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• Enjoy How-To Geek User Style Script Goodness

  - by Asian Angel

  Most people may not be aware of it but there are two user style scripts that have been created just for use with the How-To Geek website. If you are curious then join us as we look at these two scripts at work. Note: User Style Scripts & User Scripts can be added to most browsers but we are using Firefox for our examples here. The How-to Geek Wide User Style Script The first of the two scripts affects the viewing width of the website’s news content. Here you can see everything set at the normal width. When you visit the UserStyles website you will be able to view basic information about the script and see the code itself if desired. On the right side of the page is the good part though. Since we are using Firefox with Greasemonkey installed we chose the the “install as a user script option”. Notice that the script is available for other browsers as well (very nice!) Within a few moments of clicking on the “install as a user script button” you will see the following window asking confirmation for installing the script. After installing the user style script and refreshing the page it has now stretched out to fill 90% of the browser window’s area. Definitely nice! The How-To Geek – News and Comments (600px) User Style Script The second script can be very useful for anyone with the limited screen real-estate of a netbook. You can see another of the articles from here at the site viewed in a  “normal mode”. Once again you can view basic information about this particular user style script and view the code if desired. As above we have the Firefox/Greasemonkey combination at work so we installed as a user script. This is one of the great things about using Greasemonkey…it always checks with you to make certain that no unauthorized scripts are added. Once the script was installed and we refreshed the page things looked very very different. All the focus has been placed on the article itself and any comments attached to the article. For those who may be curious this is what the homepage looks like using this script. Conclusion If you have been wanting to add a little bit of “viewing spice” to your browser for the How-To Geek website then definitely pop over to the User Styles website and give these two scripts a try. Using Opera Browser? See our how-to for adding user scripts to Opera here. Links Install the How-to Geek Wide User Style Script Install the How-To Geek – News and Comments (600px) User Style Script Download the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox (Mozilla Add-ons) Download the Stylish extension for Firefox (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set Up User Scripts in Opera BrowserSet Gmail as Default Mail Client in UbuntuHide Flash Animations in Google ChromeShell Script to Upload a File to the Same Subdirectory on a Remote ServerAutomate Adding Bookmarks to del.icio.us TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition

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• Some Original Expressions

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk newsletterIn a guest editorial for the Simple-Talk Newsletter, Phil Factor wonders if we are still likely to find some more novel and unexpected ways of using the newer features of Transact SQL: or maybe in some features that have always been there! There can be a great deal of fun to be had in trying out recent features of SQL Expressions to see if  they provide new functionality.  It is surprisingly rare to find things that couldn’t be done before, but in a different   and more cumbersome way; but it is great to experiment or to read of someone else making that discovery.  One such recent feature is the ‘table value constructor’, or ‘VALUES constructor’, that managed to get into SQL Server 2008 from Standard SQL.  This allows you to create derived tables of up to 1000 rows neatly within select statements that consist of  lists of row values.  E.g. SELECT Old_Welsh, number FROM (VALUES ('Un',1),('Dou',2),('Tri',3),('Petuar',4),('Pimp',5),('Chwech',6),('Seith',7),('Wyth',8),('Nau',9),('Dec',10)) AS WelshWordsToTen (Old_Welsh, number) These values can be expressions that return single values, including, surprisingly, subqueries. You can use this device to create views, or in the USING clause of a MERGE statement. Joe Celko covered  this here and here.  It can become extraordinarily handy to use once one gets into the way of thinking in these terms, and I’ve rewritten a lot of routines to use the constructor, but the old way of using UNION can be used the same way, but is a little slower and more long-winded. The use of scalar SQL subqueries as an expression in a VALUES constructor, and then applied to a MERGE, has got me thinking. It looks very clever, but what use could one put it to? I haven’t seen anything yet that couldn’t be done almost as  simply in SQL Server 2000, but I’m hopeful that someone will come up with a way of solving a tricky problem, just in the same way that a freak of the XML syntax forever made the in-line  production of delimited lists from an expression easy, or that a weird XML pirouette could do an elegant  pivot-table rotation. It is in this sort of experimentation where the community of users can make a real contribution. The dissemination of techniques such as the Number, or Tally table, or the unconventional ways that the UPDATE statement can be used, has been rapid due to articles and blogs. However, there is plenty to be done to explore some of the less obvious features of Transact SQL. Even some of the features introduced into SQL Server 2000 are hardly well-known. Certain operations on data are still awkward to perform in Transact SQL, but we mustn’t, I think, be too ready to state that certain things can only be done in the application layer, or using a CLR routine. With the vast array of features in the product, and with the tools that surround it, I feel that there is generally a way of getting tricky things done. Or should we just stick to our lasts and push anything difficult out into procedural code? I’d love to know your views.

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• emo-framework in android move on collision of sprites with physics

  - by KaHeL

  I'm developing my first ever game for Android where I'm still learning about using of framework. To begin I made two sprites of ball where one ball is movable by dragging and another one is just standing on it's place on load. Now I've already added the collision listener for both sprites and as tested it's working properly. Now what I need to learn is on how can I add physics on both sprites where when they collide the standing sprite will move based on the physics and bounce around the screen. It would be best if you teach it to me step by step since I'm a little slow on this. Here's my nut so far: local stage = emo.Stage(); class Okay_1 { sprite = null; spriteok = null; dragStart = false; angle = 0; // Called when the stage is loaded function onLoad() { print("Level_1 is loaded!"); // Create new sprite and load 'f1.png' sprite = emo.Sprite("f1.png"); sprite.moveCenter(stage.getWindowWidth() * 0.5, stage.getWindowHeight() * 0.5); sprite.load(); spriteok = emo.Sprite("okay.png") spriteok.setWidth(100); spriteok.setHeight(100); spriteok.load(); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (spriteok.contains(100, 100)) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (spriteok.collidesWith(sprite)) { print("collides!"); } } function onMotionEvent(ev) { if (ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_DOWN) { // Moves the sprite at the position of motion event angle = sprite.getAngle(); sprite.remove(); sprite = emo.Sprite("f2.png"); sprite.load(); sprite.rotate(angle); sprite.moveCenter(ev.getX(), ev.getY()); sprite.rotate(sprite.getAngle()+10); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (sprite.contains(sprite.getWidth(), sprite.getHeight())) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (sprite.collidesWith(spriteok)) { print("collides!"); } dragStart = true; }else if (ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_MOVE) { if (dragStart) { // Moves the sprite at the position of motion event sprite.moveCenter(ev.getX(), ev.getY()); sprite.rotate(sprite.getAngle()+10); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (sprite.contains(sprite.getWidth(), sprite.getHeight())) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (sprite.collidesWith(spriteok)) { print("collides!"); } } }else if (ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_UP || ev.getAction() == MOTION_EVENT_ACTION_CANCEL) { if (dragStart) { // change block color to red dragStart = false; angle = sprite.getAngle(); sprite.remove(); sprite = emo.Sprite("f1.png"); sprite.load(); sprite.moveCenter(ev.getX(), ev.getY()); sprite.rotate(angle); // Check if the coordinate (X=100, Y=100) is inside the sprite if (sprite.contains(sprite.getWidth(), sprite.getHeight())) { print("contains!"); } // Does the sprite collides with the other sprite? if (sprite.collidesWith(spriteok)) { print("collides!"); } } } } // Called when the stage is disposed function onDispose() { sprite.remove(); // Remove the sprite print("Level_1 is disposed!"); } } function emo::onLoad() { emo.Stage().load(Okay_1()); }

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• Looking under the hood of SSRS

  - by Jim Giercyk

  SSRS is a powerful tool, but there is very little available to measure it’s performance or view the SSRS execution log or catalog in detail.  Here are a few simple queries that will give you insight to the system that you never had before.   ACTIVE REPORTS:  Have you ever seen your SQL Server performance take a nose dive due to a long-running report?  If the SPID is executing under a generic Report ID, or it is a scheduled job, you may have no way to tell which report is killing your server.  Running this query will show you which reports are executing at a given time, and WHO is executing them.   USE ReportServerNative SELECT runningjobs.computername,             runningjobs.requestname,              runningjobs.startdate,             users.username,             Datediff(s,runningjobs.startdate, Getdate()) / 60 AS    'Active Minutes' FROM runningjobs INNER JOIN users ON runningjobs.userid = users.userid ORDER BY runningjobs.startdate               SSRS CATALOG:  We have all asked “What was the last thing that changed”, or better yet, “Who in the world did that!”.  Here is a query that will show all of the reports in your SSRS catalog, when they were created and changed, and by who.           USE ReportServerNative SELECT DISTINCT catalog.PATH,                            catalog.name,                            users.username AS [Created By],                             catalog.creationdate,                            users_1.username AS [Modified By],                            catalog.modifieddate FROM catalog         INNER JOIN users ON catalog.createdbyid = users.userid  INNER JOIN users AS users_1 ON catalog.modifiedbyid = users_1.userid INNER JOIN executionlogstorage ON catalog.itemid = executionlogstorage.reportid WHERE ( catalog.name <> '' )               SSRS EXECUTION LOG:  Sometimes we need to know what was happening on the SSRS report server at a given time in the past.  This query will help you do just that.  You will need to set the timestart and timeend in the WHERE clause to suit your needs.         USE ReportServerNative SELECT catalog.name AS report,        executionlogstorage.username AS [User],        executionlogstorage.timestart,        executionlogstorage.timeend,         Datediff(mi,e.timestart,e.timeend) AS ‘Time In Minutes',        catalog.modifieddate AS [Report Last Modified],        users.username FROM   catalog  (nolock)        INNER JOIN executionlogstorage e (nolock)          ON catalog.itemid = executionlogstorage.reportid        INNER JOIN users (nolock)          ON catalog.modifiedbyid = users.userid WHERE  executionlogstorage.timestart >= Dateadd(s, -1, '03/31/2012')        AND executionlogstorage.timeend <= Dateadd(DAY, 1, '04/02/2012')      LONG RUNNING REPORTS:  This query will show the longest running reports over a given time period.  Note that the “>5” in the WHERE clause sets the report threshold at 5 minutes, so anything that ran less than 5 minutes will not appear in the result set.  Adjust the threshold and start/end times to your liking.  With this information in hand, you can better optimize your system by tweaking the longest running reports first.         USE ReportServerNative SELECT executionlogstorage.instancename,        catalog.PATH,        catalog.name,        executionlogstorage.username,        executionlogstorage.timestart,        executionlogstorage.timeend,        Datediff(mi, e.timestart, e.timeend) AS 'Minutes',        executionlogstorage.timedataretrieval,        executionlogstorage.timeprocessing,        executionlogstorage.timerendering,        executionlogstorage.[RowCount],        users_1.username        AS createdby,        CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), catalog.creationdate, 101)        AS 'Creation Date',        users.username        AS modifiedby,        CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), catalog.modifieddate, 101)        AS 'Modified Date' FROM   executionlogstorage e         INNER JOIN catalog          ON executionlogstorage.reportid = catalog.itemid        INNER JOIN users          ON catalog.modifiedbyid = users.userid        INNER JOIN users AS users_1          ON catalog.createdbyid = users_1.userid WHERE  ( e.timestart > '03/31/2012' )        AND ( e.timestart <= '04/02/2012' )        AND  Datediff(mi, e.timestart, e.timeend) > 5        AND catalog.name <> '' ORDER  BY 'Minutes' DESC        I have used these queries to build SSRS reports that I can refer to quickly, and export to Excel if I need to report or quantify my findings.  I encourage you to look at the data in the ReportServerNative database on your report server to understand the queries and create some of your own.  For instance, you may want a query to determine which reports are using which shared data sources.  Work smarter, not harder!

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• Enterprise Integration: Can Companies Afford It?

  - by Ralph Wheaton

  Each year, my company holds a global sales conference where employees and partners from around the world some together to collaborate, share knowledge and ideas and learn about future plans.  As a member of the professional services division, several of us had been asked to make a presentation, an elevator pitch in 3 minutes or less that relates to a success we have worked on or directly relates to our tag (that is, our primary technology focus).  Mine happens to be Enterprise Integration as it relates Business Intelligence.  I found it rather difficult to present that pitch in a short amount of time and had to pare it down.  At any rate, in just a little over 3 minutes, this is the presentation I submitted.  Here is a link to the full presentation video in WMV format.   Many companies today subscribe to a buy versus build mentality in an attempt to drive down costs and improve time to implementation. Sometimes this makes sense, especially as it relates to specialized software or software that performs a small number of tasks extremely well. However, if not carefully considered or planned out, this oftentimes leads to multiple disparate systems with silos of data or multiple versions of the same data. For instance, client data (contact information, addresses, phone numbers, opportunities, sales) stored in your CRM system may not play well with Accounts Receivables. Employee data may be stored across multiple systems such as HR, Time Entry and Payroll. Other data (such as member data) may not originate internally, but be provided by multiple outside sources in multiple formats. And to top it all off, some data may have to be manually entered into multiple systems to keep it all synchronized. When left to grow out of control like this, overall performance is lacking, stability is questionable and maintenance is frequent and costly. Worse yet, in many cases, this topology, this hodgepodge of data creates a reporting nightmare. Decision makers are forced to try to put together pieces of the puzzle attempting to find the information they need, wading through multiple systems to find what they think is the single version of the truth. More often than not, they find they are missing pieces, pieces that may be crucial to growing the business rather than closing the business. across applications. Master data owners are defined to establish single sources of data (such as the CRM system owns client data). Other systems subscribe to the master data and changes are replicated to subscribers as they are made. This can be one way (no changes are allowed on the subscriber systems) or bi-directional. But at all times, the master data owner is current or up to date. And all data, whether internal or external, use the same processes and methods to move data from one place to another, leveraging the same validations, lookups and transformations enterprise wide, eliminating inconsistencies and siloed data. Once implemented, an enterprise integration solution improves performance and stability by reducing the number of moving parts and eliminating inconsistent data. Overall maintenance costs are mitigated by reducing touch points or the number of places that require modification when a business rule is changed or another data element is added. Most importantly, however, now decision makers can easily extract and piece together the information they need to grow their business, improve customer satisfaction and so on. So, in implementing an enterprise integration solution, companies can position themselves for the future, allowing for easy transition to data marts, data warehousing and, ultimately, business intelligence. Along this path, companies can achieve growth in size, intelligence and complexity. Truly, the question is not can companies afford to implement an enterprise integration solution, but can they afford not to.   Ralph Wheaton Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist Microsoft Certified Professional Developer Microsoft VTS-P BizTalk, .Net

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• SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 1

  Today I had a little spare time during the morning hours and I decided that after checking MVA that I'm going to query the available course material over at Pluralsight. Wow, thanks to fantastic corporations and acquisitions there are lots of courses available. Nicely split by SharePoint version as well as particular interest group. Additionally, I found a couple of online blogs and community sites that I'm going to visit regularly during the next couple of weeks. Today's resource(s) Of course, I'm "all in" for the latest developer resources: SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 1 - Understanding the Platform and Developer Experience SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 2 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 3 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 4 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 5 SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 6 I guess, I'm going to stick to the Pluralsight library until the end of this week. We'll see... Anyway, apart from the video material I came across a couple of other websites which I'd like to list here, too. That's mainly for personal reference instead of bookmarking in the browser, I'll use my own blog for that purpose. Atkinson's SharePoint Blog Düsseldorfer Jung Doerflers SharePoint Blog SharePoint Community Absolute SharePoint The links are in no preferential order and I added them as soon as I found them. Most probably, I'm going to report about specific articles from those resources during this challenge. So, stay tuned and I try to provide more details on certain topics. Takeaway First contact with the 'real stuff' in order to get an idea about software development in Microsoft SharePoint and beyond. Unfortunately and as already expected, the marketing department over at Microsoft seemed to have nothing better to do than to invent new names and baptise literally the same product with every release. Luckily, the release cycles between versions have been three years (roughly) - 2007, 2010, and 2013. Nonetheless, there will be a lot of version-specfic issues to tackle during this learning phase. Especially, when it's about historical expressions like 'WSS'* like I had it yesterday... It's going to be exciting and demanding to catch up with roughly 6-7 years of development and changes. Okay, let's face it. * WSS stands for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 which forms the 'core engine' of SharePoint 2007. Part 1 of Andrew Connell's series on SharePoint 2013 for developers provides a brief history and overview of the various product names and their relation to the actual SharePoint version. I guess, I might create a cheat-sheet or something comparable in order to reduce the level of confusion while reading through other material: SharePoint 2007 (aka SharePoint v3 aka SharePoint 12) Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 .NET Framework 3.0, 32-bit or 64-bit OS SharePoint 2010 (aka SharePoint v4 aka SharePoint 14) Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (SPF) 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Server (SPS) 2010 .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, 64-bit OS only SharePoint 2013 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (SPF) 2013 Microsoft SharePoint Server (SPS) 2013 .NET Framework 4.5, 64-bit OS only After this quick excursion it is getting more interesting. SharePoint 2013 has a number of Development Practices and Techniques under the hood, and it will be quite a decision process depending on the task requirements to choose the correct path to go. At the moment, the following two options seem to be my future fields of operation: Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) REST API and OData syntax As part of my job assignment, I see myself developing within Visual Studio 2012/2013. Most probably the client development in C# will be using CSOM but of course I'll keep an eye on the REST API, too. JavaScript has quite a momentum since a while and it would a shame to ignore this type of opportunity and possibilities.

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• Code Contracts: validating arrays and collections

  - by DigiMortal

  Validating collections before using them is very common task when we use built-in generic types for our collections. In this posting I will show you how to validate collections using code contracts. It is cool how much awful looking code you can avoid using code contracts. Failing code Let’s suppose we have method that calculates sum of all invoices in collection. We have class Invoice and one of properties it has is Sum. I don’t introduce here any complex calculations on invoices because we have another problem to solve in this topic. Here is our code. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) {     var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum);     return sum; } This method is very simple but it fails when invoices list contains at least one null. Of course, we can test if invoice is null but having nulls in lists like this is not good idea – it opens green way for different coding bugs in system. Our goal is to react to bugs ASAP at the nearest place they occur. There is one more way how to make our method fail. It happens when invoices is null. I thing it is also one common bugs during development and it even happens in production environments under some conditions that are usually hardly met. Now let’s protect our little calculation method with code contracts. We need two contracts: invoices cannot be null invoices cannot contain any nulls Our first contract is easy but how to write the second one? Solution: Contract.ForAll Preconditions in code are checked using Contract.Ensures method. This method takes boolean value as argument that sais if contract holds or not. There is also method Contract.ForAll that takes collection and predicate that must hold for that collection. Nice thing is ForAll returns boolean. So, we have very simple solution. public static decimal CalculateTotal(IList<Invoice> invoices) {     Contract.Requires(invoices != null);     Contract.Requires(Contract.ForAll<Invoice>(invoices, p => p != null));       var sum = invoices.Sum(p => p.Sum);     return sum; } And here are some lines of code you can use to test the contracts quickly. var invoices = new List<Invoice>(); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); invoices.Add(null); invoices.Add(new Invoice()); //CalculateTotal(null); CalculateTotal(invoices); If your code is covered with unit tests then I suggest you to write tests to check that these contracts hold for every code run. Conclusion Although it seemed at first place that checking all elements in collection may end up with for-loops that does not look so nice we were able to solve our problem nicely. ForAll method of contract class offered us simple mechanism to check collections and it does it smoothly the code-contracts-way. P.S. I suggest you also read devlicio.us blog posting Validating Collections with Code Contracts by Derik Whittaker.

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• The WaitForAll Roadshow

  - by adweigert

  OK, so I took for granted some imaginative uses of WaitForAll but lacking that, here is how I am using. First, I have a nice little class called Parallel that allows me to spin together a list of tasks (actions) and then use WaitForAll, so here it is, WaitForAll's 15 minutes of fame ... First Parallel that allows me to spin together several Action delegates to execute, well in parallel.   public static class Parallel { public static ParallelQuery Task(Action action) { return new Action[] { action }.AsParallel(); } public static ParallelQuery> Task(Action action) { return new Action[] { action }.AsParallel(); } public static ParallelQuery Task(this ParallelQuery actions, Action action) { var list = new List(actions); list.Add(action); return list.AsParallel(); } public static ParallelQuery> Task(this ParallelQuery> actions, Action action) { var list = new List>(actions); list.Add(action); return list.AsParallel(); } }   Next, this is an example usage from an app I'm working on that just is rendering some basic computer information via WMI and performance counters. The WMI calls can be expensive given the distance and link speed of some of the computers it will be trying to communicate with. This is the actual MVC action from my controller to return the data for an individual computer.  public PartialViewResult Detail(string computerName) { var computer = this.Computers.Get(computerName); var perf = Factory.GetInstance(); var detail = new ComputerDetailViewModel() { Computer = computer }; try { var work = Parallel .Task(delegate { // Win32_ComputerSystem var key = computer.Name + "_Win32_ComputerSystem"; var system = this.Cache.Get(key); if (system == null) { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { system = computer.GetWmiContext().GetInstances().Single(); } this.Cache.Set(key, system); } detail.TotalMemory = system.TotalPhysicalMemory; detail.Manufacturer = system.Manufacturer; detail.Model = system.Model; detail.NumberOfProcessors = system.NumberOfProcessors; }) .Task(delegate { // Win32_OperatingSystem var key = computer.Name + "_Win32_OperatingSystem"; var os = this.Cache.Get(key); if (os == null) { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { os = computer.GetWmiContext().GetInstances().Single(); } this.Cache.Set(key, os); } detail.OperatingSystem = os.Caption; detail.OSVersion = os.Version; }) // Performance Counters .Task(delegate { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { detail.AvailableBytes = perf.GetSample(computer, "Memory", "Available Bytes"); } }) .Task(delegate { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { detail.TotalProcessorUtilization = perf.GetValue(computer, "Processor", "% Processor Time", "_Total"); } }).WithExecutionMode(ParallelExecutionMode.ForceParallelism); if (!work.WaitForAll(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(15), task => task())) { return PartialView("Timeout"); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.LogException(ex); return PartialView("Error.ascx"); } return PartialView(detail); }

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• Content Challenge: You Can Only Get it Here

  - by Mike Stiles

  Part of the content conundrum for brands is figuring out what kind of content customers would find cool, desirable, and relevant. The mere fact many brands have no idea what this content might be is, in itself, pretty alarming. You’d have to have a pretty thorough lack of involvement with and understanding of your customers to not know what they might like. But despite what should be a great awakening in which consumers are using every technology and trick in the book to shield themselves from ads and commercials, brand self-obsession continues as marketers concentrate on their message, their campaign, what they want to say, and what they want social users to do. When individuals conduct themselves in that same fashion on Facebook and Twitter, it gets tiresome and starts losing value pretty quickly. Their posts eventually get hidden. Conversely, friends who post things that consistently entertain or inform, with little self-marketing desperation involved, win the coveted “show all updates” setting. Of course brands are going to use social to market. It’s pretty much the point of having social in the marketing mix. And yes, people who follow a brand’s Twitter account or “Like” a brand’s Facebook Page implicitly state they want to know what’s going on with that brand’s products and services. But if you have a Facebook friend that assumes you want every one of her posts to be about what wine she likes (Mitsubishi’s current campaign is even based around weeding out pretentious Facebook friends, then running them over), then you know how it must feel for your fans and followers to get a sales pitch for your crackers or whatever you’re selling every single time. Is there such a thing as content that doesn’t sell but that still advances the brand and makes the consumer more involved and valuable? Of course. And perhaps there are no better companies than enterprise brands to do it. Enterprise organizations are large enough to go beyond a product and engage readers/viewers at higher, broader levels…communicating expertise across entire sectors, subjects and industries. You’re going from pitchman to news source, and getting full credit for it as the presenter. A recent GigaOM article pointed out the success a San Francisco-based startup called Crunchyroll is having. Their niche (and they proudly admit it’s a niche) is providing Japanese anime, Korean drama and Asian live action content to countries that can’t get it any other way via licensing deals. Shows are available in HD and on the same day they air in the host country. Crunchyroll not only gets 8 million viewers a month, they have 100,000 paying subscribers at $7-12/month. Got a point, Mike? I do happen to have one. Crunchyroll illustrates the content opportunity enterprise companies have…which is to determine your “area,” the interest graph of your customers, then provide content that speaks to and satisfies those interests that can’t be found anywhere else. At least not in the same style, or of the same quality, or with the same authority. Do what no one else is doing. Provide what no one else is providing in your sector. If underserved users are willing to pay monthly for access to awkwardly moving cartoon dragons, imagine the audience you could attract with free, useful, non-sales content in your customers’ area of interest. It’s an audience you’ll want in place when the time does come to put out that marketing message. A content challenge is better than a content conundrum any day.

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• So You Want to Be a Social Media Director

  - by Mike Stiles

  Do you want to be a Social Media Director? Some say the title is already losing its relevance; that social should be a basic skill that is required and used no matter what your position is inside the enterprise. I suppose that’s visionary, and a fun thing for thought leaders to say. But in the vast majority of business organizations, we’re so far away from that reality that the thought of not having someone driving social’s implementation and guiding its proper usage conjures up images of anarchy. That said, social media has become so broad, so catch-all, and so extended across business functions, that today’s Social Media Director, depending on the size of their staff, must make jacks-of-all-trades look like one-trick-ponies. Just as the purview of the CMO has grown all-encompassing, the disciplines required of their heads of social are stacking up. Master of Content Every social pipeline you build must stay filled, with quantity and quality. Content takes time, and the job never stops. Never. And no, it’s not true that anybody can write. Master of Customer Experience You must have a passion for hearing from customers and making them really happy. Master of PR You must know how to communicate and leverage the trust you’ve built when crises strike. Couldn’t hurt to be a Master of Politics. Master of Social Technology So many social management tools on the market. You have to know what social tech ecosystem makes sense and avoid piecemeal point solutions. Master of Business Development Social for selling and prospecting is hot, and you have to know how to use social to do it. Master of Analytics Nothing else matters if you can’t prove social is helping the brand. That’s right, creative content guy has to also be a math and stats geek. Good luck with that. Master of Paid Media You’ve got to learn the language, learn the tactics, learn the vendors and learn how to measure results. Master of Education Guess who gets to teach everyone who has no clue how to use social for business. Master of Personal Likability You’ll be leading the voice, tone, image and personality of the brand. If you don’t instinctively know how to be liked by actual people, the brand will be starting from a deficit. How deep must you go in this parade of masteries? Again, that depends on your employer’s maturity level in social. Serious players recognize these as distinct disciplines requiring true experts for maximum effect. Less serious players will need you to execute personally in many of these areas. Do the best you can, and try to grow quickly at each. If you’re the sole person executing all social…well…you’re in the game of managing expectations and trying to socially educate your employer. The good news is, you should be making a certifiable killing. If you’re alone and your salary is modest, time to understand how many brands out there crave what you’ve mastered. Not to push back against thought leaders, but the need for brand social leadership has not gone away…not even a little bit. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Stefan Wagner, freeimages.com

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• BizTalk Testing Series - The xpath Function

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Background While the xpath function in a BizTalk orchestration is a very powerful feature I have often come across the situation where someone has hard coded an xpath expression in an orchestration. If you have read some of my previous posts about testing I've tried to get across the general theme like test-driven or test-assisted development approaches where the underlying principle is that your building up your solution of small well tested units that are put together and the resulting solution is usually quite robust. You will be finding more bugs within your unit tests and fewer outside of your team. The thing I don't like about the xpath functions usual usage is when you come across an orchestration which has something like the below snippet in an expression or assign shape: string result = xpath(myMessage,"string(//Order/OrderItem/ProductName)"); My main issue with this is that the xpath statement is hard coded in the orchestration and you don't really know it works until you are running the orchestration. Some of the problems I think you end up with are: You waste time with lengthy debugging of the orchestration when your statement isn't working You might not know the function isn't working quite as expected because the testable unit around it is big You are much more open to regression issues if your schema changes     Approach to Testing The technique I usually follow is to hold the xpath statement as a constant in a helper class or to format a constant with a helper function to get the actual xpath statement. It is then used by the orchestration like follows. string result = xpath(myMessage, MyHelperClass.ProductNameXPathStatement); This means that because the xpath statement is available outside of the orchestration it now becomes testable in its own right. This means: I can test it in its own right I'm less likely to waste time tracking down problems caused by an error in the statement I can reduce the risk or regression issuess I'm now able to implement some testing around my xpath statements which usually are something like the following:    The test will use a sample xml file The sample will be validated against the schema The test will execute the xpath statement and then check the results are as expected     Walk-through BizTalk uses the XPathNavigator internally behind the xpath function to implement the queries you will usually use using the navigators select or evaluate functions. In the sample (link at bottom) I have a small solution which contains a schema from which I have generated a sample instance. I will then use this instance as the basis for my tests.     In the below diagram you can see the helper class which I've encapsulated my xpath expressions in, and some helper functions which will format the expression in the case of a repeating node which would want to inject an index into the xpath query.             I have then created a test class which has some functions to execute some queries against my sample xml file. An example of this is below.         In the test class I have a couple of helper functions which will execute the xpath expressions in a similar way to BizTalk. You could have a proper helper class to do this if you wanted.         You can see now in the BizTalk expression editor I can use these functions alongside the xpath function.         Conclusion I hope you can see with very little effort you can make your life much easier by testing xpath statements outside of an orchestration rather than using them directly hard coded into the orchestration.     This can also save you lots of pain longer term because your build should break if your schema changes unexpectedly causing these xpath tests to fail where as your tests around the orchestration will be more difficult to troubleshoot and workout the cause of the problem.     Sample Link The sample is available from the following link: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/testbtsxpathfunction     Other Tools On the subject of using the xpath function, if you don't already use it the below tool is very useful for creating your xpath statements (thanks BizBert) http://www.bizbert.com/bizbert/2007/11/30/XPath+The+Hidden+Language+Of+BizTalk.aspx

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• Twice as long and half as long

  - by PointsToShare

  We are in a project and we hit some snags. What’s a snag? An activity that takes longer than expected. Actually it takes longer than the time assigned to it by an over pressed PM who accepts an impossible time table and tries his best to make it possible, but I digress (again!).  So we have snags and we also have the opposite. Let’s call these “cinches”. The question is: how does a combination of snags and cinches affect the project timeline? Well, there is no simple answer. It depends on the projects dependencies as we see in the PERT chart. If all the snags are in the critical path and all the cinches are elsewhere then the cinches don’t help at all. In fact any snag in the critical path will delay the project.  Conversely, a cinch in the critical path will expedite it. A snag outside the critical path might be serious enough to even change the critical path. Thus without the PERT chart, we cannot really tell. Still there is a principle involved – Time and speed are non-linear! Twice as long adds a full unit, half as long only takes ½ unit away. Let’s just investigate a simple project. It consists of two activities – S and C - each estimated to take a week. Alas, S is a snag and really needs twice the time allotted and – a sigh of relief – C is a cinch and will take half the time allotted, so everything is Hun-key-dory, or is it?  Even here the PERT chart is important. We have 2 cases: 1: S depends on C (or vice versa) as in when the two activities are assigned to one employee. Here the estimated time was 1 + 1 and the actual time was 2 + ½ and we are ½ week late or 25% late. 2: S and C are done in parallel. Here the estimated time was 1, but the actual time is 2 – we are a whole week or 100% late. Let’s change the equation a little. S need 1.5 and C needs .5 so in case 1, we have the loss fully compensated by the gain, but in case 2 we are still behind. There are cases where this really makes no difference. This is when the critical path is not affected and we have enough slack in the other paths to counteract the difference between its snags and cinches – Let’s call this difference DSC. So if the slack is greater than DSC the project will not suffer. Conclusion: There is no general rule about snags and cinches. We need to examine each case within its project, still as we saw in the 4 examples above; the snag is generally more powerful than the cinch. Long live Murphy! That’s All Folks

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• What is the right way to process inconsistent data files?

  - by Tahabi

  I'm working at a company that uses Excel files to store product data, specifically, test results from products before they are shipped out. There are a few thousand spreadsheets with anywhere from 50-100 relevant data points per file. Over the years, the schema for the spreadsheets has changed significantly, but not unidirectionally - in the sense that, changes often get reverted and then re-added in the space of a few dozen to few hundred files. My project is to convert about 8000 of these spreadsheets into a database that can be queried. I'm using MongoDB to deal with the inconsistency in the data, and Python. My question is, what is the "right" or canonical way to deal with the huge variance in my source files? I've written a data structure which stores the data I want for the latest template, which will be the final template used going forward, but that only helps for a few hundred files historically. Brute-forcing a solution would mean writing similar data structures for each version/template - which means potentially writing hundreds of schemas with dozens of fields each. This seems very inefficient, especially when sometimes a change in the template is as little as moving a single line of data one row down or splitting what used to be one data field into two data fields. A slightly more elegant solution I have in mind would be writing schemas for all the variants I can find for pre-defined groups in the source files, and then writing a function to match a particular series of files with a series of variants that matches that set of files. This is because, more often that not, most of the file will remain consistent over a long period, only marred by one or two errant sections, but inside the period, which section is inconsistent, is inconsistent. For example, say a file has four sections with three data fields, which is represented by four Python dictionaries with three keys each. For files 7000-7250, sections 1-3 will be consistent, but section 4 will be shifted one row down. For files 7251-7500, 1-3 are consistent, section 4 is one row down, but a section five appears. For files 7501-7635, sections 1 and 3 will be consistent, but section 2 will have five data fields instead of three, section five disappears, and section 4 is still shifted down one row. For files 7636-7800, section 1 is consistent, section 4 gets shifted back up, section 2 returns to three cells, but section 3 is removed entirely. Files 7800-8000 have everything in order. The proposed function would take the file number and match it to a dictionary representing the data mappings for different variants of each section. For example, a section_four_variants dictionary might have two members, one for the shifted-down version, and one for the normal version, a section_two_variants might have three and five field members, etc. The script would then read the matchings, load the correct mapping, extract the data, and insert it into the database. Is this an accepted/right way to go about solving this problem? Should I structure things differently? I don't know what to search Google for either to see what other solutions might be, though I believe the problem lies in the domain of ETL processing. I also have no formal CS training aside from what I've taught myself over the years. If this is not the right forum for this question, please tell me where to move it, if at all. Any help is most appreciated. Thank you.

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• First-Time GLSL Shadow Mapping Problems

  - by Locke

  I'm working on building out a 2.5D engine and having massive problems getting my shadows working. I'm at a point where I'm VERY close. So, let's see a picture to see what I have: As you can see above, the image has lighting -- but the shadow map is displaying incorrectly. The shadow map is shown in the bottom left hand side of the screen as a normal 2D texture, so we can see what it looks like at any given time. If you notice, it appears that the shadows are generating backwards in the wrong direction -- I think. But the problem is a little more deep -- I'm just plotting the shadow onto the screen, which I know is wrong -- I'm ignoring the actual test to see if we NEED to show a shadow. The incoming parameters all appear to be correct -- so there has to be something wrong with my shader code somewhere. Here's what my code looks like: VERTEX: uniform mat4 LightModelViewProjectionMatrix; varying vec3 Normal; // The eye-space normal of the current vertex. varying vec4 LightCoordinate; // The texture coordinate of the light of the current vertex. varying vec3 LightDirection; // The eye-space direction of the light. void main() { Normal = normalize(gl_NormalMatrix * gl_Normal); LightDirection = normalize(gl_NormalMatrix * gl_LightSource[0].position.xyz); LightCoordinate = LightModelViewProjectionMatrix * gl_Vertex; LightCoordinate.xy = ( LightCoordinate.xy * 0.5 ) + 0.5; gl_Position = ftransform(); gl_TexCoord[0] = gl_MultiTexCoord0; } FRAGMENT: uniform sampler2D DiffuseMap; uniform sampler2D ShadowMap; varying vec3 Normal; // The eye-space normal of the current vertex. varying vec4 LightCoordinate; // The texture coordinate of the light of the current vertex. varying vec3 LightDirection; // The eye-space direction of the light. void main() { vec4 Texel = texture2D(DiffuseMap, vec2(gl_TexCoord[0])); // Directional lighting //Build ambient lighting vec4 AmbientElement = gl_LightSource[0].ambient; //Build diffuse lighting float Lambert = max(dot(Normal, LightDirection), 0.0); //max(abs(dot(Normal, LightDirection)), 0.0); vec4 DiffuseElement = ( gl_LightSource[0].diffuse * Lambert ); vec4 LightingColor = ( DiffuseElement + AmbientElement ); LightingColor.r = min(LightingColor.r, 1.0); LightingColor.g = min(LightingColor.g, 1.0); LightingColor.b = min(LightingColor.b, 1.0); LightingColor.a = min(LightingColor.a, 1.0); LightingColor *= Texel; //Everything up to this point is PERFECT // Shadow mapping // ------------------------------ vec4 ShadowCoordinate = LightCoordinate / LightCoordinate.w; float DistanceFromLight = texture2D( ShadowMap, ShadowCoordinate.st ).z; float DepthBias = 0.001; float ShadowFactor = 1.0; if( LightCoordinate.w > 0.0 ) { ShadowFactor = DistanceFromLight < ( ShadowCoordinate.z + DepthBias ) ? 0.5 : 1.0; } LightingColor.rgb *= ShadowFactor; //gl_FragColor = LightingColor; //Yes, I know this is wrong, but the line above (gl_FragColor = LightingColor;) produces the wrong effect gl_FragColor = LightingColor * texture2D( ShadowMap, ShadowCoordinate.st ); } I wanted to make sure the coordinates were correct for the shadow map -- so that's why you see it applied to the image as it is below. But the depth for each point seems to be wrong -- the shadows SHOULD be opposite (look at how the image is -- the shaded areas from normal lighting are facing the opposite direction of the shadows). Maybe my matrices are bad or something going in? They're isolated and appear to be correct -- nothing else is going in unusual. When I view from the light's view and get the MVP matrices for it, they're correct. EDIT: Added an image so you can see what happens when I do the correct command at the end of the GLSL: That's the image when the last line is just glFragColor = LightingColor; Maybe someone has some idea of what I screwed up?

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• #iPad at One Week: A Great Device Made with a Heavy Hand

  - by andrewbrust

  I have now had my iPad for a little over a week. In that time, Apple introduced the world to its iPhone OS 4 (and the SDK agreement’s draconian new section 3.3.1), HP introduced is Slate, and Microsoft got ready to launch Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. And through it all I have used my iPad. I've used it for email, calendar, controlling my Sonos, and writing an essay. I've used it for getting on TripIt and Twitter, and surfing the Web. I've used it for online banking, and online ordering and delivery of food. And the verdict? Honestly? I think it's a great device and I thoroughly enjoy using it. The screen is bright and vibrant. I am surprisingly fast and accurate when I type on it. The touch screen's responsiveness is nearly flawless. The software, including a number of third party applications, include pleasing animations and use of color that make it fun to get work done. And speaking of work, the Exchange integration is, dare I say it, robust. Not as full-featured as on a PC or Windows Mobile device, but still offering core functionality and, so far at least, without bugs. The UI is intuitive, not just to me, but also to my 5 1/2 year old, and also to my nearly-3-year-old son. They picked it up and, with just just a few pointers from me, they almost immediately knew what to do, whether they were looking at photos (and swiping/flicking along as they did so), using a drawing program, playing a game, or watching YouTube videos. The younger of the two of them even tried to get up on a chair and grab the thing today. He dropped it, from about 4 feet off the ground. And it's still fine. (Meanwhile, I'll be keeping it on a higher shelf.) I cannot fully describe yet what makes this form factor and this product so appealing. Maybe it's that it's an always-on device. Maybe it's just being able to hold such a nice, relatively large display so close. Maybe it's the design sensibility, that seems to pervade throughout the app ecosystem. Or maybe it's that one's fingers, and not pens or mice, are the software's preferred input device. Whatever the attraction, it's strong. And no matter how much I tend to root for Microsoft and against Apple, Cupertino has, in my mind, scored big, Can Microsoft compete? Yes, but not with the Windows 7 standard UI (nor with individual OEMs’ own UIs on top). I hope Microsoft builds a variant of the Windows Phone 7 specifically for tablet devices. And I hope they make it clear that all developers, and programming languages, are welcome to the platform. Once that’s established, the OEMs have to build great hardware with fast, responsive touch screens, under Microsoft's watchful eye. That may be the hardest part of getting this right. No matter what, Microsoft's got a fight on its hands. I don't know if it can count on winning that fight, either. But Silverlight and Live Tiles could certainly help. And so can treating developers like adults.  Apple seems intent on treating their devs like kids, and then giving the kids a curfew.  For that, dev-friendly Microsoft may one day give thanks.

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• Dissing Architects, or "What's wrong with the coffee?"

  - by Bob Rhubart

  In my conversations with people in architect roles, tales of animosity, disrespect, and outright hostility aren't uncommon. And it's clear that in more than a few organizations architects regularly face a tough uphill climb. For architects with the requisite combination of technical, organizational, and people skills, that rough treatment is grossly undeserved. But tales of unqualified people in positions up and down the IT food chain are also easy to come by. So what's the other side of the architect story? Are some architects tarnishing the role and making life miserable for their more qualified colleagues? The various quotes included below were culled from a variety of sources. The criticism is harsh, and the people behind these quotes clearly have issues with architects. Still, whether based on mere opinion or actual experience, the comments shed some light on behaviors that should raise red flags for anyone pursuing a career as an architect. If you're an architect, and you've ever noticed that your coffee tastes like window cleaner, or your car is repeatedly keyed, or no one ever holds the elevator for you, maybe you need to do a little soul searching... Those Who Can, Code; Those Who Can't, Architect | Joe Winchester [May 18, 2007] "At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas - sweeping generalized designs, creating presentations to audiences of acronym addicts, writing esoteric academic papers, speaking at conferences attended by headless engineers on company expense accounts hungrily seeking out this year's grail, and creating e-mails with huge cc lists from people whose signature footer is more interesting than the content. I tried to re-orient him into actually doing some coding, to join a team that has a good product and keen users both of whom are pushing requirements forward, to no avail. Somehow the lure of being an architecture astronaut was too strong and I lost him to the dark side." Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You | Joel Spolsky [April 21, 2001] "It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line. Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve." Non Coding Architects Suck | Richard Henderson [May 24, 2010] "If a guy with a badge saying 'system architect' looks blank on low-level issues then he is not an architect, he is a business-analyst who went on a course. He will probably wax lyrical on all things high-level and 'important.' He will produce lovely object hierarchies without a clue to implementation. He will have a moustache and play golf." Architects Play Golf | Sunir Shah [August 15, 2012] "Often arrogant architects are difficult to get a hold of during the implementation phase because they no longer feel the need to stick around. Especially around midnight when most of the poor sob [sic] developers are still banging away. After all, they've already solved the problem--the rest is just an implementation exercise." Engineer vs Architect(Part of a discussion on the IT Architect Network Group on LinkedIn) "[An] architect spends his time producing white papers full of acronyms he does not understand but that impress his boss [while the] engineer keeps his head down and does the actual job." Architects Don't Code | [Author Unknown] "Faulty belief: System Architects don't need to code anymore. They know what they are talking about by virtue of the fact that they are System Architects."

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• Xsigo and Oracle's Storage

  - by Philippe Deverchère

  Xsigo, a virtual network infrastructure provider, has recently been acquired by Oracle. Following this acquisition, one might ask ourselves why it is important to Oracle and how Oracle's storage is going to benefit on the long term from this virtualized infrastructure layer. Well, the first thing to understand is that Virtual Networking addresses both network and storage connectivity. Oracle Virtual Networking, as the Xsigo technology is now called, connects any server to any network and storage, so this is not just about connecting servers to the Internet or Intranet. It is also for a large part connecting servers to NAS and SAN storage. Connecting servers to storage has become increasingly complex in the past few years because of the strong emergence of virtualization at the Operating System level. 50% of enterprise workloads are now virtualized, up from 18% in 2009, resulting in a strong consolidation of various applications in a high density server footprint. At the same time, server I/O capability increased 8x in the last 8 years. All this has pushed IT administrators to multiply the number of I/O connections in the back-end of their physical servers, resulting in a messy and very hard to manage networking infrastructure. Here is a typical view of a rack back-end when no virtual networking is used. We consider that today: - 75% of users have ten or more Ethernet ports per server - 85% of users have two or more SAN ports per server - 58% have had to add connectivity to a server specifically for VMs - 65% consider cable reduction a priority The average is 12 or more ports per server, resulting in an extremely complex infrastructure to manage. What Oracle wants to achieve with its Oracle Virtual Networking offering is pretty simple. The objective is to eliminate the complexity through a dramatic reduction of cabling between servers and storage/networks. It is also to provide a software based management system so that any server can be connected to any network or any storage, on demand, and without physical intervention on the infrastructure. At the end of the day, the picture on the left shows what one wants to get for the back-end of customer's racks: just a couple of connections on each physical server to provide a simple, agile and fast network infrastructure for both storage and networking access. This is exactly what the Oracle Virtual Networking solution does. It transforms a complex, error-prone, difficult to manage and expensive networking infrastructure into a simple, high performance and agile solution for the data center. Practically speaking, and for the sake of simplicity, imagine that each server just hosts a minimal number of physical InfiniBand HCAs (Host Channel Adapter) with two links (for redundancy) onto the Oracle Fabric Interconnect director. Using the Oracle Fabric Manager software, you'll then be able to create virtual NICs and HBAs (called vNIC and vHBA) that will be seen by the servers as standard NICs and HBAs and associate them to networks and storage systems which are physically connected to the back-end of the director through standard Fibre Channel and Ethernet GbE/10GbE ports. In addition to this incredibly simple "at-a-click" connectivity capability, the Oracle Virtual Networking solution offers powerful features such as network isolation, Quality of Service, advanced performance monitoring and non-disruptive reconfiguration, migration and scalability of networking infrastructure. So let's go back now to our initial question: why is Oracle Virtual Networking especially important to Oracle's storage solutions? After all, one could connect any storage in the back-end of the Oracle Fabric Interconnect directors, right? The answer is pretty simple: since Oracle owns both the virtualized networking infrastructure and the storage (ZFS-SA, Pillar Axiom and tape), it is possible to imagine several ways in the future to add value when it comes to connect storage to a virtualized storage network: enhanced storage capabilities, converged management between storage and network, improved diagnostic capabilities and optimized integration resulting in higher performance and unique features/functions. Of course, all this is not going to be done overnight, and future will tell us is which evolutions come first. But there is little doubt that the integration of Xsigo within Oracle is going to create opportunities for Oracle's storage!

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• The theory of evolution applied to software

  - by Michel Grootjans

  I recently realized the many parallels you can draw between the theory of evolution and evolving software. Evolution is not the proverbial million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, where one of them comes up with the complete works of Shakespeare. We would have noticed by now, since the proverbial monkeys are now blogging on the Internet ;-) One of the main ideas of the theory of evolution is the balance between random mutations and natural selection. Random mutations happen all the time: millions of mutations over millions of years. Most of them are totally useless. Some of them are beneficial to the evolved species. Natural selection favors the beneficially mutated species. Less beneficial mutations die off. The mutated rabbit doesn't have to be faster than the fox. It just has to be faster than the other rabbits.   Theory of evolution Evolving software Random mutations happen all the time. Most of these mutations are so bad, the new species dies off, or cannot reproduce. Developers write new code all the time. New ideas come up during the act of writing software. The really bad ones don't get past the stage of idea. The bad ones don't get committed to source control. Natural selection favors the beneficial mutated species Good ideas and new code gets discussed in group during informal peer review. Less than good code gets refactored. Enhanced code makes it more readable, maintainable... A good set of traits makes the species superior to others. It becomes widespread A good design tends to make it easier to add new features, easier to understand the current implementations, easier to optimize for performance...thus superior. The best designs get carried over from project to project. They appear in blogs, articles and books about principles, patterns and practices.   Of course the act of writing software is deliberate. This can hardly be called random mutations. Though it sometimes might seem that code evolves through a will of its own ;-) Does this mean that evolving software (evolution) is better than a big design up front (creationism)? Not necessarily. It's a false idea to think that a project starts from scratch and everything evolves from there. Everyone carries his experience of what works and what doesn't. Up front design is necessary, but is best kept simple and minimal, just enough to get you started. Let the good experiences and ideas help to drive the process, whether they come from you or from others, from past experience or from the most junior developer on your team. Once again, balance is the keyword. Balance design up front with evolution on a daily basis. How do you know what balance is right? Through your own experience of what worked and what didn't (here's evolution again). Notes: The evolution of software can quickly degenerate without discipline. TDD is a discipline that leaves little to chance on that part. Write your test to describe the new behavior. Write just enough code to make it behave as specified. Refactor to evolve the code to a higher standard. The responsibility of good design rests continuously on each developers' shoulders. Promiscuous pair programming helps quickly spreading the design to the whole team.

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• how to do loop for array which have different data for each array

  - by Suriani Salleh

  i have this file XML file.. I need to convert it form XMl to MYSQL. if it have only one array than i know how to do it.. now my question how to extract this two array Each array will have different value of data..for example for first array, pmIntervalTxEthMaxUtilization data : 0,74,0,0,48 and for second array pmIntervalRxPowerLevel data: -79,-68,-52 , pmIntervalTxPowerLevel data: 13,11,-55 . can some one help to guide how write php code to extract this xml file to MY SQL <mi> <mts>20130618020000</mts> <gp>900</gp> <mt>pmIntervalRxUndersizedFrames</mt> [ this is first array] <mt>pmIntervalRxUnicastFrames</mt> <mt>pmIntervalTxUnicastFrames</mt> <mt>pmIntervalRxEthMaxUtilization</mt> <mt>pmIntervalTxEthMaxUtilization</mt> <mv> <moid>port:1:3:23-24</moid> <sf>FALSE</sf> <r>0</r> [the data for 1st array i want to insert in DB] <r>0</r> <r>0</r> <r>5</r> <r>0</r> </mv> </mi> <mi> <mts>20130618020000</mts> <gp>900</gp> <mt>pmIntervalRxSES</mt> [this is second array] <mt>pmIntervalRxPowerLevel</mt> <mt>pmIntervalTxPowerLevel</mt> <mv> <moid>client:1:3:23-24</moid> <sf>FALSE</sf> <r>0</r> [the data for 2nd array i want to insert in DB] <r>-79</r> <r>13</r> </mv> </mi> this is the code for one array that i write..i dont know how to write code for two array because the field appear two times and have different data value for each array // Loop through the specified xpath foreach($xml->mi->mv as $subchild) { $port_no = $subchild->moid; $rx_ses = $subchild->r[0]; $rx_es = $subchild->r[1]; $tx_power = $subchild->r[10]; // dump into database; ........................... i have do a little research on it this is the out come... $i = 0; while( $i < 5) { // Loop through the specified xpath foreach($xml->md->mi->mv as $subchild) { $port_no = $subchild->moid; $rx_uni = $subchild->r[10]; $tx_uni = $subchild->r[11]; $rx_eth = $subchild->r[16]; $tx_eth = $subchild->r[17]; // dump into database; .............................. $i++; if( $i == 5 )break; } } // Loop through the specified xpath foreach($xml->mi->mv as $subchild) { $port_no = $subchild->moid; $rx_ses = $subchild->r[0]; $rx_es = $subchild->r[1]; $tx_power = $subchild->r[10]; // dump into database; .......................

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• What is the SharePoint Action Framework and Why do I need it ?

  - by SAF

  For those out there that are a little curious as to whether SAF is any use to your organisation, please read this FAQ.  What is SAF ? SAF is free to use. SAF is the "SharePoint Action Framework", it was built by myself and Hugo (plus a few others along the way). SAF is written entirely in C# code available from : http://saf.codeplex.com.   SAF is a way to automate SharePoint configuration changes. An Action is a command/class/task/script written in C# that performs a unit of execution against SharePoint such as "CreateWeb"  or "AddLookupColumn". A SAF Macro is collection of one or more Actions. SAF Macro can be run from Msbuild, a Feature, StsAdm or common plain old .Net code. Parameters can be passed to a Macro at run-time from a variety of sources such as "Environment Variable", "*.config", "Msbuild Properties", Feature Properties, command line args, .net code. SAF emits lots of trace statements at run-time, these can be viewed using "DebugView". One Action can pass parameters to another Action. Parameters can be set using Expression Syntax such as "DateTime.Now".  You should consider SAF is you suffer from one of the following symptoms... "Our developers write lots of code to deploy changes at release time - it's always rushed" "I don't want my developers shelling out to Powershell or Stsadm from a Feature". "We have loads of Console applications now, I have lost track of where they are, or what they do" "We seem to be writing similar scripts against SharePoint in lots of ways, testing is hard". "My scripts often have lots of errors - they are done at the last minute". "When something goes wrong - I have no idea what went wrong or how to solve it". "Our Features get stuck and bomb out half way through - there no way to roll them back". "We have tons of Features now - I can't keep track". "We deploy Features to run one-off tasks" "We have a library of reusable scripts, but, we can only run it in one way, sometimes we want to run it from MSbuild and a Feature". "I want to automate the deployment of changes to our development environment". "I would like to run a housekeeping task on a scheduled basis"   So I like the sound of SAF - what's the problems ?  Realistically, there are few things that need to be considered: Someone on your team will need to spend a day or 2 understanding SAF and deciding exactly how you want to use it. I would suggest a Tech Lead, SysAdm or SP Architect will need to download it, try out the examples, look through the unit tests. Ask us questions. Although, SAF can be downloaded and set to go in a few minutes, you will still need to address issues such as - "Do you want to execute your Macros in MsBuild or from a Feature ?" You will need to decide who is going to do your deployments - is it each developer to themself, or do you require a dedicated Build Manager ? As most environments (Dev, QA, Live etc) require different settings (e.g. Urls, Database names, accounts etc), you will more than likely want to define these and set a properties file up for each environment. (These can then be injected into Saf at run-time). There may be no Action to solve your particular problem. If this is the case, suggest it to us - we can try and write it, or write it yourself. It's very easy to write a new Action - we have an approach to easily unit test it, document it and author it. For example, I wrote one to deploy  a WSP in 2 hours the other day. Alternatively, Saf can also call Stsadm commands and Powershell scripts.   Anyway, I do hope this helps! If you still need help, or a quick start, we can also offer consultancy around SAF. If you want to know more give us a call or drop an email to [email protected]

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• Dropped impression 25 days after restructure

  - by Hamid

  Our website is a non English property related website (moshaver.com) which is similar to rightmove.co.uk. On September 2012 our website was adversely affected by Panda causing our Google incoming clicks to drop from around 3000 clicks to less than a thousand. We were hoping that Google will eventually realize that we are not a spam website and things will get better. However, in August 2013 we were almost sure that we needed to do something, so we started to restructure our web content. We used the canonical tag to remove our search results and point to our listing pages, using the noindex tag to remove it from our listing pages which does not have any properties at the moment. We also changed title tags to more friendly ones, in addition to other changes. Our changes were effective on 10th August. As shown in the graph taken from Google Analytics Search Engine Optimization section, these changes has resulted in an increase in the number of times Google displayed our results in its search results. Our impressions almost doubled starting 15th August. However, as the graph shows, our CTR dropped from this date from around 15% to 8%. This might have been because of our changed title tags (so people were less likely to click on them), or it might be normal for increased impressions. This situation has continued up until 10th September, when our impressions decreased dramatically to less than a thousand. This is almost 30% of our original impressions (before website restructure) and 15% of the new impressions. At the same time our impressions has increased dramatically to around 50%. I have two theories for this increase. The first one is that these statistics are less accurate for lower impressions. The second one is that Google is now only displaying our results for queries directly related to our website (our name, our url), and not for general terms, such as "apartments in a specific city". The second theory also explains the dramatic decrease in impression as well. After digging the analytic data a little more, I constructed the following table. It displays the breakdown of our impressions, clicks and ctr in different Google products (web and image) and in total. What I understand from this table is that, most of our increased impressions after restructure were on the image search section. I don't think users of search would be looking for content in our website. Furthermore, it shows that the drop in our web search ctr, is as dramatic of the overall ctr (-30% in compare to -60%) . I thought posting it here might help you understand the situation better. Is it possible that Google has tested our new structure for 25 days, and then decided to decrease our impressions because of the the new low CTR? Or should we look for another factor? If this is the case, how long does it usually take for Google to give us another chance? It has been one month since our impressions has dropped.

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• RC of Entity Framework 4.1 (which includes EF Code First)

  - by ScottGu

  Last week the data team shipped the Release Candidate of Entity Framework 4.1.  You can learn more about it and download it here. EF 4.1 includes the new “EF Code First” option that I’ve blogged about several times in the past.  EF Code First provides a really elegant and clean way to work with data, and enables you to do so without requiring a designer or XML mapping file.  Below are links to some tutorials I’ve written in the past about it: Code First Development with Entity Framework 4.x EF Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database The above tutorials were written against the CTP4 release of EF Code First (and so some APIs might be a little different) – but the concepts and scenarios outlined in them are the same as with the RC. Go Live License Last week’s EF 4.1 RC ships with a “go live” license that enables you to use it in production environments.  The final release of EF 4.1 will ship within the next 4 weeks and will be 100% API compatible with the RC release. Improvements with the RC The RC includes several improvements and enhancements.  The EF team has a good blog post summarizing the RC changes.  Scott Hanselman also has a nice video interview with the data team that talks more about the release. One of my favorite improvements introduced with last week’s RC is its support for medium trust security.  This enables you to use EF 4.1 (and code-first) within low-cost ASP.NET shared hosting web environments – without requiring a hoster to install anything to use it. EF 4.1 also now supports validation with not only code-first scenarios, but also model-first and database-first workflows.  Upgrading from previous releases The RC does include a few API tweaks and changes from the prior CTP builds.  Read the release notes that come with the release to get a more detailed listing of the changes. John Papa also has an excellent Upgrading to EF 4.1 RC blog post that describes the steps he took when upgrading a large project he wrote with the previous CTP5 release.  The work to upgrade is pretty straight forward and easy – use his write-up as a guide on how to quickly update projects of your own. NuGet Package Rename One of the changes that the data team made between the CTP5 and RC releases was to rename the NuGet package name from “EFCodeFirst” to “EntityFramework”. They decided to make this change since the EF 4.1 release now includes several additions above and beyond just code first. If you already have installed the “EFCodeFirst” NuGet package, you’ll want to uninstall it and then install the new “EntityFramework” NuGet package.  John Papa’s blog post details the exact steps on how to do this (it only takes ~20 seconds to do this). More EF Tutorials Julie Lerman has created some nice whitepapers and tutorials for MSDN that show using the new EF4 and EF 4.1 feature set. Click here to find links to read and watch them. Summary I’m really excited about the EF 4.1 release that will be shipping next month.  It significantly improves the Entity Framework, and makes it even easier and cleaner to work with data inside of .NET.  You can take advantage of it within all ASP.NET projects (including both Web Forms and MVC), within client projects using Windows Forms and WPF, and within other project types like WCF, Console and Services.  You can use NuGet to easily install it within all of them. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• WebLogic Server–Use the Execution Context ID in Applications–Lessons From Hansel and Gretel

  - by james.bayer

  I learned a neat trick this week.  Don’t let your breadcrumbs go to waste like Hansel and Gretel did!  Keep track of the code path, logs and errors for each request as they flow through the system.  Earlier this week an OTN forum post in the WLS – General category by Oracle Ace John Stegeman asked a question how to retrieve the Execution Context ID so that it could be used on an error page that a user could provide to a help desk or use to check with application administrators so they could look up what went wrong.  What is the Execution Context ID (ECID)?  Fusion Middleware injects an ECID as a request enters the system and it says with the request as it flows from Oracle HTTP Server to Oracle Web Cache to multiple WebLogic Servers to the Oracle Database. It’s a way to uniquely identify a request across tiers.  According to the documentation it’s: The value of the ECID is a unique identifier that can be used to correlate individual events as being part of the same request execution flow. For example, events that are identified as being related to a particular request typically have the same ECID value.  The format of the ECID string itself is determined by an internal mechanism that is subject to change; therefore, you should not have or place any dependencies on that format. The novel idea that I see John had was to extend this concept beyond the diagnostic information that is captured by Fusion Middleware.  Why not also use this identifier in your logs and errors so you can correlate even more information together!  Your logging might already identify the user, so why not identify the request so you filter down even more.  All you need to do inside of WebLogic Server to get ahold of this information is invoke DiagnosticConextHelper: weblogic.diagnostics.context.DiagnosticContextHelper.getContextId() This class has other helpful methods to see other values tracked by the diagnostics framework too.  This way I can see even more detail and get information across tiers. In performance profiling, this can be very handy to track down where time is being spent in code.  I’ve blogged and made videos about this before.  JRockit Flight Recorder can use the WLDF Diagnostic Volume in WLS 10.3.3+ to automatically capture and correlate lots of helpful information for each request without installing any special agents and with the out-of-the-box JRockit and WLS settings!  You can see here how information is displayed in JRockit Flight Recorder about a single request as it calls a Servlet, which calls an EJB, which gets a DB connection, which starts a transaction, etc.  You can get timings around everything and even see the SQL that is used. http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/web.1111/e13714/using_flightrecorder.htm#WLDFC480 Recent versions of the WLS console also are able to visualize this data too, so it works with other JVMs besides JRockit when you turn on WLDF instrumentation. I wrote a little sample application that verified to myself that the ECID did actually cross JVM boundaries.  I invoked a Servlet in one JVM, which acted as an EJB client to Stateless Session Bean running in another JVM.  Each call returned the same ECID.  You need to turn on WLDF Instrumentation for this to work otherwise the framework returns null.  I’m glad John put me on to this API as I have some interesting ideas on how to correlate some information together.

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• Professional Developers, may I join you?

  - by Ben

  I currently work in technical support for a software/hardware company and for the most part it's a good job, but it's feeling more and more like I'm getting 'stuck' here. No raises in the 5 years I've been here, and lately there seems to be more hiring from the outside than promotion from within. The work I do is more technical than end-user support, as we deal primarily with our field technicians who have a little more technical skill than the general user base. As a result I get into much more technical support issues... often tracking down bugs in our software, finding performance bottlenecks in our database schema, etc. The work I'm most proud of are the development projects I've come up with on my own, and worked on during lunch breaks and slow periods in Support. Over the years I've written a number of useful utilities for the company. Diagnostic type applications that several departments use and appreciate. These include apps that simulate our various hardware devices, log file analysis, time-saving utilities for our work processes, etc. My best projects have been the hardware simulation programs, which are the type of thing we probably wouldn't have put a full-time developer on had anyone thought to do it, but they've ended up being popular and useful enough to be used by development, QA, R&D, and Support. They allow us to interface our software with simulated hardware, rather than clutter up our work areas with bulky, hard to acquire equipment. Since starting here my life has moved forward (married, kid, one more on the way), but it feels like my career has not. I still earn what I earned walking in the door my first day. Company budget is tight, bonuses have gone down, and no raises or cost of living / inflation adjustments either. As the sole source of income for my family I feel I need to do more, and I'd like to have a more active role in creating something at work, not just cleaning up other people's mistakes. I enjoy technical work, and I think development is the next logical step in my career. I'd like to bring some "legitimacy" to my part-time development work, and make myself a more skilled and valuable employee. Ultimately if this can help me better support my family, that would be ideal. Can I make the jump to professional developer? I have an engineering degree, but no formal education in computer science. I write WinForms apps using the .NET framework, do some freelance web development, have volunteered to write software for a nonprofit, and have started experimenting with programming microcontrollers. I enjoy learning new things in the limited free time I have available. I think I have the aptitude to take on a development role, even in an 'apprentice' capacity if such an option is possible. Have any of you moved into development like this? Do any of you developers have any advice or cautionary tales? Are there better career options I haven't thought of? I welcome any and all related comments and thank you in advance for posting them.

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• How to create Checkboxes that act like Radio buttons with Jquery

  - by hmloo

  I have a post here to show code examples for check/uncheck all checkbox with Jquery. This time I will implement another request that the user should only be able to check at most one of the checkboxes, it's behave like radio buttons. There are 2 cases. Case 1 shows function that has little difference with radio button. It allows the user to deselect checkbox. Case 2 is same as radio button. Case 1 <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title></title> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .cbRowItem {display:block;} </style> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var $chk = $('input:checkbox .cbRowItem'); $chk.click(function() { $chk.not(this).removeAttr('checked'); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div style="display:block;"> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox1" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 1"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox2" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 2"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox3" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 3"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox4" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 4"/> </div> </form> </body> </html> Case 2 <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title></title> <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .cbRowItem {display:block;} </style> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { var $chk = $('input:checkbox .cbRowItem'); $chk.click(function() { $chk.removeAttr('checked'); $(this).attr('checked', 'checked'); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div style="display:block;"> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox1" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 1"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox2" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 2"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox3" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 3"/> <asp:CheckBox id="CheckBox4" runat="server" class="cbRowItem" Text = "CheckBox 4"/> </div> </form> </body> </html>

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