below   var q = from i in input.AlterEventDuration(evt => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5)).SnapshotWindow(SnapshotWindowOutputPolicy.Clip) select new { CountOfClicks = i.Count() };   In this code we extend the duration of each MouseClick to five seconds.  We then create  Snapshot Windows over those events.  Snapshot windows are discussed in detail here.  With this solution we are centred around the events.  It is the events that are driving the output.  Let’s have a look at the output from this solution as it may be a little confusing. First though let me show how we get the output from StreamInsight into the Console window. foreach (var x in q.ToPointEnumerable().Where(e => e.EventKind != EventKind.Cti)) { Console.WriteLine(x.Payload.CountOfClicks); }   Ok so now to the output.   The table at the top shows the output from our routine and the table at the bottom helps to explain the output.  One of the things that will help as well is, you will note that for our PointStream we set the issuing of CTIs to be IncreasingStartTime.  What this means is that the CTI is placed right at the start of the event so will not flush the event with which it was issued but will flush those prior to it.  In the bottom table the Blue fill is where we issued a click.  Yellow fill is the duration and boundaries of our events.  The numbers at the bottom indicate the count of events   Clicked 22:40:16                                 Clicked 23:40:18                                 1                                   Clicked 23:40:20                                 2                                   Clicked 23:40:22                                 3                                   2                                   Clicked 23:40:24                                 3                                   2                                   Clicked 23:40:32                                 3                                   2                                   1                                                                                                         secs 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32                                                                                                                                                                                                                         counts   1   2 3 2 3 2 3   2   1           What we can see here in the output is that the counts include all the end edges that have occurred between the mouse clicks.  If we look specifically at the mouse click at 22:40:32. then we see that 3 events are returned to us. These include the following End Edge count at 22:40:25 End Edge count at 22:40:27 End Edge count at 22:40:29 Another thing we notice is that until we actually issue a CTI at 22:40:32 then those last 3 snapshot window counts will never be reported. Hopefully this has helped to explain  a few concepts around StreamInsight and the IObservable() pattern.   You can download this solution from here and play.  You will need the Reactive Framework from here and StreamInsight 1.1

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• Manic Monday - More OpenWorld Solaris Sessions: Developers, Cloud, Customer Insights, Hardware Optimization

  - by Larry Wake

  We're overflowing with Monday sessions; literally more than one person can take in. Learn more about what's new in Oracle Solaris Studio, hear about the latest x86 and SPARC hardware optimizations, get some insights on cloud deployment strategies, and find out from your peers what they're doing with Oracle Solaris. If you're an OpenWorld attendee, go to to Schedule Builder to guarantee your space in any session or lab. See yesterday's blog post and the "Focus on Oracle Solaris" guide for even more sessions. Monday, October 1st: 10:45 AM - Maximizing Your SPARC T4 Oracle Solaris Application Performance(CON6382,  Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3) Hear how customers and commercial software partners have reached peak performance on SPARC T4 servers and engineered systems with Oracle Solaris Studio and its latest tools for analyzing, reporting, and improving runtime performance: Autoparallelizing, high-performance compilers Performance Analyzer (used to find performance hotspots) Thread Analyzer (to expose data races and deadlocks) Code Analyzer (used to discover latent memory corruption issues) 10:45 Cloud Formation: Implementing IaaS in Practice with Oracle Solaris(CON8787, Moscone South 302) Decisions, decisions--at the same time, we've got a session that covers why Oracle Solaris is the ideal OS for public or private clouds, IaaS or PaaS, with built-in features for elastic infrastructure, unrivaled security, superfast installation and deployment, nonstop availability, and crystal-clear observability. This session will include a customer study on how Oracle Solaris is used in the cloud today to implement the Oracle stack. 12:15 PM - Customer Insight: Oracle Solaris on Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic, and SPARC SuperCluster(CON8760, Moscone South 270) Hear from customers what benefits they have realized from using the Oracle stack on Oracle Exadata and Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster and from using Oracle Solaris on those engineered systems, taking advantage of built-in lightweight OS virtualization (Zones), enterprise reliability and scale, and other key features. 1:45 PM - Case Study: Mobile Tornado Uses Oracle Technology for Better RAS and TCO?(CON4281, Moscone West 2005) Mobile Tornado develops and markets instant communication platforms, replacing traditional radio networks with cellular networks. Its critical concern is uptime. Find out how they've used Oracle Solaris, Netra SPARC T4, and Oracle Solaris Cluster, including Oracle Solaris ZFS and Zones, for their Oracle Database deployments to improve reliability and drive down cost. 3:15 PM - Technical Panel: Developing High Performance Applications on Oracle Solaris(CON7196, Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2) Engineers from the Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle Tuxedo development teams, and Oracle ISV Engineering discuss how they develop high-performance enterprise applications that take advantage of Oracle's SPARC and x86 servers, with Oracle Solaris Studio and new Oracle Solaris 11 features. Topics will include developer tools, parallel frameworks, best practices, and methodologies, as well as insights and case studies on parallelizing and optimizing application performance on Oracle Solaris. Bring your best questions! 3:15 PM -  x86 Power Management with Oracle Solaris: Current State, Opportunities, and Future(CON6271, Moscone West 2012) Another option for this time slot: learn about how Intel Xeon and Oracle Solaris work together to reduce server power consumption. This presentation addresses some of the recent power management improvements in Oracle Solaris, opportunities to further improve energy efficiency, and some future directions for Oracle Solaris power management.

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• Push-Based Events in a Services Oriented Architecture

  - by Colin Morelli

  I have come to a point, in building a services oriented architecture (on top of Thrift), that I need to expose events and allow listeners. My initial thought was, "create an EventService" to handle publishing and subscribing to events. That EventService can use whatever implementation it desires to actually distribute the events. My client automatically round-robins service requests to available service hosts which are determined using Zookeeper-based service discovery. So, I'd probably use JMS inside of EventService mainly for the purpose of persisting messages (in the event that a service host for EventService goes down before it can distribute the message to all of the available listeners). When I started considering this, I began looking into the differences between Queues and Topics. Topics unfortunately won't work for me, because (at least for now), all listeners must receive the message (even if they were down at the time the event was pushed, or hadn't made a subscription yet because they haven't completed startup (during deployment, for example) - messages should be queued until the service is available). However, I don't want EventService to be responsible for handling all of the events. I don't think it should have the code to react to events inside of it. Each of the services should do what it needs with a given event. This would indicate that each service would need a JMS connection, which questions the value of having EventService at all (as the services could individually publish and subscribe to JMS directly). However, it also couples all of the services to JMS (when I'd rather that there be a single service that's responsible for determining how to distribute events). What I had thought was to publish an event to EventService, which pulls a configuration of listeners from some configuration source (database, flat file, irrelevant for now). It replicates the message and pushes each one back into a queue with information specific to that listener (so, if there are 3 listeners, 1 event would become 3 events in JMS). Then, another thread in EventService (which is replicated, running on multiple hots) would be pulling from the queue, attempting to make the service call to the "listener", and returning the message to the queue (if the service is down), or discarding the message (if the listener completed successfully). tl;dr If I have an EventService that is responsible for receiving events and delegating service calls to "event listeners," (which are really just endpoints on other services), how should it know how to craft the service call? Should I create a generic "Event" object that is shared among all services? Then, the EventService can just construct this object and pass it to the service call. Or is there a better answer to this problem entirely?

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• To My 24 Year Old Self, Wherever You Are&hellip;

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  A decade is a milestone in one’s life, regardless of when it occurs. 2011 might seem like a weird year to mark a decade, but 2001 was a defining year for me. It marked my emergence into the technology industry, an unexpected loss of innocence, and triggered an ongoing struggle with faith and belief. Once you go through a valley, climbing the mountain and looking back over where you travelled, you can take in the entirety of the journey. Over the last 10 years I kept journals, and in this new year I took some time to review them. For those today that are me a decade ago, I share with you what I’ve gleamed from my experiences. Take it for what it’s worth, and safe travels on your own journeys through life. Life is a Performance-Based Sport Have confidence, believe you’re capable, but realize that life is a performance-based sport. Everything you get in life is based on whether you can show that you deserve it. Performance is also your best defense against personal attacks. Just make sure you know what standards you’re expected to hit and if people want to poke holes at you let them do the work of trying to find them. Sometimes performance won’t matter though. Good things will happen to bad people, and bad things to good people. What’s important is that you do the right things and ensure the good and bad even out in your own life. How you finish is just as important as how you start. Start strong, end strong. Respect is Your Most Prized Reward Respect is more important than status or ego. The formula is simple: Performing Well + Building Trust + Showing Dedication = Respect Focus on perfecting your craft and helping your team and respect will come. Life is a Team Sport Whatever aspect of your life, you can’t do it alone. You need to rely on the people around you and ensure you’re a positive aspect of their lives; even those that may be difficult or unpleasant. Avoid criticism and instead find ways to help colleagues and superiors better whatever environment you’re in (work, home, etc.). Don’t just highlight gaps and issues, but also come to the table with solutions. At the same time though, stand up for yourself and hold others accountable for the commitments they make to the team. A healthy team needs accountability. Give feedback early and often, and make it verbal. Issues should be dealt with immediately, and positives should be celebrated as they happen. Life is a Contact Sport Difficult moments will happen. Don’t run from them or shield yourself from experiencing them. Embrace them. They will further mold you and reveal who you will become. Find Your Tribe and Embrace Your Community We all need a tribe: a group of people that we gravitate to for support, guidance, wisdom, and friendship. Discover your tribe and immerse yourself in them. Don’t look for a non-existent tribe just to fill the need of belonging though that will leave you empty and bitter when they don’t meet your unrealistic expectations. Try to associate with people more experienced and more knowledgeable than you. You’ll always learn, and you’ll always remember you have much to learn. Put yourself out there, get involved with the community. Opportunities will present themselves. When we open ourselves up to be vulnerable, we also give others the chance to do the same. This helps us all to grow and help each other, it’s very important. And listen to your wife. (Easter *is* a romantic holiday btw, regardless of what you may think.) Don’t Believe Your Own Press Clippings (and by that I mean the ones you write) Until you have a track record of performance to refer to, any notions of grandeur are just that: notions. You lose your rookie status through trials and tribulations, not by the number of stamps in your passport. Be realistic about your own “experience and leadership” and be honest when you aren’t ready for something. And always remember: nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Don’t Let Assholes Get You Down The world isn’t evil, but there is evil in the world. Know the difference and don’t paint all people with the same brush. Do be wary of those that use personal beliefs to describe their business (i.e. “We’re a [religion] company”). What matters is the culture of the organization, and that will tell you the moral compass and what is truly valued. Don’t make someone or something a priority that only makes you an option. Life is unfair and enemies/opponents will succeed when you fail. Don’t waste your energy getting upset at this; the only one that will lose out is you. As mentioned earlier, nobody really cares about you as much as you think they do. Misc Ecclesiastes is bullshit. Everything is certainly *not* meaningless. Software development is about delivery, not the process. Having a great process means nothing if you don’t produce anything. Watch “The Weatherman” (“It’s not easy, but easy doesn’t enter into grownup life.”). Read Tony Dungee’s autobiography, even if you don’t like football, and even if you aren’t a Christian. Say no, don’t feel like you have to commit right away when someone asks you to.

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• Sass interface in HTML6 for upload files.

  - by Anirudha

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/11/04/sass-interface-in-html6-for-upload-files.aspx[This post is about experiment & imagination] From Windows XP (ever last OS I tried) I have seen a feature that is about send file to pen drive and make shortcut on Desktop. In XP, Win7 (Win8 have this too, not removed) just select the file right click > send to and you can send this file to many places. In my menu it’s show me Skype because I have installed it. this skype confirm that we can add our own app here to make it more easy for user to send file in our app. Nowadays Many people use Cloud or online site to store the file. In case of html5 drag and drop you need to have site opened and have opened that page which is about file upload. You need to select all  and drag and drop. after drag and drop file is simply uploaded to server and site show you on list (if no error happen). but this file upload is seriously not worthy since I have to open the site when I do this operation.   Through this post I want to describe a feature that can make this thing better.  This API is simply called SASS FILE UPLOAD API Through This API when you surf the site and come into file upload page then the page will tell you that we also have SASS FILE API support. Enable it for better result.   How this work This API feature are activated on 2 basis. 1. Feature are disabled by default on site (or you can change it if it’s not) 2. This API allow specific site to upload the files. Files upload may have some rule. For example (minimum or maximum size of file to uploaded, which format the site allowed you to upload). In case of resume site you will be allowed to use .doc (according to code of site)   How browser recognize that Site have SASS service. In HTML source of  the site, the code have a meta tag similar to this <meta name=”sass-upload-api” path=”/upload.json”/> Remember that upload.json is one file that has define the value of many settings {   "cookie_name": "ck_file",   "maximum_allowed_perday": 24,   "allowed_file_extensions","*.png,*.jpg,*.jpeg,*.gif",   "method": [       {           "get": "file/get",           "routing":"/file/get/{fileName}"       },       {           "post": "file/post",           "routing":"/file/post/{fileName}"       },       {           "delete": "file/delete",           "routing":"/file/delete/{fileName}"       },         {           "put": "file/put",           "routing":"/file/put/{fileName}"       },        {           "all": "file/all",           "routing":"/file/all/{fileName}"       }    ] } cookie name is simply a cookie which should be stored in browser and define in json. we define the cookie_name so we can easily share then with service in Windows system. This cookie will be accessible with the service so it’s security based safe. other cookie will not be shared.   The cookie will be post,put, get from this location. The all location will be simply about showing a whole list of file. This will gave a treeview kind of json to show the directories on sever.   for example example.com if you have activated the API with this site then you will seen a send to option in your explorer.exe when you send you will got a windows open which folder you want to use to send the file. The windows will also describe the limit and how much you can upload. This thing never required site to opened. When you upload the file this will be uploaded through FTP protocol. FTP protocol are better for performance.   How this API make thing faster. Suppose you want to ask a question and want to post image. you just do it and get it ready when you open stackoverflow.com now stackoverflow will only tell you which file you want to put on your current question that you asking for. second use is about people use cloud app.   There is no need of drag and drop anymore. we just need to do it without drag and drop it. we doesn’t need to open the site either. This thing is still in experiment level. I will update this post when I got some progress on this API.

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• Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance?

  - by user1849534

  I have a question, it's about why programmers seems to love concurrency and multi-threaded programs in general. I'm considering 2 main approaches here: an async approach basically based on signals, or just an async approach as called by many papers and languages like the new C# 5.0 for example, and a "companion thread" that manages the policy of your pipeline a concurrent approach or multi-threading approach I will just say that I'm thinking about the hardware here and the worst case scenario, and I have tested this 2 paradigms myself, the async paradigm is a winner at the point that I don't get why people 90% of the time talk about multi-threading when they want to speed up things or make a good use of their resources. I have tested multi-threaded programs and async program on an old machine with an Intel quad-core that doesn't offer a memory controller inside the CPU, the memory is managed entirely by the motherboard, well in this case performances are horrible with a multi-threaded application, even a relatively low number of threads like 3-4-5 can be a problem, the application is unresponsive and is just slow and unpleasant. A good async approach is, on the other hand, probably not faster but it's not worst either, my application just waits for the result and doesn't hangs, it's responsive and there is a much better scaling going on. I have also discovered that a context change in the threading world it's not that cheap in real world scenario, it's in fact quite expensive especially when you have more than 2 threads that need to cycle and swap among each other to be computed. On modern CPUs the situation it's not really that different, the memory controller it's integrated but my point is that an x86 CPUs is basically a serial machine and the memory controller works the same way as with the old machine with an external memory controller on the motherboard. The context switch is still a relevant cost in my application and the fact that the memory controller it's integrated or that the newer CPU have more than 2 core it's not bargain for me. For what i have experienced the concurrent approach is good in theory but not that good in practice, with the memory model imposed by the hardware, it's hard to make a good use of this paradigm, also it introduces a lot of issues ranging from the use of my data structures to the join of multiple threads. Also both paradigms do not offer any security abut when the task or the job will be done in a certain point in time, making them really similar from a functional point of view. According to the X86 memory model, why the majority of people suggest to use concurrency with C++ and not just an async approach ? Also why not considering the worst case scenario of a computer where the context switch is probably more expensive than the computation itself ?

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• Workflow 4.5 is Awesome, cant wait for 5.0!

  - by JoshReuben

  About 2 years ago I wrote a blog post describing what I would like to see in Workflow vnext: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2010/08/25/workflow-4.0---not-there-yet.aspx At the time WF 4.0 was a little rough around the edges – the State Machine was on codeplex and people were simulating state machines with Flowcharts. Last year I built a near- realtime machine management system using WF 4.0.1 – its managing the internal operations of this device: http://landanano.com/products/commercial   Well WF 4.5 has come a long way – many of my gripes have been addressed: C# expressions - no more VB 'AndAlso' clauses state machine awesomeness - can query current state many designer improvements - Document Outline is so much more succinct than Designer! Separate WCF Service Contract interfaces and ability to generate activities from contract operations ability to rehydrate to updated flow definitions via DynamicUpdateMap and WorkflowIdentity you can read about the new features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh305677(VS.110).aspx   2013 could be the year of Workflow evangelism for .NET, as it comes together as the DSL language. Eg on Azure it could be used to graphically orchestrate between WebRoles, WorkerRoles and AppFabric Queues and the ServiceBus – that would be grand.   Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in Workflow 5.0: Stronger Parallelism support for true multithreaded workflows . A Workflow executes on a single thread – wouldn’t it be great if we had the ability to model TPL DataFlow? Parallel is not really parallel, just allows AsyncCodeActivity.     support for recursion an ExpressionTree activity with an editor design surface a math activity pack return of application level protocol (3.51 WF services) – automatically expose a state machine as a WCF service with bookmark Receive activities generated from OperationContract automatically placed in state transition triggers. A new HTML5 ActivityDesigner control – support with different CSS3  skinnable hooks,  remote connectivity (had to roll my own) A data flow view – crucial to understanding the big picture Ability to refactor a Sequence to custom activity in a separate .xaml file – like Expression Blend does for UserControl state machine global error handling - if all states goto an error state, you quickly get visual spagetti. Now you could nest a state machine, but what if you want an application level protocol whereby each state exposes certain WCF ops. DSL RAD editing - Make the Document Outline into a DSL editor for adding activities  – For WF to really succeed as a higher level of abstraction, It needs to be more productive than raw coding - drag & drop on the designer is currently too slow compared to just typing code. Extensible Wizard API - for pluggable WF editor experience other execution models beyond Sequence, Flowchart & StateMachine: SSIS, Behavior Trees,  Wolfram Model tool – surprise us! improvements to Designer debugging API - SourceLocation is tied to XAML file line number and char position, and ModelService access seems convoluted - why not leverage WPF LogicalTreeHelper / VisualTreeHelper ? Workflow Team , keep on rocking!

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• How can I make a universal construction more efficient?

  - by VF1

  A "universal construction" is a wrapper class for a sequential object that enables it to be linearized (a strong consistency condition for concurrent objects). For instance, here's an adapted wait-free construction, in Java, from [1], which presumes the existence of a wait-free queue that satisfies the interface WFQ (which only requires one-time consensus between threads) and assumes a Sequential interface: public interface WFQ<T> // "FIFO" iteration { int enqueue(T t); // returns the sequence number of t Iterable<T> iterateUntil(int max); // iterates until sequence max } public interface Sequential { // Apply an invocation (method + arguments) // and get a response (return value + state) Response apply(Invocation i); } public interface Factory<T> { T generate(); } // generate new default object public interface Universal extends Sequential {} public class SlowUniversal implements Universal { Factory<? extends Sequential> generator; WFQ<Invocation> wfq = new WFQ<Invocation>(); Universal(Factory<? extends Sequential> g) { generator = g; } public Response apply(Invocation i) { int max = wfq.enqueue(i); Sequential s = generator.generate(); for(Invocation invoc : wfq.iterateUntil(max)) s.apply(invoc); return s.apply(i); } } This implementation isn't very satisfying, however, since it presumes determinism of a Sequential and is really slow. I attempted to add memory recycling: public interface WFQD<T> extends WFQ<T> { T dequeue(int n); } // dequeues only when n is the tail, else assists other threads public interface CopyableSequential extends Sequential { CopyableSequential copy(); } public class RecyclingUniversal implements Universal { WFQD<CopyableSequential> wfqd = new WFQD<CopyableSequential>(); Universal(CopyableSequential init) { wfqd.enqueue(init); } public Response apply(Invocation i) { int max = wfqd.enqueue(i); CopyableSequential cs = null; int ctr = max; for(CopyableSequential csq : wfq.iterateUntil(max)) if(--max == 0) cs = csq.copy(); wfqd.dequeue(max); return cs.apply(i); } } Here are my specific questions regarding the extension: Does my implementation create a linearizable multi-threaded version of a CopyableSequential? Is it possible extend memory recycling without extending the interface (perhaps my new methods trivialize the problem)? My implementation only reduces memory when a thread returns, so can this be strengthened? [1] provided an implementation for WFQ<T>, not WFQD<T> - one does exist, though, correct? [1] Herlihy and Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming.

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• Fixing a NoClassDefFoundError

  - by Chris Okyen

  I have some code: package ftc; import java.util.Scanner; public class Fer_To_Cel { public static void main(String[] argv) { // Scanner object to get the temp in degrees Farenheit Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in); boolean isInt = true; // temporarily put as true in case the user enters a valid int the first time int degreesF = 0; // initialy set to 0 do { try { // Input the temperature text. System.out.print("\nPlease enter a temperature (integer number, no fractional part) in degrees Farenheit: "); degreesF = Integer.parseInt(keyboard.next()); // Get user input and Assign the far. temperature variable, which is casted from String to int. } // Let the user know in a user friendly notice that the value entered wasnt an int ( give int value range ) , and then give error log catch(java.lang.Exception e) { System.out.println("Sorry but you entered a non-int value ( needs to be between ( including ) -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647 ).. \n"); e.printStackTrace(); isInt = false; } } while(!isInt); System.out.println(""); // print a new line. final int degreesC = (5*(degreesF-32)/9); // convert the degrees from F to C and store the resulting expression in degreesC // Print out a newline, then print what X degrees F is in Celcius. System.out.println("\n" + degreesF + " degrees Farenheit is " + degreesC + " degrees Celcius"); } } And The following error: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_06\bin>java Fer_To_Cel Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Fer_To_Cel (wrong name: ftc/Fer_To_Cel) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:791) at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:14 at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:449) at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:71) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:361) at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:355) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:354) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:423) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:308) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:356) at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:480) The code compiled without compile errors, but presented errors during execution. Which leads me to two questions. I know Errors can be termed Compiler, Runtime and Logic Errors, but the NoClassDefFoundError inherits java.lang.LinkageError. Does that make it a Linker error, being niether of the three types of errors I listed, If I am right this is the answer. For someone else who obtains the singular .java file and compiles it, would this be the only way to solve this problem? Or can I (should I ) do/have done something to fix this problem? Basically, based on a basis of programming, is this a fault of me as the writer? Could this be done once on, my half and be distributed and not needed be done again?

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• Disk drive for / not ready on boot after upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04

  - by Mathieu M-Gosselin

  After upgrading (using the Upgrade button from the update manager) from 10.04.4 to 12.04.1, I cannot boot anymore. Upon booting, I am greeted with the Ubuntu logo and the error "The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present". I have the option to wait, to skip and to access a basic shell. Waiting overnight did nothing, skipping just gives me the same error for /tmp, /home, then for a UUID and finally it just goes to a black screen with a white "_" in the top left corner. My setup is a dual boot one with XP on a single hard drive, I use separate partitions for / and /home. Back in the day I installed 8.04 directly from the CD while leaving a partition for XP, which I installed after. This setup had never caused any such issues, even when upgrading from 8.04 to 10.04. I have done plenty of research regarding this issue, as many others seem to have had similar issues after doing the same upgrade as me. However, while for most what fixed the problem was running: apt-get -f install after remounting / in read-write, it didn't do it for me. I got dependency errors (see here), which I also investigated. I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-defaults/+bug/990740 where most people say the solution that worked is (prior to running the above command) running: apt-get install -o APT::Immediate-Configure=false -f apt python-minimal but that also got me a lot of dependencies errors as output (see here), similar to #34 in the above thread. I also read that running: dpkg --configure -a could help, at first it wouldn't run because it had trouble parsing /var/lib/dpkg/status since there was an extra blank line in a package description (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/916799) but I removed it using vim (and then reran the command). It still gives me output that looks like an error, though. Here it is: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1338074/. I also tried re-running the above apt-get commands after that, to no avail. I'm running out of things to try in the hope of getting this fixed, your help would be very much appreciated! Thank you in advance.

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• C# Dev - I've tried Lisps, but I don't get it.

  - by Jonathan Mitchem

  After a few months of learning about and playing with lisps, both CL and a bit of Clojure, I'm still not seeing a compelling reason to write anything in it instead of C#. I would really like some compelling reasons, or for someone to point out that I'm missing something really big. The strengths of a Lisp (per my research): Compact, expressive notation - More so than C#, yes... but I seem to be able to express those ideas in C# too. Implicit support for functional programming - C# with LINQ extension methods: mapcar = .Select( lambda ) mapcan = .Select( lambda ).Aggregate( (a,b) = a.Union(b) ) car/first = .First() cdr/rest = .Skip(1) .... etc. Lambda and higher-order function support - C# has this, and the syntax is arguably simpler: "(lambda (x) ( body ))" versus "x = ( body )" "#(" with "%", "%1", "%2" is nice in Clojure Method dispatch separated from the objects - C# has this through extension methods Multimethod dispatch - C# does not have this natively, but I could implement it as a function call in a few hours Code is Data (and Macros) - Maybe I haven't "gotten" macros, but I haven't seen a single example where the idea of a macro couldn't be implemented as a function; it doesn't change the "language", but I'm not sure that's a strength DSLs - Can only do it through function composition... but it works Untyped "exploratory" programming - for structs/classes, C#'s autoproperties and "object" work quite well, and you can easily escalate into stronger typing as you go along Runs on non-Windows hardware - Yeah, so? Outside of college, I've only known one person who doesn't run Windows at home, or at least a VM of Windows on *nix/Mac. (Then again, maybe this is more important than I thought and I've just been brainwashed...) The REPL for bottom-up design - Ok, I admit this is really really nice, and I miss it in C#. Things I'm missing in a Lisp (due to a mix of C#, .NET, Visual Studio, Resharper): Namespaces. Even with static methods, I like to tie them to a "class" to categorize their context (Clojure seems to have this, CL doesn't seem to.) Great compile and design-time support the type system allows me to determine "correctness" of the datastructures I pass around anything misspelled is underlined realtime; I don't have to wait until runtime to know code improvements (such as using an FP approach instead of an imperative one) are autosuggested GUI development tools: WinForms and WPF (I know Clojure has access to the Java GUI libraries, but they're entirely foreign to me.) GUI Debugging tools: breakpoints, step-in, step-over, value inspectors (text, xml, custom), watches, debug-by-thread, conditional breakpoints, call-stack window with the ability to jump to the code at any level in the stack (To be fair, my stint with Emacs+Slime seemed to provide some of this, but I'm partial to the VS GUI-driven approach) I really like the hype surrounding Lisps and I gave it a chance. But is there anything I can do in a Lisp that I can't do as well in C#? It might be a bit more verbose in C#, but I also have autocomplete. What am I missing? Why should I use Clojure/CL?

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• Got Samba, Got PyNeighbourhood but still no connection. What else do I need?

  - by Frank A

  I am sure I had already hit post before but then could only find it by backing through browser. Was it deleted? is the question too dumb, sorry that I do not know the right jargon just trying to get answers to my problem anyway have reworded stuff a bit This seems to be a number one requirement for lots of people and 2 months on from setting up my Ubuntu pc, I am still unable to get a lasting connection in either direction. Adding a windows pc to a network is so easy... just a few clicks and get on with using it all. Using all command approaches and modifying configuration files is hardly user friendly. Googling brings up thousands of solutions but mostly they are too techy or assume the user is fully aware of how to use Linux. I do realise that their must be a lot of flavours for connecting to networks. So far I have installed Samba and fiddled with its config file. The day I did all that it worked from XP to Ubuntu. When I came back two days later to transfer my data over it would not connect. Although the the share does show up in Windows (XP) My Network Places. Today I installed PyNeighbourhood and this shows the Ubuntu box and all of the shares I had created at some point on Ubuntu and it even shows this under the XP workgroup name. But instructions on setting the connection up seem to relate to an earlier version and nothing seems to work there either. (I unshared most of those test folders but they still show up her but that is another question. When I click on mount- I can only click on one on the Ubuntu machine, there is one with no name so I assume this to be my attempt to add one XP Shared drive using ipaddress, I get errors. (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", (gksu:9767): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "pixmap", mount error(6): No such device or address Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs) OK tried to find the manual referred to... only an old comment that manual would be produced for future versions. I saw in another thread that Winbind is needed as well or at least I assume as well? Totally lost again? Please help, what else needs to be installed to connect to win pcs on the network.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-10-12

  - by Bob Rhubart

  This is your brain on IT architecture. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles, Oct 25 This is your brain on IT architecture. Stuff your cranium with architecture by attending Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles, October 25, 2012, at the Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Technical sessions, panel Q&A, and peer roundtables--plus a free lunch. Register now. WebCenter Sites Gadget Development Concepts Quickstart | John Brunswick What are Gadgets? "At their most basic level they can be thought of as lightweight portlets that run largely on the client side of an architecture," says John Brunswick. "Gadgets provide a cross-platform container to run reusable UI modules that generally expose dynamic information to an end user, allowing for some level of end user customization." ORCLville: OOW 2012 - A Not So Brief Recap Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter, an Applications & Apps Technology specialists, shares his personal, frank, and and extensive recap or Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Fusion Applications Technical Tips | Naveen Nahata "Setting memory parameters for Admin and Managed servers of various domains in Fusion Applications can be, let us say, a little daunting," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Naveen Nahata. "While all this may look complicated and intimidating, it is actually relatively simple once you understand how it all works." Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. ExaLogic Hackers Night - November 19th Nürnberg Germany | WebLogic Partner Community EMEA Want to get your hands on Oracle Exalogic? Make your way to Nürnberg, Germany for this Exalogic Hacker's Night on November 19, 2012. Experts will be on hand to help you test your ideas. (The blog post is in English, but the event registration page is in German.) Thought for the Day "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…" — Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Synergy - easy share of keyboard and mouse between multiple computers

  Did you ever have the urge to share one set of keyboard and mouse between multiple machines? If so, please read on... Using multiple machines Honestly, as a software craftsman it is my daily business to run multiple machines - either physical or virtual - to be able to solve my customers' requirements. Recent hardware equipment allows this very easily. For laptops it's a no-brainer to attach a second or even a third screen in order to extend your native display. This works quite handy and in my case I used to attached two additional screens - one via HD15 connector, the other via HDMI. But... as it's a laptop and therefore a mobile unit there are slight restrictions. Detaching and re-attaching all cables when changing locations is one of them but hardware limitations, too. After all, it's a laptop and not a workstation. I guess, that anyone working in IT (or ICT) has more than one machine at their workplace or their home office and at least I find it quite annoying to have multiple sets of keyboard and mouse conquering my remaining space on my desk. Despite the ugly looks of all those cables and whatsoever 'chaos of distraction' I prefer a more clean solution and working environment. This allows me to actually focus on my work and tasks to do rather than to worry about choosing the right combination of keyboard/mouse. My current workplace is a patch work of various pieces of hardware (approx. 2-3 years): DIY desktop on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Core2 Duo (E7400, 2.8GHz), 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD, nVidia GPU 512MB Dell Inspiron 1525 on Windows 8 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 200GB HDD HP Compaq 6720s on Windows Vista 32-bit, Core2 Duo (T5670, 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD Mac mini on Mac OS X 10.7, Core i5 (2.3 GHz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD I know... Not the latest and greatest but a decent combination to work with. New system(s) is/are already on the shopping list but I live in the 'wrong' country to buy computer hardware. So, the next trip abroad will provide me with some new stuff. Using multiple operating systems The list of hardware above already names different operating systems, and actually I have only one preference: Linux. But still my job as a software craftsman for Visual FoxPro and .NET development requires other OSes, too. Not a big deal, it's just like this. Additionally to those physical machines, there are a bunch of virtual machines around. Most of them running either Windows XP or Windows 7. Since years I have the practice that each development for one customer is isolated into its own virtual machine and environment. This keeps it clean and version-safe. But as you can easily imagine with that setup there are a couple of constraints referring to keyboard and mouse. Usually, those systems require their own pieces of hardware attached. As stated, I don't like clutter on my desk's surface, so a cross-platform solution has to come in here. In the past, I tried it with various applications, hardware or network protocols like X11, RDP, NX, TeamViewer, RAdmin, KVM switch, etc. but the problem in this case is that they either allow you to remotely connect to the other system or exclusively 'bind' your peripherals to the active system. Not optimal after all. Synergy to the rescue Quote from their website: "Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk, and it's Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer's screen on to another. You can even share all of your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)." Yep, that's it! All I need for my setup here... Actually, I couldn't believe it myself that I didn't stumble over synergy earlier but 'Get over it' and there we go. And despite the fact that it is Open Source, no, it's also for free. Donations for the developers are very welcome and recently they introduced Synergy Premium. A possibility to buy so-called premium votes that can be used to put more weight / importance on specific issues or bugs that you would like the developers to look into. Installation and configuration Simply download the installation packages for your systems of choice, run the installer and enter some minor information about your network setup. I chose my desktop machine for the role of the Synergy server and configured my screen setup as follows: The screen setup allows you currently to build or connect up to 15 machines. The number of screens can be higher as those machine might have multiple screens physically attached. Synergy takes this into the overall calculations and simply works as expected. I tried it for fun with a second monitor each connected to both laptops to have a total number of 6 active screens. No flaws after all - stunning! All the other machines are configured as clients like so: Side note: The screenshot was taken on Windows 8 and pasted via clipboard into Gimp running on Ubuntu. Resume Synergy is now definitely in my box of tools for my daily work, and amongst the first pieces of software I install after the operating system. It just simplifies my life and cleans my desk. Never again without Synergy!Now, only waiting for an Android version to integrate my Galaxy Tab 10.1, too. ;-) Please, check out that superb product and enjoy sharing one keyboard, one mouse and one clipboard between your various machines and operating systems.

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• Survey: Your Plans for Adopting New Firefox Releases?

  - by Steven Chan (Oracle Development)

  Mozilla is committing to releasing new Firefox versions every six weeks.  Mozilla released Firefox 5 this week.  With this release, Mozilla states that Firefox 4 is End-of-Life and will not receive any additional security updates.  In a comment thread posted on to a Mike Kaply's blog article discussing these new Firefox policies, Asa Dotzler from Mozilla stated: ... Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.  In a later comment, he added: ... A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I’d much rather Mozilla spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don’t have enterprise support systems already taking care of them. Asa then confirmed that every new Firefox release will put the previous one into End-of-Life: As for John’s concern, “By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won’t go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?” He has the opposite of guarantees that won’t happen. He has my promise that it will happen. Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.  He added: “You’re basically saying you don’t care about corporations.” Yes, I’m basically saying that I don’t care about making Firefox enterprise friendly. Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla later stated to PC Mag: The Web and Web browsers continue to evolve rapidly. Mozilla's focus is on providing users with the best Web experience possible, and Firefox needs to evolve at the pace the Web's users and developers expect. By releasing small, focused updates more often, we are able to deliver improved security and stability even as we introduce new features, which is better for our users, and for the Web.We recognize that this shift may not be compatible with a large organization's IT Policy and understand that it is challenging to organizations that have effort-intensive certification polices. However, our development process is geared toward delivering products that support the Web as it is today, while innovating and building future Web capabilities. Tying Firefox product development to an organizational process we do not control would make it difficult for us to continue to innovate for our users and the betterment of the Web.  Your feedback needed for E-Business Suite certifications  Mozilla's new support policy has significant implications for enterprise users of Firefox with Oracle E-Business Suite.  We are reviewing the implications for our certification and support policies for Firefox now.  It would be very helpful if you could let me know about your organisation's plans for Firefox in light of this new information.  Please feel free to drop me a private email, or post a comment here if that's appropriate. 

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• Which programming language to get into?

  - by user602479

  I'm ending my third term in a few weeks so I have some spare time coming up. I'd like to spend it seriously digging into programming. My problem: I'm not sure which language to begin with. Just to be clear, I don't want to start a language-y-compared-to-language-z discussion. There are a some other issues that play a major role. In my 5th term I'm going to be participating in a major practical course which will include either Java or C programming. It will take a lot of time and energy, as I found out while talking to a few students who passed the final exams (only 15% pass on their first try). Which practical course I will take is randomly decided. My skills so far are the absolute basics of Java and C programming. I know the different data types and how to handle them, objects, pointers, thread programming, etc. All of that is on a very low level, though. My question now is, what language should I start seriously practicing? Java: I did my first GUIs with this language. I'm familiar with Eclipse but I need a project to work on (which I don't have) to really keep me pushing. Besides that, I don't think it would help me if I have to do C in a year. C: As with Java, I can't think of a personal project to keep me working and keep me interested in programming. If I get assigned to Java in a year, this wouldn't give me any advantages either, would it? (No objects, etc.) Objective-C: I recently came up with this idea. I have a Mac; I'm not really familiar with Xcode but I have one or two personal projects I'd like to work on. Further, I would be working with objects (as in Java) and C language constructs which would both be great for this practical course in a year. What do you think I should begin with? Should I just stick to Java and hope for the best, force myself through C or start (nearly) completely from the beginning with Objective C? Maybe you folks could give me some good advice that would stop me from switching from one language to the next?

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• Efficient way to render tile-based map in Java

  - by Lucius

  Some time ago I posted here because I was having some memory issues with a game I'm working on. That has been pretty much solved thanks to some suggestions here, so I decided to come back with another problem I'm having. Basically, I feel that too much of the CPU is being used when rendering the map. I have a Core i5-2500 processor and when running the game, the CPU usage is about 35% - and I can't accept that that's just how it has to be. This is how I'm going about rendering the map: I have the X and Y coordinates of the player, so I'm not drawing the whole map, just the visible portion of it; The number of visible tiles on screen varies according to the resolution chosen by the player (the CPU usage is 35% here when playing at a resolution of 1440x900); If the tile is "empty", I just skip drawing it (this didn't visibly lower the CPU usage, but reduced the drawing time in about 20ms); The map is composed of 5 layers - for more details; The tiles are 32x32 pixels; And just to be on the safe side, I'll post the code for drawing the game here, although it's as messy and unreadable as it can be T_T (I'll try to make it a little readable) private void drawGame(Graphics2D g2d){ //Width and Height of the visible portion of the map (not of the screen) int visionWidht = visibleCols * TILE_SIZE; int visionHeight = visibleRows * TILE_SIZE; //Since the map can be smaller than the screen, I center it just to be sure int xAdjust = (getWidth() - visionWidht) / 2; int yAdjust = (getHeight() - visionHeight) / 2; //This "deducedX" thing is to move the map a few pixels horizontally, since the player moves by pixels and not full tiles int playerDrawX = listOfCharacters.get(0).getX(); int deducedX = 0; if (listOfCharacters.get(0).currentCol() - visibleCols / 2 >= 0) { playerDrawX = visibleCols / 2 * TILE_SIZE; map_draw_col = listOfCharacters.get(0).currentCol() - visibleCols / 2; deducedX = listOfCharacters.get(0).getXCol(); } //"deducedY" is the same deal as "deducedX", but vertically int playerDrawY = listOfCharacters.get(0).getY(); int deducedY = 0; if (listOfCharacters.get(0).currentRow() - visibleRows / 2 >= 0) { playerDrawY = visibleRows / 2 * TILE_SIZE; map_draw_row = listOfCharacters.get(0).currentRow() - visibleRows / 2; deducedY = listOfCharacters.get(0).getYRow(); } int max_cols = visibleCols + map_draw_col; if (max_cols >= map.getCols()) { max_cols = map.getCols() - 1; deducedX = 0; map_draw_col = max_cols - visibleCols + 1; playerDrawX = listOfCharacters.get(0).getX() - map_draw_col * TILE_SIZE; } int max_rows = visibleRows + map_draw_row; if (max_rows >= map.getRows()) { max_rows = map.getRows() - 1; deducedY = 0; map_draw_row = max_rows - visibleRows + 1; playerDrawY = listOfCharacters.get(0).getY() - map_draw_row * TILE_SIZE; } //map_draw_row and map_draw_col representes the coordinate of the upper left tile on the screen //iterate through all the tiles on screen and draw them - this is what consumes most of the CPU for (int col = map_draw_col; col <= max_cols; col++) { for (int row = map_draw_row; row <= max_rows; row++) { Tile[] tiles = map.getTiles(col, row); for(int layer = 0; layer < tiles.length; layer++){ Tile currentTile = tiles[layer]; boolean shouldDraw = true; //I only draw the tile if it exists and is not empty (id=-1) if(currentTile != null && currentTile.getId() >= 0){ //The layers above 1 can be draw behing or infront of the player according to where it's standing if(layer > 1 && currentTile.getId() >= 0){ if(playerBehind(col, row, layer, listOfCharacters.get(0))){ behinds.get(0).add(new int[]{col, row}); //the tiles that are infront of the player wont be draw right now shouldDraw = false; } } if(shouldDraw){ g2d.drawImage( tiles[layer].getImage(), (col-map_draw_col)*TILE_SIZE - deducedX + xAdjust, (row-map_draw_row)*TILE_SIZE - deducedY + yAdjust, null); } } } } } } There's some more code in this method but nothing relevant to this question. Basically, the biggest problem is that I iterate over around 5000 tiles (in this specific resolution) 60 times each second. I thought about rendering the visible portion of the map once and storing it into a BufferedImage and when the player moved move the whole image the same amount but to the opposite side and then drawn the tiles that appeared on the screen, but if I do it like that, I wont be able to have animated tiles (at least I think). That being said, any suggestions?

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• Office 2010 Professional Plus (Top 10 reasons to upgrade)

  - by mbcrump

  Being a huge nerd, I decided that I would go ahead and upgrade to the latest and greatest office. That being, Office 2010 Professional Plus. The biggest concern that I had was loosing all my mail settings from Outlook 2007. Thankfully, it upgrade gracefully and worked like a charm. So lets start this top 10 list. 1) You can upgrade without fear of loosing all your stuff! As you can tell by the screenshot below, you can select what you want to do. I selected to remove all previous versions.    2) Outlook conversations: Just like GMail, you can now group emails by conversations. This is simply awesome and a must have. 3) The ability to ignore conversations. If you are on a email thread that has nothing to do with you. Simply “ignore” the conversation and all emails go into the deleted folder. 4) Quick Steps, do you send an email to the same team member or group constantly. With quick steps, its just one click away. 5) Spell check in the Subject line! 6)  Easier Screenshots, built in just click the button. No more ALT-Printscreen for those that are not aware of the awesome SnagIT 10 that's out. 7) Open in protected view. When you open a document from an email attachment, it lets you know the file may be unsafe. You can click a button to enable editing. This is great for preventing macros.       8) Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell. The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet. 9) Contact actions. If you hover over a name in the form or fields on an email, you get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on the person such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call. 10) Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu – I love the jumplist. I don’t know how much that I would actually use it but it just rocks.

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• Link instead of Attaching

  - by Daniel Moth

  With email storage not being an issue in many companies (I think I currently have 25GB of storage on my email account, I don’t even think about storage), this encourages bad behaviors such as liberally attaching office documents to emails instead of sharing a link to the document in SharePoint or SkyDrive or some file share etc. Attaching a file admittedly has its usage scenarios too, but it should not be the default. I thought I'd list the reasons why sharing a link can be better than attaching files directly. In no particular order: Better Review. It allows multiple recipients to review the file and their comments are aggregated into a single document. The alternative is everyone having to detach the document, add their comments, then send back to you, and then you have to collate. Wirth the alternative, you also potentially miss out on recipients reading comments from other recipients. Always up to date. The attachment becomes a fork instead of an always up to date document. For example, you send the email on Thursday, I only open it on Tuesday: between those days you could have made updates that now I am missing because you decided to share a link instead of an attachment. Better bookmarking. When I need to find that document you shared, you are forcing me to search through my email (I may not even be running outlook), instead of opening the link which I have bookmarked in my browser or my collection of links in my OneNote or from the recent/pinned links of the office app on my task bar, etc. Can control access. If someone accidentally or naively forwards your link to someone outside your group/org who you’d prefer not to have access to it, the location of the document can be protected with specific access control. Can add more recipients. If someone adds people to the email thread in outlook, your attachment doesn't get re-attached - instead, the person added is left without the attachment unless someone remembers to re-attach it. If it was a link, they are immediately caught up without further actions. Enable Discovery. If you put it on a share, I may be able to discover other cool stuff that lives alongside that document. Save on storage. So this doesn't apply to me given my opening statement, but if in your company you do have such limitations, attaching files eats up storage on all recipients accounts and will also get "lost" when those people archive email (and lose completely at some point if they follow the company retention policy). Like I said, attachments do have their place, but they should be an explicit choice for explicit reasons rather than the default. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Is is possible to get a patch included in the current release? If so, how?

  - by Oli

  So a while back I reported a bug in Compiz's Place Window plugin. It's a fairly major regression for people affected by it: mainly those using Gnome-Fallback, judging by the reports. A patch surfaced a short time later. I created a PPA for testing and everybody involved so far is reporting the issues are fixed. It even fixes another bug. I've done testing with a standard Unity desktop and can say (for my testing) no adverse effects were visible. I want to get this pushed to Ubuntu right now for two main reasons: I'm selfish. I don't want to need to update my PPA every time a new version of Compiz is pushed to 12.04. I don't want Ubuntu users seeing their windows flying around because of a silly little bug. I want this patch pushed to Ubuntu's version of Compiz as soon as possible, so we can mark these bugs fixed and move on with our lives. Whose leg do I have to hump to get this pulled into Ubuntu right now? I don't maintain this project and it's an upstream thing but it's fairly integral to Ubuntu. I could go to Compiz but I imagine that if they accept the patch, it'll be months (at least a release) before it's anywhere near Ubuntu. And when I do find the right person, how can I make the process as slick as possible for them? I want them to see my request, go "Yup, that all looks great, done" and that be it. I don't want seventeen rounds of emails addressing aspects of the patch. More importantly, I don't want to waste their time either. And what do I have to provide them? My packaging skills are... lamentable. This was my first attempt at patching a package for redistribution so I've probably made every single packaging error known to man. Will they be happy with the original patch (so they can apply it themselves) or should I repackage things so the diff/changelog is a little cleaner (it took me a few goes and the versioning is all over the place). Note: This question is about Compiz but I'd prefer if answers could address other styles of package too so we have an authoritative and comprehensive thread of how to get things fixed.

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• The Problem Should Define the Process, Not the Tool

  - by thatjeffsmith

  All around awesome tool, but not the only gadget in your toolbox.I’m stepping down from my SQL Developer pulpit today and standing up on my philosophical soap box. I’m frequently asked to help folks transition from one set of database tools over to Oracle SQL Developer, which I’m MORE than happy to do. But, I’m not looking to simply change the way people interact with Oracle database. What I care about is your productivity. Is there a faster, more efficient way for you to connect the dots, get from A to B, or just get home to your kids or to the pub for happy hour? If you have defined a business process around a specific tool, what happens when that tool ‘goes away?’ Does the business stop? No, you feel immediate pain until you are able to re-implement the process using another mechanism. Where I get confused, or even frustrated, is when someone asks me to redesign our tool to match their problem. Tools are just tools. Saying you ‘can’t load your data anymore because XYZ’ isn’t valid when you could easily do that same task via SQL*Loader, Create Table As Selects, or 9 other different mechanisms. Sometimes changes brings opportunity for improvement in the process. Don’t be afraid to step back and re-evaluate a problem with a fresh set of eyes. Just trying to replicate your process in another tool exactly as it was done in the ‘old tool’ doesn’t always make sense. Quick sidebar: scheduling a Windows program to kick off thousands if not millions of table inserts from Excel versus using a ‘proper’ server process using SQL*Loader and or external tables means sacrificing scalability and reliability for convenience. Don’t let old habits blind you to new solutions and possibilities. Of couse I’m not going to sit here and say that our tools aren’t deficient in some areas or can’t be improved upon. But I bet if we work together we can find something that’s not only better for the business, but is also better for you. What do you ‘miss’ since you’ve started using SQL Developer as your primary Oracle database tools? I’d love to start a thread here and share ideas on how we can better serve you and your organizations needs. The end solution might not look exactly what you have in mind starting out, but I had no idea I’d be a Product Manager when I started college either What can you no longer ‘do’ since you picked up SQL Developer? What hurts more than it should? What keeps you from being great versus just good?

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