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• MAXDOP in SQL Azure

  - by Herve Roggero

  In my search of better understanding the scalability options of SQL Azure I stumbled on an interesting aspect: Query Hints in SQL Azure. More specifically, the MAXDOP hint. A few years ago I did a lot of analysis on this query hint (see article on SQL Server Central:  http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Configuring/managingmaxdegreeofparallelism/1029/).  Here is a quick synopsis of MAXDOP: It is a query hint you use when issuing a SQL statement that provides you control with how many processors SQL Server will use to execute the query. For complex queries with lots of I/O requirements, more CPUs can mean faster parallel searches. However the impact can be drastic on other running threads/processes. If your query takes all available processors at 100% for 5 minutes... guess what... nothing else works. The bottom line is that more is not always better. The use of MAXDOP is more art than science... and a whole lot of testing; it depends on two things: the underlying hardware architecture and the application design. So there isn't a magic number that will work for everyone... except 1... :) Let me explain. The rules of engagements are different. SQL Azure is about sharing. Yep... you are forced to nice with your neighbors.  To achieve this goal SQL Azure sets the MAXDOP to 1 by default, and ignores the use of the MAXDOP hint altogether. That means that all you queries will use one and only one processor.  It really isn't such a bad thing however. Keep in mind that in some of the largest SQL Server implementations MAXDOP is usually also set to 1. It is a well known configuration setting for large scale implementations. The reason is precisely to prevent rogue statements (like a SELECT * FROM HISTORY) from bringing down your systems (like a report that should have been running on a different in the first place) and to avoid the overhead generated by executing too many parallel queries that could cause internal memory management nightmares to the host Operating System. Is summary, forcing the MAXDOP to 1 in SQL Azure makes sense; it ensures that your database will continue to function normally even if one of the other tenants on the same server is running massive queries that would otherwise bring you down. Last but not least, keep in mind as well that when you test your database code for performance on-premise, make sure to set the DOP to 1 on your SQL Server databases to simulate SQL Azure conditions.

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• Getting Started With Sinatra

  - by Liam McLennan

  Sinatra is a Ruby DSL for building web applications. It is distinguished from its peers by its minimalism. Here is hello world in Sinatra: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/hi' do "Hello World!" end A haml view is rendered by: def '/' haml :name_of_your_view end Haml is also new to me. It is a ruby-based view engine that uses significant white space to avoid having to close tags. A hello world web page in haml might look like: %html %head %title Hello World %body %div Hello World You see how the structure is communicated using indentation instead of opening and closing tags. It makes views more concise and easier to read. Based on my syntax highlighter for Gherkin I have started to build a sinatra web application that publishes syntax highlighted gherkin feature files. I have found that there is a need to have features online so that customers can access them, and so that they can be linked to project management tools like Jira, Mingle, trac etc. The first thing I want my application to be able to do is display a list of the features that it knows about. This will happen when a user requests the root of the application. Here is my sinatra handler: get '/' do feature_service = Finding::FeatureService.new(Finding::FeatureFileFinder.new, Finding::FeatureReader.new) @features = feature_service.features(settings.feature_path, settings.feature_extensions) haml :index end The handler and the view are in the same scope so the @features variable will be available in the view. This is the same way that rails passes data between actions and views. The view to render the result is: %h2 Features %ul - @features.each do |feature| %li %a{:href => "/feature/#{feature.name}"}= feature.name Clearly this is not a complete web page. I am using a layout to provide the basic html page structure. This view renders an <li> for each feature, with a link to /feature/#{feature.name}. Here is what the page looks like: When the user clicks on one of the links I want to display the contents of that feature file. The required handler is: get '/feature/:feature' do @feature_name = params[:feature] feature_service = Finding::FeatureService.new(Finding::FeatureFileFinder.new, Finding::FeatureReader.new) # TODO replace with feature_service.feature(name) @feature = feature_service.features(settings.feature_path, settings.feature_extensions).find do |feature| feature.name == @feature_name end haml :feature end and the view: %h2= @feature.name %pre{:class => "brush: gherkin"}= @feature.description %div= partial :_back_to_index %script{:type => "text/javascript", :src => "/scripts/shCore.js"} %script{:type => "text/javascript", :src => "/scripts/shBrushGherkin.js"} %script{:type => "text/javascript" } SyntaxHighlighter.all(); Now when I click on the Search link I get a nicely formatted feature file: If you would like see the full source it is available on bitbucket.

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• Emoti-phrases

  - by Tony Davis

  Surely the next radical step in the development of User-interface design is for applications to react appropriately to the rising tide of bewilderment, frustration or antipathy of the users. When an application understands that rapport is lost, it should respond accordingly. When we, for example, become confused by an unforgiving interface, shouldn't there be a way of signalling our bewilderment and having the application respond appropriately? There is surprisingly little in the current interface standards that would help. If we're getting frustrated with an unresponsive application, perhaps we could let it know of our increasing irritation by means of an "I'm getting angry and exasperated" slider. Although, by 'responding appropriately', I don't include playing a "we are experiencing unusually heavy traffic: your application usage is important to us" message, accompanied by calming muzak. When confronted with a tide of wizards, 'are you sure?' messages, or page-after-page of tiresome and barely-relevant options, how one yearns for a handy 'JFDI' (Just Flaming Do It) button. One click and the application miraculously desists with its annoying questions and just gets on with the job, using the defaults, or whatever we selected last time. Much more satisfying, and more direct to most developers and DBAs, however, would be the facility to communicate to the application via a twitter-style input field, or via parameters to command-line applications ("I don't want a wide-ranging debate with you; just open the bl**dy PDF!" or, or "Don't forget which of us has the close button"). Although to avoid too much cultural-dependence, perhaps we should take the lead from emoticons, and use a set of standardized emoti-phrases such as 'sez you', 'huh?', 'Pshaw!', or 'meh', which could be used to vent a range of feelings in any given application, whether it be SQL Server stubbornly refusing to give us the result we are expecting, or when an online-survey is getting too personal. Or a 'Lingua Glaswegia' perhaps: 'Atsabelter' ("very good") 'Atspish' ("must try harder") 'AnThenYerArsFellAff ' ("I don't quite trust these results") 'BileYerHeid' or 'ShutYerGub' ("please stop these inane questions") There would, of course, have to be an ANSI standards body to define the phrases that were acceptable. Presumably, there would be a tussle amongst the different international standards organizations. Meanwhile Oracle, Microsoft and Apple would each release non-standard extensions. Time then, surely, to plant emoti-phrases on the lot of them and develop a user-driven consensus. Send us your suggestions! The best one will win an iPod nano! Cheers! Tony.

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• The softer side of BPM

  - by [email protected]

  BPM and RTD are great complementary technologies that together provide a much higher benefit than each of them separately. BPM covers the need for automating processes, making sure that there is uniformity, that rules and regulations are complied with and that the process runs smoothly and quickly processes the units flowing through it. By nature, this automation and unification can lead to a stricter, less flexible process. To avoid this problem it is common to encounter process definition that include multiple conditional branches and human input to help direct processing in the direction that best applies to the current situation. This is where RTD comes into play. The selection of branches and conditions and the optimization of decisions is better left in the hands of a system that can measure the results of its decisions in a closed loop fashion and make decisions based on the empirical knowledge accumulated through observing the running of the process.When designing a business process there are key places in which it may be beneficial to introduce RTD decisions. These are:Thresholds - whenever a threshold is used to determine the processing of a unit, there may be an opportunity to make the threshold "softer" by introducing an RTD decision based on predicted results. For example an insurance company process may have a total claim threshold to initiate an investigation. Instead of having that threshold, RTD could be used to help determine what claims to investigate based on the likelihood they are fraudulent, cost of investigation and effect on processing time.Human decisions - sometimes a process will let the human participants make decisions of flow. For example, a call center process may leave the escalation decision to the agent. While this has flexibility, it may produce undesired results and asymetry in customer treatment that is not based on objective functions but subjective reasoning by the agent. Instead, an RTD decision may be introduced to recommend escalation or other kinds of treatments.Content Selection - a process may include the use of messaging with customers. The selection of the most appropriate message to the customer given the content can be optimized with RTD.A/B Testing - a process may have optional paths for which it is not clear what populations they work better for. Rather than making the arbitrary selection or selection by committee of the option deeped the best, RTD can be introduced to dynamically determine the best path for each unit.In summary, RTD can be used to make BPM based process automation more dynamic and adaptable to the different situations encountered in processing. Effectively making the automation softer, less rigid in its processing.

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• Programming doesn&rsquo;t have to be Magic

  - by Wes McClure

  In the show LOST, the Swan Station had a button that “had to be pushed” every 100 minutes to avoid disaster.  Several characters in the show took it upon themselves to have faith and religiously push the button, resetting the clock and averting the unknown “disaster”.  There are striking similarities in this story to the code we write every day.  Here are some common ones that I encounter: “I don’t know what it does but the application doesn’t work without it” “I added that code because I saw it in other similar places, I didn’t understand it, but thought it was necessary.” (for consistency, or to make things “work”) “An error message recommended it” “I copied that code” (and didn’t look at what it was doing) “It was suggested in a forum online and it fixed my problem so I left it” In all of these cases we haven’t done our due diligence to understand what the code we are writing is actually doing.  In the rush to get things done it seems like we’re willing to push any button (add any line of code) just to get our desired result and move on.  All of the above explanations are common things we encounter, and are valid ways to work through a problem we have, but when we find a solution to a task we are working on (whether a bug or a feature), we should take a moment to reflect on what we don’t understand.  Remove what isn’t necessary, comprehend and simplify what is.  Why is it detrimental to commit code we don’t understand? Perpetuates unnecessary code If you copy code that isn’t necessary, someone else is more likely to do so, especially peers Perpetuates tech debt Adding unnecessary code leads to extra code that must be understood, maintained and eventually cleaned up in longer lived projects Tech debt begets tech debt as other developers copy or use this code as guidelines in similar situations Increases maintenance How do we know the code is simplified if we don’t understand it? Perpetuates a lack of ownership Makes it seem ok to commit anything so long as it “gets the job done” Perpetuates the notion that programming is magic If we don’t take the time to understand every line of code we add, then we are contributing to the notion that it is simply enough to make the code work, regardless of how. TLDR Don’t commit code that you don’t understand, take the time to understand it, simplify it and then commit it!

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• Functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Also, I asked myself if my impression is just plainly wrong due to lack of knowledge. E.g., do C# and C++11 support FP as extensively as, say, Scala or Caml do? In this case, my question would be simply non-existent. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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• Do I suffer from encapsulation overuse?

  - by Florenc

  I have noticed something in my code in various projects that seems like code smell to me and something bad to do, but I can't deal with it. While trying to write "clean code" I tend to over-use private methods in order to make my code easier to read. The problem is that the code is indeed cleaner but it's also more difficult to test (yeah I know I can test private methods...) and in general it seems a bad habit to me. Here's an example of a class that reads some data from a .csv file and returns a group of customers (another object with various fields and attributes). public class GroupOfCustomersImporter { //... Call fields .... public GroupOfCustomersImporter(String filePath) { this.filePath = filePath; customers = new HashSet<Customer>(); createCSVReader(); read(); constructTTRP_Instance(); } private void createCSVReader() { //.... } private void read() { //.... Reades the file and initializes the class attributes } private void readFirstLine(String[] inputLine) { //.... Method used by the read() method } private void readSecondLine(String[] inputLine) { //.... Method used by the read() method } private void readCustomerLine(String[] inputLine) { //.... Method used by the read() method } private void constructGroupOfCustomers() { //this.groupOfCustomers = new GroupOfCustomers(**attributes of the class**); } public GroupOfCustomers getConstructedGroupOfCustomers() { return this.GroupOfCustomers; } } As you can see the class has only a constructor which calls some private methods to get the job done, I know that's not a good practice not a good practice in general but I prefer to encapsulate all the functionality in the class instead of making the methods public in which case a client should work this way: GroupOfCustomersImporter importer = new GroupOfCustomersImporter(filepath) importer.createCSVReader(); read(); GroupOfCustomer group = constructGoupOfCustomerInstance(); I prefer this because I don't want to put useless lines of code in the client's side code bothering the client class with implementation details. So, Is this actually a bad habit? If yes, how can I avoid it? Please note that the above is just a simple example. Imagine the same situation happening in something a little bit more complex.

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• SQLAuthority News – Android Efficiency Tips and Tricks – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  I use my phone for lots of things.  I use it mainly to replace my tablet – I can e-mail, take and edit photos, and do almost everything I can do on a laptop with this phone.  And I am sure that there are many of you out there just like me.  I personally have a Galaxy S3, which uses the Android operating system, and I have decided to feature it as the third installment of my Technology Tips and Tricks series. 1) Shortcut to your favorite contacts on home screen Access your most-called contacts easily from your home screen by holding your finger on any empty spot on the home screen.  A menu will pop up that allows you to choose Shortcuts, and Contact.  You can scroll through your contact list and then just tap on the name of the person you want to be able to dial with a single click. 2) Keep track of your data usage Yes, we all should keep a close eye on our data usage, because it is very easy to go over our limits and then end up with a giant bill at the end of the month.  Never get surprised when you open that mobile phone envelope again.  Go to Settings, then Data Usage, and you can find a quick rundown of your usage, how much data each app uses, and you can even set alarms to let you know when you are nearing the limits.   Better yet, you can set the phone to stop using data when it reaches a certain limit. 3) Bring back Good Grammar We often hear proclamations about the downfall of written language, and how texting abbreviations, misspellings, and lack of punctuation are the root of all evil.  Well, we can show all those doomsdayers that all is not lost by bringing punctuation back to texting.  Usually we leave it off when we text because it takes too long to get to the screen with all the punctuation options.  But now you can hold down the period (or “full stop”) button and a list of all the commonly-used punctuation marks will pop right up. 4) Apps, Apps, Apps and Apps And finally, I cannot end an article about smart phones without including a list of my favorite apps.  Here are a list of my Top 10 Applications on my Android (not counting social media apps). Advanced Task Killer – Keeps my phone snappy by closing un-necessary apps WhatsApp - my favorite alternate to Text SMS Flipboard - my ‘timepass’ moments Skype – keeps me close to friends and family GoogleMaps - I am never lost because of this one thing Amazon Kindle – Books my best friends DropBox - My data always safe Pluralsight Player – Learning never stops for me Samsung Kies Air – Connecting Phone to Computer Chrome – Replacing default browser I have not included any social media applications in the above list, but you can be sure that I am linked to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Android, Personal Technology

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• I spy a Live Framework portal

  - by jamiet

  Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Python PyBluez loses Bluetooth connection after a while

  - by Travis G.

  I am using Python to write a simple serial Bluetooth script that sends information about my computer stats periodically. The receiving device is a Sparkfun BlueSmirf Silver. The problem is that, after the script runs for a few minutes, it stops sending packets to the receiver and fails with the error: (11, 'Resource temporarily unavailable') Noticing that this inevitably happens, I added some code to automatically try to reopen the connection. However, then I get: Could not connect: (16, 'Device or resource busy') Am I doing something wrong with the connection? Do I need to occasionally reopen the socket? I'm not sure how to recover from this type of error. I understand that sometimes the port will be busy and a write operation is deferred to avoid blocking other processes, but I wouldn't expect the connection to fail so regularly. Any thoughts? Here is the script: import psutil import serial import string import time import bluetooth sampleTime = 1 numSamples = 5 lastTemp = 0 TEMP_CHAR = 't' USAGE_CHAR = 'u' SENSOR_NAME = 'TC0D' #gauges = serial.Serial() #gauges.port = '/dev/rfcomm0' #gauges.baudrate = 9600 #gauges.parity = 'N' #gauges.writeTimeout = 0 #gauges.open() filename = '/sys/bus/platform/devices/applesmc.768/temp2_input' def parseSensorsOutputLinux(output): return int(round(float(output) / 1000)) def connect(): while(True): try: gaugeSocket = bluetooth.BluetoothSocket(bluetooth.RFCOMM) gaugeSocket.connect(('00:06:66:42:22:96', 1)) break; except bluetooth.btcommon.BluetoothError as error: print "Could not connect: ", error, "; Retrying in 5s..." time.sleep(5) return gaugeSocket; gaugeSocket = connect() while(1): usage = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=sampleTime) sensorFile = open(filename) temp = parseSensorsOutputLinux(sensorFile.read()) try: #gauges.write(USAGE_CHAR) gaugeSocket.send(USAGE_CHAR) #gauges.write(chr(int(usage))) #write the first byte gaugeSocket.send(chr(int(usage))) #print("Wrote usage: " + str(int(usage))) #gauges.write(TEMP_CHAR) gaugeSocket.send(TEMP_CHAR) #gauges.write(chr(temp)) gaugeSocket.send(chr(temp)) #print("Wrote temp: " + str(temp)) except bluetooth.btcommon.BluetoothError as error: print "Caught BluetoothError: ", error time.sleep(5) gaugeSocket = connect() pass gaugeSocket.close() EDIT: I should add that this code connects fine after I power-cycle the receiver and start the script. However, it fails after the first exception until I restart the receiver. P.S. This is related to my recent question, Why is /dev/rfcomm0 giving PySerial problems?, but that was more about PySerial specifically with rfcomm0. Here I am asking about general rfcomm etiquette.

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• Using MAC Authentication for simple Web API’s consumption

  - by cibrax

  For simple scenarios of Web API consumption where identity delegation is not required, traditional http authentication schemas such as basic, certificates or digest are the most used nowadays. All these schemas rely on sending the caller credentials or some representation of it in every request message as part of the Authorization header, so they are prone to suffer phishing attacks if they are not correctly secured at transport level with https. In addition, most client applications typically authenticate two different things, the caller application and the user consuming the API on behalf of that application. For most cases, the schema is simplified by using a single set of username and password for authenticating both, making necessary to store those credentials temporally somewhere in memory. The true is that you can use two different identities, one for the user running the application, which you might authenticate just once during the first call when the application is initialized, and another identity for the application itself that you use on every call. Some cloud vendors like Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services have adopted an schema to authenticate the caller application based on a Message Authentication Code (MAC) generated with a symmetric algorithm using a key known by the two parties, the caller and the Web API. The caller must include a MAC as part of the Authorization header created from different pieces of information in the request message such as the address, the host, and some other headers. The Web API can authenticate the caller by using the key associated to it and validating the attached MAC in the request message. In that way, no credentials are sent as part of the request message, so there is no way an attacker to intercept the message and get access to those credentials. Anyways, this schema also suffers from some deficiencies that can generate attacks. For example, brute force can be still used to infer the key used for generating the MAC, and impersonate the original caller. This can be mitigated by renewing keys in a relative short period of time. This schema as any other can be complemented with transport security. Eran Rammer, one of the brains behind OAuth, has recently published an specification of a protocol based on MAC for Http authentication called Hawk. The initial version of the spec is available here. A curious fact is that the specification per se does not exist, and the specification itself is the code that Eran initially wrote using node.js. In that implementation, you can associate a key to an user, so once the MAC has been verified on the Web API, the user can be inferred from that key. Also a timestamp is used to avoid replay attacks. As a pet project, I decided to port that code to .NET using ASP.NET Web API, which is available also in github under https://github.com/pcibraro/hawknet Enjoy!.

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• Appropriate response when client empowered with CMS destroys content to his own will

  - by dukeofgaming

  So, I just recently closed a website project that pretty much was The Oatmeals' Design Hell, but with content. The client loved the site at the beginning but started getting other people involved and mercilessly bombarding us with their opinions. We served a carefully thought content strategy (which the client approved) and extremely curated copywriting that took us four months after at least 5 requirement changes (new content, new objectives for the business, changed offerings, new mindfaps, etc.) that required us to rewrite the content about 3 times. The client never gave timely feedback even though we kept the process open for him and his people to see (content being developed transparently in Google Docs). Near the end of the project he still wanted to make changes but wanted us to finish already (there are not enough words in the world to even try to make sense of this). So I explained to him the obvious implications of the never-ending requirement changes and advised him to take the time to gather his thoughts with his own team and see the new content introduced as a new content maintenance project. He happily accepted, but on the day of training/delivery things went very wrong and we have no idea why. The client didn't even allow the site to be out for a week with the content we developed for him and quickly replaced us with a Joomla savvy intern so that he completely destroy the content with shallow, unstructured, tasteless and plain wordsmithing (and I'm not even being visceral). Worst insult of all, he revoked our access from his server and the deployed CMS not even having passed 10 minutes of being given his administrator account (we realized the day after that he did it in our own office, the nerve!). Everybody involved in the team is enraged and insulted. I never want to see this happen again. So, to try to make sense of this situation and avoid it in the future with new clients I have two concrete questions: Is there even an appropriate course of action with a client like this?, or is he just not worth the trouble of analyzing (blindly hoping this never repeats again). In the exercise to try and blame ourselves instead of the client and take this as a lesson of... something, how should we set expectations for new clients about the working terms, process and final product so that they are discouraged from mauling the content to their own contempt once they get the codes to the nukes (access to the CMS)?

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• Silverlight Cream for June 28, 2011 -- #1112

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: WindowsPhoneGeek, John Papa, Mike Taulty, Erno de Weerd, Stephen Price, Chris Rouw, Peter Kuhn, Damian Schenkelman, Michael Washington, and Manas Patnaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Binding to View Model properties in Data Templates. The RootBinding Markup Extension" Damian Schenkelman WP7: "Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 3" Chris Rouw LightSwitch: "Saving Files To File System With LightSwitch (Uploading Files)" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Steve Wortham announced a change to his XilverlightXAP.com site... they're now accepting XAML illustrations: Introducing XAML Illustrations, Increased Payouts to Contributors, and More Amid all the discussions that I've tried to avoid, Michael Washinton is Betting The House On LightSwitch From SilverlightCream.com: Dynamically updating a data bound LongListSelector in Windows Phone WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is on using the LongListSelector from the Toolkit and dynamically updating it with data... detailed guidelines and plenty of pictures and code as always. Silverlight TV 77: Exploring 3D with Aaron Oneal John Papa has Silverlight TV number 77 up and is chatting with Aaron Oneal, program manager of the Silverlight 3D efforts... too cool. Silverlight WebBrowser Control for Offline Apps (Part 2) Mike Taulty wrote this post in Silverlight 5 Beta, but says it should be fine in 4... a continuation of his HTML Content display using the WebBrowser control while offline Windows Phone 7: Databinding and the Pivot Control Erno de Weerd discusses the Pivot control in WP7 based on his attempts to use it in an app. Required Attribute on an Entity Stephen Price has a new post at XAML Source... first is this one on setting the required attribute and the troubles you can get into if it's not set correctly Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 3 Chris Rouw has Part 3 of his series on Storing files in SQL Server using FILESTREAM Storage in SQL Server 2008 and Silverlight... this time he's viewing files stored in the FILESTREAM from the LOB app. Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599 (Part 4) Peter Kuhn has Part 4 of his series on getting ready for the WP7 exam up at SilverlightShow... the date is coming up soon... are you ready? Binding to View Model properties in Data Templates. The RootBinding Markup Extension Damian Schenkelman has a Silverlight 5 Beta post up... digging into the XAML Markup Extensions and popping out a RootBindingExtensionthat helps bind to a property in a view model from a DataTemplate. Saving Files To File System With LightSwitch (Uploading Files) Michael Washington has a cool tutorial up on his new LightSwitch Help Website... File Upload to a server file system using LightSwitch, plus a project to download... good stuff! Microsoft Media Platform (MMPPF): Player Framework for Silverlight Manas Patnaik's latest post is about the Media Player Project... some of the history of media with Silvelight and how to go about using the Media Player Project bits Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Hello World - My Name is Christian Finn and I'm a WebCenter Evangelist

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Good Morning World! I'd like to introduce a new member of the Oracle WebCenter Team, Christian Finn. We decided to let him do his own intros today. Look for his guest posts next week and he'll be a frequent contributor to WebCenter blog and voice of the community. Hello (Oracle) World! Hi everyone, my name is Christian Finn. It’s a coder’s tradition to have “hello world” be the first output from a new program or in a new language. While I have left my coding days far behind, it still seems fitting to start my new role here at Oracle by saying hello to all of you—our customers, partners and my colleagues. So by way of introduction, a little background about me. I am the new senior director for evangelism on the WebCenter product management team. Not only am I new to Oracle, but the evangelism team is also brand new. Our mission is to raise the profile of Oracle in all of the markets/conversations in which WebCenter competes—social business, collaboration, portals, Internet sites, and customer/audience engagement. This is all pretty familiar turf for me because, as some of you may know, until recently I was the director of product management at Microsoft for Microsoft SharePoint Server and several other SharePoint products. And prior to that, I held management roles at Microsoft in marketing, channels, learning, and enterprise sales. Before Microsoft, I got my start in the industry as a software trainer and Lotus Notes consultant. I am incredibly excited to be joining Oracle at this time because of the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead to improve how people and businesses work. Of all the vendors offering a vision for social business, Oracle is unique in having best of breed strength in market (or coming soon) in all three critical areas: customer experience management; the middleware and back-end applications that run your business; and in the social, collaboration, and content technologies that are the connective tissue between them. Everyone else can offer one or two of the above, but not all three unified together. So it is a great time to come board and there’s a fantastic team of people hard at work on building great products for you. In the coming weeks and months you’ll be hearing much more from us. For now, we’ll kick things off with some blog posts here on the WebCenter blog. Enjoy the reads and please share your thoughts with me over Twitter on @cfinn.

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• glsl shader to allow color change of skydome ogre3d

  - by Tim

  I'm still very new to all this but learning a lot. I'm putting together an application using Ogre3d as the rendering engine. So far I've got it running, with a simple scene, a day/night cycle system which is working okay. I'm now moving on to looking at changing the color of the skydome material based on the time of day. What I've done so far is to create a struct to hold the ColourValues for the different aspects of the scene. struct todColors { Ogre::ColourValue sky; Ogre::ColourValue ambient; Ogre::ColourValue sun; }; I created an array to store all the colours todColors sceneColours [4]; I populated the array with the colours I want to use for the various times of the day. For instance DayTime (when the sun is high in the sky) sceneColours[2].sky = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].ambient = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); sceneColours[2].sun = Ogre::ColourValue(135/255, 206/255, 235/255, 255); I've got code to work out the time of the day using a float currentHours to store the current hour of the day 10.5 = 10:30 am. This updates constantly and updates the sun as required. I am then calculating the appropriate colours for the time of day when relevant using else if( currentHour >= 4 && currentHour < 7) { // Lerp from night to morning Ogre::ColourValue lerp = Ogre::Math::lerp<Ogre::ColourValue, float>(sceneColours[GT_TOD_NIGHT].sky , sceneColours[GT_TOD_MORNING].sky, (currentHour - 4) / (7 - 4)); } My original attempt to get this to work was to dynamically generate a material with the new colour and apply that material to the skydome. This, as you can probably guess... didn't go well. I know it's possible to use shaders where you can pass information such as colour to the shader from the code but I am unsure if there is an existing simple shader to change a colour like this or if I need to create one. What is involved in creating a shader and material definition that would allow me to change the colour of a material without the overheads of dynamically generating materials all the time? EDIT : I've created a glsl vertex and fragment shaders as follows. Vertex uniform vec4 newColor; void main() { gl_FrontColor = newColor; gl_Position = ftransform(); } Fragment void main() { gl_FragColor = gl_Color; } I can pass a colour to it using ShaderDesigner and it seems to work. I now need to investigate how to use it within Ogre as a material. EDIT : I created a material file like this : vertex_program colour_vs_test glsl { source test.vert default_params { param_named newColor float4 0.0 0.0 0.0 1 } } fragment_program colour_fs_glsl glsl { source test.frag } material Test/SkyColor { technique { pass { lighting off fragment_program_ref colour_fs_glsl { } vertex_program_ref colour_vs_test { } } } } In the code I have tried : Ogre::MaterialPtr material = Ogre::MaterialManager::getSingleton().getByName("Test/SkyColor"); Ogre::GpuProgramParametersSharedPtr params = material->getTechnique(0)->getPass(0)->getVertexProgramParameters(); params->setNamedConstant("newcolor", Ogre::Vector4(0.7, 0.5, 0.3, 1)); I've set that as the Skydome material which seems to work initially. I am doing the same with the code that is attempting to lerp between colours, but when I include it there, it all goes black. Seems like there is now a problem with my colour lerping.

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• How to set conditional activation to taskflows?

  - by shantala.sankeshwar(at)oracle.com

  This article describes implementing conditional activation to taskflows.Use Case Description Suppose we have a taskflow dropped as region on a page & this region is enclosed in a popup .By default when the page is loaded the respective region also gets loaded.Hence a region model needs to provide a viewId whenever one is requested.  A consequence of this is the TaskFlowRegionModel always has to initialize its task flow and execute the task flow's default activity in order to determine a viewId, even if the region is not visible on the page.This can lead to unnecessary performance overhead of executing task flow to generate viewIds for regions that are never visible. In order to increase the performance,we need to set the taskflow bindings activation property to 'conditional'.Below described is a simple usecase that shows how exactly we can set the conditional activations to taskflow bindings.Steps:1.Create an ADF Fusion web ApplicationView image 2.Create Business components for Emp tableView image3.Create a view criteria where deptno=:some_bind_variableView image4.Generate EmpViewImpl.java file & write the below code.Then expose this to client interface.    public void filterEmpRecords(Number deptNo){            // Code to filter the deptnos         ensureVariableManager().setVariableValue("some_bind_variable",  deptNo);        this.applyViewCriteria(this.getViewCriteria("EmpViewCriteria"));        this.executeQuery();       }5.Create an ADF Taskflow with page fragements & drop the above method on the taskflow6.Also drop the view activity(showEmp.jsff) .Define control flow case from the above method activity to the view activity.Set the method activity as default activityView image7.Create  main.jspx page & drop the above taskflow as region on this pageView image8.Surround the region with the dialog & surround the dialog with the popup(id is Popup1)9.Drop the commandButton on the above page & insert af:showPopupBehavior inside the commandButton:<af:commandButton text="show popup" id="cb1"><af:showPopupBehavior popupId="::Popup1"/></af:commandButton>10.Now if we execute this main page ,we will notice that the method action gets called even before the popup is launched.We can avoid this this by setting the activation property of the taskflow to conditional11.Goto the bindings of the above main page & select the taskflow binding ,set its activation property to 'conditional' & active property to Boolean value #{Somebean.popupVisible}.By default its value should be false.View image12.We need to set the above Boolean value to true only when the popup is launched.This can be achieved by inserting setPropertyListener inside the popup:<af:setPropertyListener from="true" to="#{Somebean.popupVisible}" type="popupFetch"/>13.Now if we run the page,we will notice that the method action is not called & only when we click on 'show popup' button the method action gets called.

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• How to handle "circular dependency" in dependency injection

  - by Roel

  The title says "Circular Dependency", but it is not the correct wording, because to me the design seems solid. However, consider the following scenario, where the blue parts are given from external partner, and orange is my own implementation. Also assume there is more then one ConcreteMain, but I want to use a specific one. (In reality, each class has some more dependencies, but I tried to simplify it here) I would like to instanciate all of this with Depency Injection (Unity), but I obviously get a StackOverflowException on the following code, because Runner tries to instantiate ConcreteMain, and ConcreteMain needs a Runner. IUnityContainer ioc = new UnityContainer(); ioc.RegisterType<IMain, ConcreteMain>() .RegisterType<IMainCallback, Runner>(); var runner = ioc.Resolve<Runner>(); How can I avouid this? Is there any way to structure this so that I can use it with DI? The scenario I'm doing now is setting everything up manually, but that puts a hard dependency on ConcreteMain in the class which instantiates it. This is what i'm trying to avoid (with Unity registrations in configuration). All source code below (very simplified example!); public class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { IUnityContainer ioc = new UnityContainer(); ioc.RegisterType<IMain, ConcreteMain>() .RegisterType<IMainCallback, Runner>(); var runner = ioc.Resolve<Runner>(); Console.WriteLine("invoking runner..."); runner.DoSomethingAwesome(); Console.ReadLine(); } } public class Runner : IMainCallback { private readonly IMain mainServer; public Runner(IMain mainServer) { this.mainServer = mainServer; } public void DoSomethingAwesome() { Console.WriteLine("trying to do something awesome"); mainServer.DoSomething(); } public void SomethingIsDone(object something) { Console.WriteLine("hey look, something is finally done."); } } public interface IMain { void DoSomething(); } public interface IMainCallback { void SomethingIsDone(object something); } public abstract class AbstractMain : IMain { protected readonly IMainCallback callback; protected AbstractMain(IMainCallback callback) { this.callback = callback; } public abstract void DoSomething(); } public class ConcreteMain : AbstractMain { public ConcreteMain(IMainCallback callback) : base(callback){} public override void DoSomething() { Console.WriteLine("starting to do something..."); var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>{ Thread.Sleep(5000);/*very long running task*/ }); task.ContinueWith(t => callback.SomethingIsDone(true)); } }

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• On Writing Blogs

  - by Tony Davis

  Why are so many blogs about IT so difficult to read? Over at SQLServerCentral.com, we do a special subscription-only newsletter called Database Weekly. Every other week, it is my turn to look through all the blogs, news and events that might be of relevance to people working with databases. We provide the title, with the link, and a short abstract of what you can expect to read. It is a popular service with close to a million subscribers. You might think that this is a happy and fascinating task. Sometimes, yes. If a blog comes to the point quickly, and says something both interesting and original, then it has our immediate attention. If it backs up what it says with supporting material, then it is more-or-less home and dry, featured in DBW's list. If it also takes trouble over the formatting and presentation, maybe with an illustration or two and any code well-formatted, then we are agog with joy and it is marked as a must-visit destination in our blog roll. More often, however, a task that should be fun becomes a routine chore, and the effort of trawling so many badly-written blogs is enough to make any conscientious Health & Safety officer whistle through their teeth at the risk to the editor's spiritual and psychological well-being. And yet, frustratingly, most blogs could be improved very easily. There is, I believe, a simple formula for a successful blog. First, choose a single topic that is reasonably fresh and interesting. Second, get to the point quickly; explain in the first paragraph exactly what the blog is about, and then stay on topic. In writing the first paragraph, you must picture yourself as a pilot, hearing the smooth roar of the engines as your plane gracefully takes air. Too often, however, the accompanying sound is that of the engine stuttering before the plane veers off the runway into a field, and a wheel falls off. The author meanders around the topic without getting to the point, and takes frequent off-radar diversions to talk about themselves, or the weather, or which friends have recently tagged them. This might work if you're J.D Salinger, or James Joyce, but it doesn't help a technical blog. Sometimes, the writing is so convoluted that we are entirely defeated in our quest to shoehorn its meaning into a simple summary sentence. Finally, write simply, in plain English, and in a conversational way such that you can read it out loud, and sound natural. That's it! If you could also avoid any references to The Matrix then this is a bonus but is purely personal preference. Cheers, Tony.

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• Personal Technology – Excel Tip: Comparing Excel Files

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versionsfrom SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I have been writing about Excel Tips over my blog and thought it would be great to share one interesting tips here as a guest blog here. Assume a situation where you want to compare multiple excel files. Here is a typical scenario I have encountered as a common activity. Assume you are sending an Excel file with tons of data, formulae and multiple sheets. Now you are requesting your colleague to validate the file and if required change content for correctness. After receiving the file from your colleague, now you want to know what changes were made by this person to your document. Now here is a cool new addition to Excel 2013 that can help you achieve this task. To get to this option, click the INQUIRE Tab. Incase you don’t have the INQUIRE Tab, check Options using INQUIRE blog. In that post, we discuss all the other options of INQUIRE tab. Once you are on the INQUIRE Tab, select “Compare Files” button as shown in the figure above. This brings a dialog as below. If you are on Windows 8 or Windows 7 OS, search for an application called “Spreadsheet Compare 2013”. Ultimately both the options lead us to the same application. If you are using the stand alone app, once the App initializes, click the “Compare files” options from the toolbar. Make sure to give two different Excel files as shown in the figure above. After selecting the Excel Sheets, you can see the Compare tool has a number of other options to play from. We will talk about some of them later in this post. Just below our toolbar is a colorful side-by-side comparison of both our excel sheets. We can also see the various Tab’s from each file. There is a meaning for each of our color coding which will be discussed next. As you saw above, the color coding has a meaning. For example the bottom pane lists each of the color coding and most importantly each of the changes as compared side-by-side. The detailed information shown below can be exported using the “Export Results” options from the toolbar as a separate Excel Workbook or can be copied to clipboard to be used later. The final piece of the puzzle is to show a graphical view of these differences results based on each category. We cannot drill down per se, but this is a great way to know that the maximum changes seem to be based on “Cell Formats” and then few “Calculated Values” have changed. The INQUIRE option and Spreadsheet Compare 2013 tool is part of Excel 2013. So as you explore using the new version of Excel, there are many such hidden features that are worth exploring. Do let us know if you enjoyed learning a new feature today and I hope you will play around with this feature in your day-today challenges when working with Excel files. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Excel, Personal Technology

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• Gamify your Web

  - by Isabel F. Peñuelas

  Yesterday Valencia welcomed the Gamification World Congress that I follow virtually through #GWC2012. BBVA, Iberia, Ligeresa, Axe, Wayra, ESADE, GlaxoSmithKline, Macmillan, Gamisfaction, Nomaders, Blaffin were among the companies presenting success stories on gaming. It has been proved that people remember things easily when an emotion is created. The marketing expectations around Gamification techniques have a lot to do with Neuromarketing theories. There are a lot of expectations on internal enterprise Gamification. In the public Web some sectors are taking the lead on following the trend. The Gartner Analyst Brian Burke opened another Gamification recent event in Madrid remembering that “Gamification is mostly about Engagement”, and this can be applied both to customers or employees. Gamification and Banking The experience of the Spanish Financial Group BBVA that just launched BBVA Game was also presented a week ago at the BBVA Innovation Centre during the event “Gamification & Banking: a fad or a serious business?” . One of the objectives of the BBVA Game was to double the name of registered users. “People like the efficiency of the online channel want to keep a one-to-one contact with the brand”-explained Bernardo Crespo. Another interested data coming out the BBVA presentation was that “only 20% of Spanish users –out of the total holders of Bank Accounts in the country- is familiar with the use of a Web Site to consult their bank accounts”, the project aims also to reverse this situation helping people to learn making a heavy use of the Video in the gaming context. In general Banking presenters seem to agree that Gamification techniques are helping to increase the time spent on the Web. Gamification and Health Using Gamification techniques for chronic illness rehabilitation was another topic of the World Congress. Here you can find some ideas and experiences What can games do for the health (In Spanish) I have personally started my own mental-health gaming project at http://www.lumosity.com/ Gamification in the Enterprise I really recommend Reading this excellent post of Ultan ÓBroin my Introduction to Gamification and Applications. Employee´s motivation and learning are experiencing a 360º turn and it looks than some of us will become soon the Dragon of the year instead of the Employee of the Year. Using Web 2.0 Tools for Gamification Projects  What type of tools do we need for a quick-win Gamification project? To certain extend Gamification can be considered an evolution of the participative Web. Badging, avatars, points and awards, leader boards, progress charts, virtual currencies, gifting and giving challenges and quests are common components and elements. The Web is offering new development frameworks to that purpose as this Avatar Framework from Paypal or Badgeville to include in web applications. Besides, tools to create communities around a game are required to comment, share and vote players as well as for an efficient multimedia management. Due to its entirely open architecture, its community features, and its multimedia and imaging solutions is were I see WebCenter as a tool helping brands to success. Link to Sources & Recommended Readings YouTube Video of BBVAGame presentation Where To Apply Gamification In Your Incentive Jim Calhoun Cancer Challenge Ride and Walkh For my Spanish Readers El aburrimiento es el enemigo número uno del éxito

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• The Missing Post

  - by Joe Mayo

  It’s somewhat of a mystery how the writing process can conjure up results that weren’t initially intended. Case in point is the fact that another post was planned to be in place of this one, but it never made the light of day.  This particular post started off as an introduction to a technology I had just learned, used, and wanted to share the experience with others.  The beginning was fun and demonstrated how easy it was to get started.  One of the things I’ve been pondering over time is that the Web is filled with introductions to new technologies and quick first looks, so I set out to add more depth, share lessons learned, and generally help you avoid the problems I encountered along the way; problems being a key theme of why you aren’t reading that post at this very minute.  Problems that curiously came from nowhere to thwart my good intentions. Success was sweet when using the tool for the prototypical demo scenario. The thing is, I intended the tool to accomplish a real task.  Having embarked on the path toward getting the job done, glitches began creeping into the process.  Realizing that this was all a bit new, I had patience and found a suitable work-around, but this was to be short lived. As in marching ants to a freshly laid out picnic, the problems kept coming until I had to get up and walk away.  Not to be outdone, sheer will and brute force manual intervention led to mission accomplishment.  Though I kept a positive outlook and was pleased at the final result, the process of using the tool had somewhat soured. Regardless of a less than stellar experience with the tool, I have a great deal of respect for the company that produced it and the people who built it. Perhaps I empathize for what they might feel after reading a post that details such deficiencies in their product.  Sure, if you’re in this business, you’ve got to have a thick skin; brush it off, fix the problem, and move on to greatness. But, today I feel like they’re people and are probably already aware of any issues I would seemingly reveal.  Anyone who builds a product or provides a service takes a lot of pride in what they do.  Sometimes they screw up and if their worth a dime, they make it up. I think that will happen in this case and there’s no reason why I should post information that has the potential to sound more negative than helpful.  While no one would ever notice or care either way, I’m posting something that won’t harm. Joe

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• SQL SERVER – A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement

  - by pinaldave

  For the last few weeks, I have been doing Friday Puzzles and I am really loving it. Yesterday I received a very interesting question by Navneet Chaurasia on Facebook Page. He was asked this question in one of the interview questions for job. Please read the original thread for a complete idea of the conversation. I am presenting the same question here. Puzzle Let us assume there is a single column in the table called Gender. The challenge is to write a single update statement which will flip or swap the value in the column. For example if the value in the gender column is ‘male’ swap it with ‘female’ and if the value is ‘female’ swap it with ‘male’. Here is the quick setup script for the puzzle. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE SimpleTable (ID INT, Gender VARCHAR(10)) GO INSERT INTO SimpleTable (ID, Gender) SELECT 1, 'female' UNION ALL SELECT 2, 'male' UNION ALL SELECT 3, 'male' GO SELECT * FROM SimpleTable GO The above query will return following result set. The puzzle was to write a single update column which will generate following result set. There are multiple answers to this simple puzzle. Let me show you three different ways. I am assuming that the column will have either value ‘male’ or ‘female’ only. Method 1: Using CASE Statement I believe this is going to be the most popular solution as we are all familiar with CASE Statement. UPDATE SimpleTable SET Gender = CASE Gender WHEN 'male' THEN 'female' ELSE 'male' END GO SELECT * FROM SimpleTable GO Method 2: Using REPLACE  Function I totally understand it is the not cleanest solution but it will for sure work in giving situation. UPDATE SimpleTable SET Gender = REPLACE(('fe'+Gender),'fefe','') GO SELECT * FROM SimpleTable GO Method 3: Using IIF in SQL Server 2012 If you are using SQL Server 2012 you can use IIF and get the same effect as CASE statement. UPDATE SimpleTable SET Gender = IIF(Gender = 'male', 'female', 'male') GO SELECT * FROM SimpleTable GO You can read my article series on SQL Server 2012 various functions over here. SQL SERVER – Denali – Logical Function – IIF() – A Quick Introduction SQL SERVER – Detecting Leap Year in T-SQL using SQL Server 2012 – IIF, EOMONTH and CONCAT Function Let us clean up. DROP TABLE SimpleTable GO Question to you: I came up with three simple tricks where there is a single UPDATE statement which swaps the values in the column. Do you know any other simple trick? If yes, please post here in the comments. I will pick two random winners from all the valid answers. Winners will get 1) Print Copy of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers 2) Free Learning Code for Online Video Courses I will announce the winners on coming Monday. Reference:  Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: CodeProject, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Unreal Tournament 3 vs UDK: What Should I Choose?

  - by Matt Christian

  Many people in the mod community were very excited to see the release of the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) a few months ago.  Along with generating excitement into a very dedicated community, it also introduced many new modders into a flourishing area of indie-development.  However, since UDK is free, most beginners jump right into UDK, which is OK though you might just benefit more from purchasing a shelf-copy of Unreal Tournament 3. UDK UDK is a free full version of UnrealEd (the editor environment used to create games like Gears of War 1/2, Bioshock 1/2, and of course Unreal Tournament 3).  The editor gives you all the features of the editor from the shelf-copy of the game plus some refinements in many of the tools.  (One of the first things you'll find about UnrealEd is that it's a collection of tools grouped into the same editor so it really isn't a single 'tool') Interestingly enough, Epic is allowing you to sell any game made in UDK with a few catches.  First off, you must purchase a liscense for your game (which, I THINK is aproximately $99 starting).  Secondly, you must pay 25% of all profits for the first $5,000 of your game revenue to them (about $1250).  Finally, you cannot use any of the 'media' provided in UDK for your game.  UDK provides sample meshes, textures, materials, sounds, and other sample pieces of media pulled (mostly) from Unreal Tournament 3. The final point here will really determine whether you should use UDK.  There is a very small amount of media provided in UDK for someone to go in and begin creating levels without first developing your own meshes, textures, and other media.  Sure, you can slap together a few unique levels, though you will end up finding yourself restriced to the same items over and over and over.  This is absolutely how professional game development is; you are 'given' (typically liscensed or built in-house) an engine/editor and you begin creating all the content for the game and placing it.  UDK is aimed toward those who really want to build their game content from scratch with a currently existing engine.  It is not suited for someone who would like to simply build levels and quick mods without learning external 3D programs and image editing software. Unreal Tournament 3 Unless you have a serious grudge against FPS's, Epic, or your computer sucks, there really is no reason not to own this game for PC.  You can pick it up on Steam or Amazon for around $20 brand new.  Not only are you provided with a full single-player and multiplayer game, but you are given the entire UnrealEd 3.0 including all of the content used to build UT3.  If you want to start building levels and mods quickly for UT3, you should absolutely pick up a shelf-copy. However, as off-the-shelf UT3 is a few years old now, the tools have not been updated for quite a while.  Compared to UDK, the menus are more difficult to navigate through and take more time getting used to.  Since UDK is updated almost every month, there are new inclusions to the editor that may not be in UT3 (including the future addition of 3D!).  I haven't worked enough with shelf UT3 to see if there are more features in UDK or if they both feature the same stuff in different forms, however you should remember that the Unreal Engine 3.0 has undergone numerous upgrades between it's launch and Gears of War 2 (in fact, Epic had a conference to show off what changed just between the Gears of Wars games). Since UT3 has much more core content, someone who wants to focus on level editing or modding the core UT3 game may find their needs better suited with an off-the-shelf copy of UT3.  If that level designer has a team that is generating custom assets, they may be better off with UDK. The choice is now yours...

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• Java Spotlight Episode 103: 2012 Duke Choice Award Winners

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Our annual interview with the 2012 Duke Choice Award Winners recorded live at the JavaOne 2012. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes Events Oct 13, Devoxx 4 Kids Nederlands Oct 15-17, JAX London Oct 20, Devoxx 4 Kids Français Oct 22-23, Freescale Technology Forum - Japan, Tokyo Oct 30-Nov 1, Arm TechCon, Santa Clara Oct 31, JFall, Netherlands Nov 2-3, JMagreb, Morocco Nov 13-17, Devoxx, Belgium Feature Interview Duke Choice Award Winners 2012 - Show Presentation London Java CommunityThe second user group receiving a Duke’s Choice Award this year, the London Java Community (LJC) and its users have been active in the OpenJDK, the Java Community Process (JCP) and other efforts within the global Java community. Student Nokia Developer GroupThis year’s student winner, Ram Kashyap, is the founder and president of the Nokia Student Network, and was profiled in the “The New Java Developers” feature in the March/April 2012 issue of Java Magazine. Since then, Ram has maintained a hectic pace, graduating from the People’s Education Society Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India, while working on a Java mobile startup and training students on Java ME. Jelastic, Inc.Moving existing Java applications to the cloud can be a daunting task, but startup Jelastic, Inc. offers the first all-Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables existing Java applications to be deployed in the cloud without code changes or lock-in. NATOThe first-ever Community Choice Award goes to the MASE Integrated Console Environment (MICE) in use at NATO. Built in Java on the NetBeans platform, MICE provides a high-performance visualization environment for conducting air defense and battle-space operations. DuchessRather than focus on a specific geographic area like most Java User Groups (JUGs), Duchess fosters the participation of women in the Java community worldwide. The group has more than 500 members in 60 countries, and provides a platform through which women can connect with each other and get involved in all aspects of the Java community. AgroSense ProjectImproving farming methods to feed a hungry world is the goal of AgroSense, an open source farm information management system built in Java and the NetBeans platform. AgroSense enables farmers, agribusinesses, suppliers and others to develop modular applications that will easily exchange information through a common underlying NetBeans framework. Apache Software Foundation Hadoop ProjectThe Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop project, written in Java, provides a framework for distributed processing of big data sets across clusters of computers, ranging from a few servers to thousands of machines. This harnessing of large data pools allows organizations to better understand and improve their business. Parleys.comE-learning specialist Parleys.com, based in Brussels, Belgium, uses Java technologies to bring online classes and full IT conferences to desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. Parleys.com has hosted more than 1,700 conferences—including Devoxx and JavaOne—for more than 800,000 unique visitors. Winners not presenting at JavaOne 2012 Duke Choice Awards BOF Liquid RoboticsRobotics – Liquid Robotics is an ocean data services provider whose Wave Glider technology collects information from the world’s oceans for application in government, science and commercial applications. The organization features the “father of Java” James Gosling as its chief software architect.United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesThe United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is on the front lines of crises around the world, from civil wars to natural disasters. To help facilitate its mission of humanitarian relief, the UNHCR has developed a light-client Java application on the NetBeans platform. The Level One registration tool enables the UNHCR to collect information on the number of refugees and their water, food, housing, health, and other needs in the field, and combines that with geocoding information from various sources. This enables the UNHCR to deliver the appropriate kind and amount of assistance where it is needed.

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• SQL SERVER – LOGBUFFER – Wait Type – Day 18 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  At first, I was not planning to write about this wait type. The reason was simple- I have faced this only once in my lifetime so far maybe because it is one of the top 5 wait types. I am not sure if it is a common wait type or not, but in the samples I had it really looks rare to me. From Book On-Line: LOGBUFFER Occurs when a task is waiting for space in the log buffer to store a log record. Consistently high values may indicate that the log devices cannot keep up with the amount of log being generated by the server. LOGBUFFER Explanation: The book online definition of the LOGBUFFER seems to be very accurate. On the system where I faced this wait type, the log file (LDF) was put on the local disk, and the data files (MDF, NDF) were put on SanDrives. My client then was not familiar about how the file distribution was supposed to be. Once we moved the LDF to a faster drive, this wait type disappeared. Reducing LOGBUFFER wait: There are several suggestions to reduce this wait stats: Move Transaction Log to Separate Disk from mdf and other files. (Make sure your drive where your LDF is has no IO bottleneck issues). Avoid cursor-like coding methodology and frequent commit statements. Find the most-active file based on IO stall time, as shown in the script written over here. You can also use fn_virtualfilestats to find IO-related issues using the script mentioned over here. Check the IO-related counters (PhysicalDisk:Avg.Disk Queue Length, PhysicalDisk:Disk Read Bytes/sec and PhysicalDisk :Disk Write Bytes/sec) for additional details. Read about them over here. If you have noticed, my suggestions for reducing the LOGBUFFER is very similar to WRITELOG. Although the procedures on reducing them are alike, I am not suggesting that LOGBUFFER and WRITELOG are same wait types. From the definition of the two, you will find their difference. However, they are both related to LOG and both of them can severely degrade the performance. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats in this blog is generic and varies from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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