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• The Connected Company: WebCenter Portal - Feedback - Analytics and Polls

  - by Michael Snow

  Evernote Export body, td { }Guest Post by: Mitchell Palski, Staff Sales Consultant The importance of connecting peers has been widely recognized and socialized as a critical component of employee intranets. Organizations are striving to provide mediums for sharing knowledge and improving awareness across their enterprise. Indirectly, the socialization of your enterprise should lead to cost savings and improved product/service quality. However, many times the direct effects of connecting an organization’s leadership with its employees are overlooked. Oracle WebCenter Portal can help you bridge that gap by gathering implicit and explicit feedback. Implicit Feedback Through Usage Analytics Analytics allows administrators to track and analyze WebCenter Portal traffic and usage. Analytics provides the following basic functionality: Usage Tracking Metrics: Analytics collects and reports metrics of common WebCenter Portal functions, including community and portlet traffic. Behavior Tracking: Analytics can be used to analyze WebCenter Portal metrics to determine usage patterns, such as page visit duration and usage over time. User Profile Correlation: Analytics can be used to correlate metric information with user profile information. Usage tracking reports can be viewed and filtered by user profile data such as country, company or title. Usage analytics help measure how users interact with website content – allowing your IT staff and business analysts to make informed decisions when planning development for your next intranet enhancement. For example: If users are not accessing your Announcements page and missing critical information that they need to be aware of, you may elect to use graphical links on the home page to direct more users to that page. As a result, the number of employee help-requests to HR decreases. If users are not accessing your News page to read recent articles, you may elect to stop spending as much time updating the page with new stories and cut costs in your communications department. You notice that there is a high volume of users accessing the Employee Dashboard page so your organization decides to continue making personalization enhancements to the page and investing in the Portal tool that most users are accessing. Usage analytics aren’t necessarily a new concept in the IT industry. What sets WebCenter Portal Analytics apart is: Reports are tailored for WebCenter specific tools Report can be easily added to a page as simple as a drag-and-drop Explicit Feedback Through Polls WebCenter Portal users can create, edit, take, and analyze online polls. With polls, you can survey your audience (such as their opinions and their experience level), check whether they can recall important information, and gather feedback and metrics. How many times have you been involved in a requirements discussion and someone has asked a question similar to “Well how do you know that no one likes our home page?” and the response is “Everyone says they hate it! That’s all anyone complains about.” No one has any measurable, quantifiable metric to gauge user satisfaction. Analytics measure usage, but your organization also needs to measure the quality of your portal as defined by the actual people that use it. With that information, your leadership can make informed decisions that will not only match usage patterns but also relate to employees on a personal level. The end result is a connection between employees and leadership that gives everyone in the organization a sense of ownership of their Portal rather than the feeling of development decisions being segregated to leadership only. Polls can be created and edited through the Poll Manager: Polls and View Poll Results can easily be added to a page through drag-and-drop. What did we learn? Being a “connected” company doesn’t just mean helping employees connect with each other horizontally across your enterprise. It also means connecting those employees to the decisions that affect their everyday activities. Through WebCenter Portal Usage Analytics and Polls, any decision that is made to remove a Portal page, update a Portal page, or develop new Portal functionality, can be justified by quantifiable metrics. Instead of fielding complaints and hearing that your employees don’t have a voice, give those employees a voice and listen!

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• PowerShell and SMO – be careful how you iterate

  - by Fatherjack

  I’ve yet to have a totally smooth experience with PowerShell and it was late on Friday when I crashed into this problem. I haven’t investigated if this is a generally well understood circumstance and if it is then I apologise for repeating everything. Scenario: I wanted to scan a number of server for many properties, including existing logins and to identify which accounts are bestowed with sysadmin privileges. A great task to pass to PowerShell, so with a heavy heart I started up PowerShellISE and started typing. The script doesn’t come easily to me but I follow the logic of SMO and the properties and methods available with the language so it seemed something I should be able to master. Version #1 of my script. And the results it returns when executed against my home laptop server. These results looked good and for a long time I was concerned with other parts of the script, for all intents and purposes quite happy that this was an accurate assessment of the server. Let’s just review my logic for each step of the code at the top. Lines 1 to 7 just set up our variables and write out the header message Line 8 our first loop, to go through each login on the server Line 10 an inner loop that will assess each role name that each login has been assigned Line 11 a test to see if each role has the name ‘sysadmin’ Line 13 write out the login name with a bright format as it is a sysadmin login Line 17 write out the login name with no formatting It is quite possible that here someone with more PowerShell experience than me will be shouting at their screen pointing at the error I made but to me this made total sense. Until I altered the code, I altered lines 6 and 7 of code above to be: $c = $Svr.Logins.Count write-host “There are $c Logins on the server” This changed my output to look like this: This started alarm bells ringing – there are clearly not 13 logins listed So, let’s see where things are going wrong, edit the script so it looks like this. I’ve highlighted the changes to make Running this code shows me these results Our $n variable should count up by one for each login returned and We are clearly missing some logins. I referenced this list back to Management Studio for my server and see the Logins as below, where there are clearly 13 logins. We see a Login called Annette in SSMS but not in the script results so I opened that up and looked at its properties and it’s server roles in particular. The account has only public access to the server. Inspection of the other logins that the PowerShell script misses out show they too are only members of the public role. Right now I can’t work out whether there is a good reason for this and if it should be expected behaviour or not. Please spend a few minutes to leave a comment if you have an opinion or theory for this. How to get the full list of logins. Clearly I needed to get a full list of the logins so set about reviewing my code to see if there was a better way to iterate through the roles for each login. This is the code that I came up with and I think it is doing everything that I need it to. It gives me the expected results like this: So it seems that the ListMembers() method is the trouble maker in my first versions of the code. I would have expected that ListMembers should return Logins that are only members of the public role, certainly Technet makes no reference to it being left out in it’s Login.ListMembers details. Suffice to say, it’s a lesson learned and I will approach using it with caution in future circumstances.

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• Strategies for invoking subclass methods on generic objects

  - by Brad Patton

  I've run into this issue in a number of places and have solved it a bunch of different ways but looking for other solutions or opinions on how to address. The scenario is when you have a collection of objects all based off of the same superclass but you want to perform certain actions based only on instances of some of the subclasses. One contrived example of this might be an HTML document made up of elements. You could have a superclass named HTMLELement and subclasses of Headings, Paragraphs, Images, Comments, etc. To invoke a common action across all of the objects you declare a virtual method in the superclass and specific implementations in all of the subclasses. So to render the document you could loop all of the different objects in the document and call a common Render() method on each instance. It's the case where again using the same generic objects in the collection I want to perform different actions for instances of specific subclass (or set of subclasses). For example (an remember this is just an example) when iterating over the collection, elements with external links need to be downloaded (e.g. JS, CSS, images) and some might require additional parsing (JS, CSS). What's the best way to handle those special cases. Some of the strategies I've used or seen used include: Virtual methods in the base class. So in the base class you have a virtual LoadExternalContent() method that does nothing and then override it in the specific subclasses that need to implement it. The benefit being that in the calling code there is no object testing you send the same message to each object and let most of them ignore it. Two downsides that I can think of. First it can make the base class very cluttered with methods that have nothing to do with most of the hierarchy. Second it assumes all of the work can be done in the called method and doesn't handle the case where there might be additional context specific actions in the calling code (i.e. you want to do something in the UI and not the model). Have methods on the class to uniquely identify the objects. This could include methods like ClassName() which return a string with the class name or other return values like enums or booleans (IsImage()). The benefit is that the calling code can use if or switch statements to filter objects to perform class specific actions. The downside is that for every new class you need to implement these methods and can look cluttered. Also performance could be less than some of the other options. Use language features to identify objects. This includes reflection and language operators to identify the objects. For example in C# there is the is operator that returns true if the instance matches the specified class. The benefit is no additional code to implement in your object hierarchy. The only downside seems to be the lack of using something like a switch statement and the fact that your calling code is a little more cluttered. Are there other strategies I am missing? Thoughts on best approaches?

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• Is this Hybrid of Interface / Composition kosher?

  - by paul

  I'm working on a project in which I'm considering using a hybrid of interfaces and composition as a single thing. What I mean by this is having a contain*ee* class be used as a front for functionality implemented in a contain*er* class, where the container exposes the containee as a public property. Example (pseudocode): class Visibility(lambda doShow, lambda doHide, lambda isVisible) public method Show() {...} public method Hide() {...} public property IsVisible public event Shown public event Hidden class SomeClassWithVisibility private member visibility = new Visibility(doShow, doHide, isVisible) public property Visibility with get() = visibility private method doShow() {...} private method doHide() {...} private method isVisible() {...} There are three reasons I'm considering this: The language in which I'm working (F#) has some annoyances w.r.t. implementing interfaces the way I need to (unless I'm missing something) and this will help avoid a lot of boilerplate code. The containee classes could really be considered properties of the container class(es); i.e. there seems to be a fairly strong has-a relationship. The containee classes will likely implement code which would have been pretty much the same when implemented in all the container classes, so why not do it once in one place? In the above example, this would include managing and emitting the Shown/Hidden events. Does anyone see any isseus with this Composiface/Intersition method, or know of a better way? EDIT 2012.07.26 - It seems a little background information is warranted: Where I work, we have a bunch of application front-ends that have limited access to system resources -- they need access to these resources to fully function. To remedy this we have a back-end application that can access the needed resources, with which the front-ends can communicate. (There is an API written for the front-ends for accessing back-end functionality as though it were part of the front-end.) The back-end program is out of date and its functionality is incomplete. It has made the transition from company to company a couple of times and we can't even compile it anymore. So I'm trying to rewrite it in my spare time. I'm trying to update things to make a nice(r) interface/API for the front-ends (while allowing for backwards compatibility with older front-ends), hopefully something full of OOPy goodness. The thing is, I don't want to write the front-end API after I've written pretty much the same code in F# for implementing the back-end; so, what I'm planning on doing is applying attributes to classes/methods/properties that I would like to have code for in the API then generate this code from the F# assembly using reflection. The method outlined in this question is a possible alternative I'm considering instead of implementing straight interfaces on the classes in F# because they're kind of a bear: In order to access something of an interface that has been implemented in a class, you have to explicitly cast an instance of that class to the interface type. This would make things painful when getting calls from the front-ends. If you don't want to have to do this, you have to call out all of the interface's methods/properties again in the class, outside of the interface implementation (which is separate from regular class members), and call the implementation's members. This is basically repeating the same code, which is what I'm trying to avoid!

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; dotTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  Jetbrains which is famous for the Resharper tool has also a profiler in its portfolio. I downloaded dotTrace 5.2 Professional (569€+VAT) to check how far I can profile the startup of VS2012. The most interesting startup option is “.NET Process”. With that you can profile the next started .NET process which is very useful if you want to profile an application which is not started by you.     I did select Tracing as and Wall time to get similar options across all profilers. For some reason the attach option did not work with .NET 4.5 on my home machine. But I am sure that it did work with .NET 4.0 some time ago. Since we are profiling devenv.exe we can also select “Standalone Application” and start it from the profiler. The startup time of VS does increase about a factor 3 but that is ok. You get mainly three windows to work with. The first one shows the threads where you can drill down thread wise where most time is spent. I The next window is the call tree which does merge all threads together in a similar view. The last and most useful view in my opinion is the Plain List window which is nearly the same as the Method Grid in Ants Profiler. But this time we do get when I enable the Show system functions checkbox not a 150 but 19407 methods to choose from! I really tried with Ants Profiler to find something about out how VS does work but look how much we were missing! When I double click on a method I do get in the lower pane the called methods and their respective timings. This is something really useful and I can nicely drill down to the most important stuff. The measured time seems to be Wall Clock time which is a good thing to see where my time is really spent. You can also use Sampling as profiling method but this does give you much less information. Except for getting a first idea where to look first this profiling mode is not very useful to understand how you system does interact.   The options have a good list of presets to hide by default many method and gray them out to concentrate on your code. It does not filter anything out if you enable Show system functions. By default methods from these assemblies are hidden or if the checkbox is checked grayed out. All in all JetBrains has made a nice profiler which does show great detail and it has nice drill down capabilities. The only thing is that I do not trust its measured timings. I did fall several times into the trap with this one to optimize at places which were already fast but the profiler did show high times in these methods. After measuring with Tracing I was certain that the measured times were greatly exaggerated. Especially when IO is involved it seems to have a hard time to subtract its own overhead. What I did miss most was the possibility to profile not only the next started process but to be able to select a process by name and perhaps a count to profile the next n processes of this name. Next: YourKit

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• Caching factory design

  - by max

  I have a factory class XFactory that creates objects of class X. Instances of X are very large, so the main purpose of the factory is to cache them, as transparently to the client code as possible. Objects of class X are immutable, so the following code seems reasonable: # module xfactory.py import x class XFactory: _registry = {} def get_x(self, arg1, arg2, use_cache = True): if use_cache: hash_id = hash((arg1, arg2)) if hash_id in _registry: return _registry[hash_id] obj = x.X(arg1, arg2) _registry[hash_id] = obj return obj # module x.py class X: # ... Is it a good pattern? (I know it's not the actual Factory Pattern.) Is there anything I should change? Now, I find that sometimes I want to cache X objects to disk. I'll use pickle for that purpose, and store as values in the _registry the filenames of the pickled objects instead of references to the objects. Of course, _registry itself would have to be stored persistently (perhaps in a pickle file of its own, in a text file, in a database, or simply by giving pickle files the filenames that contain hash_id). Except now the validity of the cached object depends not only on the parameters passed to get_x(), but also on the version of the code that created these objects. Strictly speaking, even a memory-cached object could become invalid if someone modifies x.py or any of its dependencies, and reloads it while the program is running. So far I ignored this danger since it seems unlikely for my application. But I certainly cannot ignore it when my objects are cached to persistent storage. What can I do? I suppose I could make the hash_id more robust by calculating hash of a tuple that contains arguments arg1 and arg2, as well as the filename and last modified date for x.py and every module and data file that it (recursively) depends on. To help delete cache files that won't ever be useful again, I'd add to the _registry the unhashed representation of the modified dates for each record. But even this solution isn't 100% safe since theoretically someone might load a module dynamically, and I wouldn't know about it from statically analyzing the source code. If I go all out and assume every file in the project is a dependency, the mechanism will still break if some module grabs data from an external website, etc.). In addition, the frequency of changes in x.py and its dependencies is quite high, leading to heavy cache invalidation. Thus, I figured I might as well give up some safety, and only invalidate the cache only when there is an obvious mismatch. This means that class X would have a class-level cache validation identifier that should be changed whenever the developer believes a change happened that should invalidate the cache. (With multiple developers, a separate invalidation identifier is required for each.) This identifier is hashed along with arg1 and arg2 and becomes part of the hash keys stored in _registry. Since developers may forget to update the validation identifier or not realize that they invalidated existing cache, it would seem better to add another validation mechanism: class X can have a method that returns all the known "traits" of X. For instance, if X is a table, I might add the names of all the columns. The hash calculation will include the traits as well. I can write this code, but I am afraid that I'm missing something important; and I'm also wondering if perhaps there's a framework or package that can do all of this stuff already. Ideally, I'd like to combine in-memory and disk-based caching.

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• Minimum team development sizes

  - by MarkPearl

  Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario. Two is a partnership, three starts a team For a while I thought that a team was anything more than one and that scrum could be effective methodology with even two people. I have recently adjusted my thinking to a scrum team being a minimum of three, so what happened to two and what do you call it? For me I consider a group of two people working together a partnership - there is value in having a partnership, but some of the dynamics and value that you get from having a team is lost with a partnership. Avoidance of a one on one confrontation The first dynamic I see missing in a partnership is the team motivation to do better and how this is delivered to individuals that are not performing. Take two highly motivated individuals and put them together and you will typically see them continue to perform. Now take a situation where you have two individuals, one performing and one not and the behaviour is totally different compared to a team of three or more individuals. With two people, if one feels the other is not performing it becomes a one on one confrontation. Most people avoid confrontations and so nothing changes. Compare this to a situation where you have three people in a team, 2 performing and 1 not the dynamic is totally different, it is no longer a personal one on one confrontation but a team concern and people seem more willing to encourage the individual not performing and express their dissatisfaction as a team if they do not improve. Avoiding the effects of Tuckman’s Group Development Theory If you are not familiar with Tuckman’s group development theory give it a read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development) In a nutshell with Tuckman’s theory teams go through these stages of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. You want your team to reach and remain in the Performing stage for as long as possible - this is where you get the most value. When you have a partnership of two and you change the individuals in the partnership you basically do a hard reset on the partnership and go back to the beginning of Tuckman’s model each time. This has a major effect on the performance of a team and what they can deliver. What I have seen is that you reduce the effects of Tuckman's theory the more individuals you have in the team (until you hit the maximum team size in which other problems kick in). While you will still experience Tuckman's theory with a team of three, the impact will be greatly reduced compared to two where it is guaranteed every time a change occurs. It's not just in the numbers, it's in the people One final comment - while the actual numbers of a team do play a role, the individuals in the team are even more important - ideally you want to keep individuals working together for an extended period. That doesn't mean that you never change the individuals in a team, or that once someone joins a team they are stuck there - there is value in an individual moving from team to team and getting cross pollination, but the period of time that an individual moves should be in month's or years, not days or weeks. Why? So why is it important to know this? Why is it important to know how a team works and what motivates them? I have been asking myself this question for a while and where I am at right now is this… the aim is to achieve the stage where the sum of the total (team) is greater than the sum of the parts (team members). This is why we form teams and why understanding how they work is a challenge and also extremely stimulating.

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• Problem with creating a deterministic finite automata (DFA) - Mercury

  - by Jabba The hut

  I would like to have a deterministic finite automata (DFA) simulated in Mercury. But I’m s(t)uck at several places. Formally, a DFA is described with the following characteristics: a setOfStates S, an inputAlphabet E <-- summation symbol, a transitionFunction : S × E -- S, a startState s € S, a setOfAcceptableFinalStates F =C S. A DFA will always starts in the start state. Then the DFA will read all the characters on the input, one by one. Based on the current input character and the current state, there will be made to a new state. These transitions are defined in the transitions function. when the DFA is in one of his acceptable final states, after reading the last character, then will the DFA accept the input, If not, then the input will be is rejected. The figure shows a DFA the accepting strings where the amount of zeros, is a plurality of three. Condition 1 is the initial state, and also the only acceptable state. for each input character is the corresponding arc followed to the next state. Link to Figure What must be done A type “mystate” which represents a state. Each state has a number which is used for identification. A type “transition” that represents a possible transition between states. Each transition has a source_state, an input_character, and a final_state. A type “statemachine” that represents the entire DFA. In the solution, the DFA must have the following properties: The set of all states, the input alphabet, a transition function, represented as a set of possible transitions, a set of accepting final states, a current state of the DFA A predicate “init_machine (state machine :: out)” which unifies his arguments with the DFA, as shown as in the Figure. The current state for the DFA is set to his initial state, namely, 1. The input alphabet of the DFA is composed of the characters '0'and '1'. A user can enter a text, which will be controlled by the DFA. the program will continues until the user types Ctrl-D and simulates an EOF. If the user use characters that are not allowed into the input alphabet of the DFA, then there will be an error message end the program will close. (pred require) Example Enter a sentence: 0110 String is not ok! Enter a sentence: 011101 String is not ok! Enter a sentence: 110100 String is ok! Enter a sentence: 000110010 String is ok! Enter a sentence: 011102 Uncaught exception Mercury: Software Error: Character does not belong to the input alphabet! the thing wat I have. :- module dfa. :- interface. :- import_module io. :- pred main(io.state::di, io.state::uo) is det. :- implementation. :- import_module int,string,list,bool. 1 :- type mystate ---> state(int). 2 :- type transition ---> trans(source_state::mystate, input_character::bool, final_state::mystate). 3 (error, finale_state and current_state and input_character) :- type statemachine ---> dfa(list(mystate),list(input_character),list(transition),list(final_state),current_state(mystate)) 4 missing a lot :- pred init_machine(statemachine :: out) is det. %init_machine(statemachine(L_Mystate,0,L_transition,L_final_state,1)) :- <-probably fault 5 not perfect main(!IO) :- io.write_string("\nEnter a sentence: ", !IO), io.read_line_as_string(Input, !IO), ( Invoer = ok(StringVar), S1 = string.strip(StringVar), (if S1 = "mustbeabool" then io.write_string("Sentenceis Ok! ", !IO) else io.write_string("Sentence is not Ok!.", !IO)), main(!IO) ; Invoer = eof ; Invoer = error(ErrorCode), io.format("%s\n", [s(io.error_message(ErrorCode))], !IO) ). Hope you can help me kind regards

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• RemoveHandler Issues with Custom Events

  - by Jeff Certain

  This is a case of things being more complicated that I thought they should be. Since it took a while to figure this one out, I thought it was worth explaining and putting all of the pieces to the answer in one spot. Let me set the stage. Architecturally, I have the notion of generic producers and consumers. These put items onto, and remove items from, a queue. This provides a generic, thread-safe mechanism to load balance the creation and processing of work items in our application. Part of the IProducer(Of T) interface is: 1: Public Interface IProducer(Of T) 2: Event ItemProduced(ByVal sender As IProducer(Of T), ByVal item As T) 3: Event ProductionComplete(ByVal sender As IProducer(Of T)) 4: End Interface Nothing sinister there, is there? In order to simplify our developers’ lives, I wrapped the queue with some functionality to manage the produces and consumers. Since the developer can specify the number of producers and consumers that are spun up, the queue code manages adding event handlers as the producers and consumers are instantiated. Now, we’ve been having some memory leaks and, in order to eliminate the possibility that this was caused by weak references to event handles, I wanted to remove them. This is where it got dicey. My first attempt looked like this: 1: For Each producer As P In Producers 2: RemoveHandler producer.ItemProduced, AddressOf ItemProducedHandler 3: RemoveHandler producer.ProductionComplete, AddressOf ProductionCompleteHandler 4: producer.Dispose() 5: Next What you can’t see in my posted code are the warnings this caused. The 'AddressOf' expression has no effect in this context because the method argument to 'AddressOf' requires a relaxed conversion to the delegate type of the event. Assign the 'AddressOf' expression to a variable, and use the variable to add or remove the method as the handler.  Now, what on earth does that mean? Well, a quick Bing search uncovered a whole bunch of talk about delegates. The first solution I found just changed all parameters in the event handler to Object. Sorry, but no. I used generics precisely because I wanted type safety, not because I wanted to use Object. More searching. Eventually, I found this forum post, where Jeff Shan revealed a missing piece of the puzzle. The other revelation came from Lian_ZA in this post. However, these two only hinted at the solution. Trying some of what they suggested led to finally getting an invalid cast exception that revealed the existence of ItemProducedEventHandler. Hold on a minute! I didn’t create that delegate. There’s nothing even close to that name in my code… except the ItemProduced event in the interface. Could it be? Naaaaah. Hmmm…. Well, as it turns out, there is a delegate created by the compiler for each event. By explicitly creating a delegate that refers to the method in question, implicitly cast to the generated delegate type, I was able to remove the handlers: 1: For Each producer As P In Producers 2: Dim _itemProducedHandler As IProducer(Of T).ItemProducedEventHandler = AddressOf ItemProducedHandler 3: RemoveHandler producer.ItemProduced, _itemProducedHandler 4:  5: Dim _productionCompleteHandler As IProducer(Of T).ProductionCompleteEventHandler = AddressOf ProductionCompleteHandler 6: RemoveHandler producer.ProductionComplete, _productionCompleteHandler 7: producer.Dispose() 8: Next That’s “all” it took to finally be able to remove the event handlers and maintain type-safe code. Hopefully, this will save you the same challenges I had in trying to figure out how to fix this issue!

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• Type of computer for a developer on the road

  - by nabucosound

  Hi developers: I am planning to be traveling through eurasia and asia (russia, china, korea, japan, south east asia...) for a while and, although there are plenty of marvelous things to see and to do, I must keep on working :(. I am a python developer, dedicated mainly to web projects. I use django, sqlite3, browsers, and ocassionaly (only if I have no choice) I install postgres, mysql, apache or any other servers commonly used in the internets. I do my coding on vim, use ssh to connect, lftp to transfer files, IRC, grep/ack... So I spend most of my time in the terminal shells. But I also use IM or Skype to communicate with my clients and peers, as well as some other software (that after all is not mandatory for my day-to-day work). I currently work with a Macbook Pro (3 years old now) and so far I am very happy with the performance. But I don't want to carry it if I am going to be "on transit" for long time, it is simply huge and heavy for what I am planning to load in my rather small backpack (while traveling, less is more, you know). So here I am reading all kind of opinions about netbooks, because at first sight this is the kind of computer I thought I had to choose. I am going to use Linux for it, Microsoft is not my cup of tea and Mac is not available for them, unless I were to buy a Macbook air, something that I won't do because if I am robbed or rain/dust/truck loaders break it I would burst in tears. I am concerned about wifi performance and connectivity, I am going to use one of those linux distros/tools to hack/test on "open" networks (if you know what I mean) in case I am not in a place with real free wifi access and I find myself in an emergency. CPU speed should be acceptable, but since I don't plan to run Photoshop or expensive IDEs, I guess most of the time I won't be overloading the machine. Apart from this, maybe (surely) I am missing other features to consider. With that said (sorry about the length) here it comes my question, raised from a deep ignorance regarding the wars betweeb betbooks vs notebooks (I assume tablet PCs are not for programming yet): If I buy a netbook will I have to throw it away after 1 month on the road and buy a notebook? Or will I be OK? Thanks! Hector Update I have received great feedback so far! I would like to insist on the fact that I will be traveling through many different countries and scenarios. I am sure that while in Japan I will be more than fine with anything related to technology, connectivity, etc. But consider that I will be, for example, on a train through Russia (transsiberian) and will cross Mongolia as well. I will stay in friends' places sometimes, but most of the time I will have to work from hostel rooms, trains, buses, beaches (hey this last one doesn't sound too bad hehe!). I think some of your answers guys seem to focus on the geek part but loose the point of this "on the road" fact. I am very aware and agree that netbooks suck compared to notebooks, but what I am trying to do here is to find a balance and discover your experiences with netbooks to see first hand if a netbook will be a fail in the mid-long term of the trip for my purposes. So I have resumed the main concepts expressed here on this small list, in no particular order: keyboard/touchpad feel: I use vim so no need of moving mouse pointers that much, unless I am browsing the web, but intensive use of keyboard screen real state: again, terminal work for most of the time battery life: I think something very important weight/size: also very important looks not worth stealing it, don't give a shit if it is lost/stolen/broken: this may depend on kind of person, your economy, etc. Also to prevent losing work, I will upload EVERYTHING to the cloud whenever I'll have a chance. wifi: don't want to discover my wifi is one of those that cannot deal with half the routers on this planet or has poor connectivity. Thanks again for your answers and comments!

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• At what point does "constructive" criticism of your code become unhelpful?

  - by user15859

  I recently started as a junior developer. As well as being one of the least experienced people on the team, I'm also a woman, which comes with all sorts of its own challenges working in a male-dominated environment. I've been having problems lately because I feel like I am getting too much unwarranted pedantic criticism on my work. Let me give you an example of what happened recently. Team lead was too busy to push in some branches I made, so he didn't get to them until the weekend. I checked my mail, not really meaning to do any work, and found that my two branches had been rejected on the basis of variable names, making error messages more descriptive, and moving some values to the config file. I don't feel that rejecting my branch on this basis is useful. Lots of people were working over the weekend, and I had never said that I would be working. Effectively, some people were probably blocked because I didn't have time to make the changes and resubmit. We are working on a project that is very time-sensitive, and it seems to me that it's not helpful to outright reject code based on things that are transparent to the client. I may be wrong, but it seems like these kinds of things should be handled in patch type commits when I have time. Now, I can see that in some environments, this would be the norm. However, the criticism doesn't seem equally distributed, which is what leads to my next problem. The basis of most of these problems was due to the fact that I was in a codebase that someone else had written and was trying to be minimally invasive. I was mimicking the variable names used elsewhere in the file. When I stated this, I was bluntly told, "Don't mimic others, just do what's right." This is perhaps the least useful thing I could have been told. If the code that is already checked in is unacceptable, how am I supposed to tell what is right and what is wrong? If the basis of the confusion was coming from the underlying code, I don't think it's my responsibility to spend hours refactoring a whole file that someone else wrote (and works perfectly well), potentially introducing new bugs etc. I'm feeling really singled out and frustrated in this situation. I've gotten a lot better about following the standards that are expected, and I feel frustrated that, for example, when I refactor a piece of code to ADD error checking that was previously missing, I'm only told that I didn't make the errors verbose enough (and the branch was rejected on this basis). What if I had never added it to begin with? How did it get into the code to begin with if it was so wrong? This is why I feel so singled out: I constantly run into this existing problematic code, that I either mimic or refactor. When I mimic it, it's "wrong", and if I refactor it, I'm chided for not doing enough (and if I go all the way, introducing bugs, etc). Again, if this is such a problem, I don't understand how any code gets into the codebase, and why it becomes my responsibility when it was written by someone else, who apparently didn't have their code reviewed. Anyway, how do I deal with this? Please remember that I said at the top that I'm a woman, and I'm sure these guys don't usually have to worry about decorum when they're reviewing other guys' code, but honestly that doesn't work for me, and it's causing me to be less productive. I'm worried that if I talk to my manager about it, he'll think I can't handled the environment, etc.

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• Designing An ACL Based Permission System

  - by ryanzec

  I am trying to create a permissions system where everything is going to be stored in MySQL (or some database) and pulled using PHP for a project management system I am building.  I am right now trying to do it is an ACL kind of way.  There are a number key features I want to be able to support: 1.  Being able to assign permissions without being tied to a specific object. The reason for this is that I want to be able to selectively show/hide elements of the UI based on permissions at a point where I am not directly looking at a domain object instance.  For instance, a button to create a new project should only should only be shown to users that have the pm.project.create permission but obviously you can assign a create permission to an domain object instance (as it is already created). 2.  Not have to assign permissions for every single object. Obviously creating permissions entries for every single object (projects, tickets, comments, etc…) would become a nightmare to maintain so I want to have some level of permission inheritance. *3.  Be able to filter queries based on permissions. This would be a really nice to have but I am not sure if it is possible.  What I mean by this is say I have a page that list all projects.  I want the query that pulls all projects to incorporate the ACL so that it would not show projects that the current user does not have pm.project.read access to.  This would have to be incorporated into the main query as if it is a process that is done after that main query (which I know I could do) certain features like pagination become much more difficult. Right now this is my basic design for the tables: AclEntities id - the primary key key - the unique identifier for the domain object (usually the primary key of that object) parentId - the parent of the domain object (like the project object if this was a ticket object) aclDomainObjectId - metadata about the domain object AclDomainObjects id - primary key title - simple string to unique identify the domain object(ie. project, ticket, comment, etc…) fullyQualifiedClassName - the fully qualified class name for use in code (I am using namespaces) There would also be tables mapping AclEntities to Users and UserGroups. I also have this interface that all acl entity based object have to implement: IAclEntity getAclKey() - to the the unique key for this specific instance of the acl domain object (generally return the primary key or a concatenated string of a composite primary key) getAclTitle() - to get the unique title for the domain object (generally just returning a static string) getAclDisplayString() - get the string that represents this entity (generally one or more field on the object) getAclParentEntity() - get the parent acl entity object (or null if no parent) getAclEntity() - get the acl enitty object for this instance of the domain object (or null if one has not been created yet) hasPermission($permissionString, $user = null) - whether or not the user has the permission for this instance of the domain object static getFromAclEntityId($aclEntityId) - get a specific instance of the domain object from an acl entity id. Do any of these features I am looking for seems hard to support or are just way off base? Am I missing or not taking in account anything in my implementation? Is performance something I should keep in mind?

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• SharePoint For Newbie Developers: Code Scope

  - by Mark Rackley

  So, I continue to try to come up with diagrams and information to help new SharePoint developers wrap their heads around this SharePoint beast, especially when those newer to development are on my team. To that end, I drew up the below diagram to help some of our junior devs understand where/when code is being executed in SharePoint at a high level. Note that I say “High Level”… This is a simplistic diagram that can get a LOT more complicated if you want to dive in deeper.  For the purposes of my lesson it served its purpose well. So, please no comments from you peanut gallery about information 3 levels down that’s missing unless it adds to the discussion.  Thanks So, the diagram below details where code is executed on a page load and gives the basic flow of the page load. There are actually many more steps, but again, we are staying high level here. I just know someone is still going to say something like “Well.. actually… the dlls are getting executed when…”  Anyway, here’s the diagram with some information I like to point out: Code Scope / Where it is executed So, looking at the diagram we see that dlls and XSL are executed on the server and that JavaScript/jQuery are executed on the client. This is the main thing I like to point out for the following reasons: XSL (for the most part) is faster than JavaScript I actually get this question a lot. Since XSL is executed on the server less data is getting passed over the wire and a beefier machine (hopefully) is doing the processing. The outcome of course is better performance. When You are using jQuery and making Web Service calls you are building XML strings and sending them to the server, then ALL the results come back and the client machine has to parse through the XML and use what it needs and ignore the rest (and there is a lot of garbage that comes back from SharePoint Web Service calls). XSL and JavaScript cannot work together in the same scope Let me clarify. JavaScript can send data back to SharePoint in postbacks that XSL can then use. XSL can output JavaScript and initiate JavaScript variables.  However, XSL cannot call a JavaScript method to get a value and JavaScript cannot directly interact with XSL and call its templates. They are executed in there scope only. No crossing of boundaries here. So, what does this all mean? Well, nothing too deep. This is just some basic fundamental information that all SharePoint devs need to understand. It will help you determine what is the best solution for your specific development situation and it will help the new guys understand why they get an error when trying to call a JavaScript Function from within XSL.  Let me know if you think quick little blogs like this are helpful or just add to the noise. I could probably put together several more that are similar.  As always, thanks for stopping by, hope you learned something new.

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• Modernizr Rocks HTML5

  - by Laila

  HTML5 is a moving target.  At the moment, we don't know what will be in future versions.  In most circumstances, this really matters to the developer. When you're using Adobe Air, you can be reasonably sure what works, what is there, and what isn't, since you have a version of the browser built-in. With Metro, you can assume that you're going to be using at least IE 10.   If, however,  you are using HTML5 in a web application, then you are going to rely heavily on Feature Detection.  Feature-Detection is a collection of techniques that tell you, via JavaScript, whether the current browser has this feature natively implemented or not Feature Detection isn't just there for the esoteric stuff such as  Geo-location,  progress bars,  <canvas> support,  the new <input> types, Audio, Video, web workers or storage, but is required even for semantic markup, since old browsers make a pigs ear out of rendering this.  Feature detection can't rely just on reading the browser version and inferring from that what works. Instead, you must use JavaScript to check that an HTML5 feature is there before using it.  The problem with relying on the user-agent is that it takes a lot of historical data  to work out what version does what, and, anyway, the user-agent can be, and sometimes is, spoofed. The open-source library Modernizr  is just about the most essential  JavaScript library for anyone using HTML5, because it provides APIs to test for most of the CSS3 and HTML5 features before you use them, and is intelligent enough to alter semantic markup into 'legacy' 'markup  using shims  on page-load  for old browsers. It also allows you to check what video Codecs are installed for playing video. It also provides media queries  and conditional resource-loading (formerly YepNope.js.).  Generally, Modernizr gives you the choice of what you do about browsers that don't support the feature that you want. Often, the best choice is graceful degradation, but the resource-loading feature allows you to dynamically load JavaScript Shims to replace the standard API for missing or defective HTML5 functionality, called 'PolyFills'.  As the Modernizr site says 'Yes, not only can you use HTML5 today, but you can use it in the past, too!' The evolutionary progress of HTML5  requires a more defensive style of JavaScript programming where the programmer adopts a mindset of fearing the worst ( IE 6)  rather than assuming the best, whilst exploiting as many of the new HTML features as possible for the requirements of the site or HTML application.  Why would anyone want the distraction of developing their own techniques to do this when  Modernizr exists to do this for you? Laila

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• Would this be a good web application architecture?

  - by Gustav Bertram

  My problem Our MVC based framework does not allow us to cache only part of our output. Ideally we want to cahce static and semi-static bits, and run dynamic bits. In addition, we need to consider data caching that reacts to database changes. My idea The concept I came up with was to represent a page as a tree of XML fragment objects. (I say XML, but I mean XHTML). Some of the fragments are dynamic, and can pull their data directly from models or other sources, but most of the fragments are static scaffolding. If a subtree of fragments is completely static, then I imagine that they could unfold into pure XML that would then be cached as the text representation of their parent element. This process would ideally continue until we are left with a root element that contains all of the static XML, and has a couple of dynamic XML fragments that are resolved and attached to the relevant nodes of the XML tree just before the page is displayed. In addition to separating content into dynamic and static fragments, some fragments could be dynamic and cached. A simple expiry time which propagates up through the XML fragment tree would indicate that a specific fragment should periodically be refreshed. A newspaper section or front page does not need to be updated each second. Minutes or sometimes even longer is sufficient. Other fragments would be dynamic and uncached. Typically too many articles are viewed for them to be cached - the cache would overflow. Some individual articles may be cached if they are extremely popular. Functional notes The folding mechanism could be to be smart enough to judge when it would be more profitable to fold a dynamic cached fragment and propagate the expiry date to the parent fragment, or to keep it separate and simple attach to the XML tree when resolving the page. If some dynamic cached fragments are associated to database objects through mechanisms like a globally unique content id, then changes to the database could trigger changes to the output cache. If fragments store the identifiers of parent fragments, then they could trigger a refolding process that would then include the updated data. A set of pure XML with an ordered array of fragment objects (that each store the identifying information of the node to which they should be attached), can be resolved in a fairly simple way by walking the XML tree, and merging the data from the fragments. Because it is not necessary to parse and construct the entire tree in memory before attaching nodes, processing should be fairly fast. The identifiers of each fragment would be a combination of relevant identity data and the type of fragment object. Cached parent fragments would contain references to these identifiers, in order to then either pull them from the fragment cache, or to run their code. The controller's responsibility is reduced to making changes to the database, and telling the root XML fragment object to render itself. The Question My question has two parts: Is this a good design? Are there any obvious flaws I'm missing? Has somebody else thought of this before? References? Is there an existing alternative that I should consider? A cool templating engine maybe?

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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• Problem with sprite direction and rotation

  - by user2236165

  I have a sprite called Tool that moves with a speed represented as a float and in a direction represented as a Vector2. When I click the mouse on the screen the sprite change its direction and starts to move towards the mouseclick. In addition to that I rotate the sprite so that it is facing in the direction it is heading. However, when I add a camera that is suppose to follow the sprite so that the sprite is always centered on the screen, the sprite won't move in the given direction and the rotation isn't accurate anymore. This only happens when I add the Camera.View in the spriteBatch.Begin(). I was hoping anyone could maybe shed a light on what I am missing in my code, that would be highly appreciated. Here is the camera class i use: public class Camera { private const float zoomUpperLimit = 1.5f; private const float zoomLowerLimit = 0.1f; private float _zoom; private Vector2 _pos; private int ViewportWidth, ViewportHeight; #region Properties public float Zoom { get { return _zoom; } set { _zoom = value; if (_zoom < zoomLowerLimit) _zoom = zoomLowerLimit; if (_zoom > zoomUpperLimit) _zoom = zoomUpperLimit; } } public Rectangle Viewport { get { int width = (int)((ViewportWidth / _zoom)); int height = (int)((ViewportHeight / _zoom)); return new Rectangle((int)(_pos.X - width / 2), (int)(_pos.Y - height / 2), width, height); } } public void Move(Vector2 amount) { _pos += amount; } public Vector2 Position { get { return _pos; } set { _pos = value; } } public Matrix View { get { return Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-_pos.X, -_pos.Y, 0)) * Matrix.CreateScale(new Vector3(Zoom, Zoom, 1)) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(ViewportWidth * 0.5f, ViewportHeight * 0.5f, 0)); } } #endregion public Camera(Viewport viewport, float initialZoom) { _zoom = initialZoom; _pos = Vector2.Zero; ViewportWidth = viewport.Width; ViewportHeight = viewport.Height; } } And here is my Update and Draw-method: protected override void Update (GameTime gameTime) { float elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; TouchCollection touchCollection = TouchPanel.GetState (); foreach (TouchLocation tl in touchCollection) { if (tl.State == TouchLocationState.Pressed || tl.State == TouchLocationState.Moved) { //direction the tool shall move towards direction = touchCollection [0].Position - toolPos; if (direction != Vector2.Zero) { direction.Normalize (); } //change the direction the tool is moving and find the rotationangle the texture must rotate to point in given direction toolPos += (direction * speed * elapsed); RotationAngle = (float)Math.Atan2 (direction.Y, direction.X); } } if (direction != Vector2.Zero) { direction.Normalize (); } //move tool in given direction toolPos += (direction * speed * elapsed); //change cameracentre to the tools position Camera.Position = toolPos; base.Update (gameTime); } protected override void Draw (GameTime gameTime) { graphics.GraphicsDevice.Clear (Color.Blue); spriteBatch.Begin (SpriteSortMode.BackToFront, BlendState.AlphaBlend, null, null, null, null, Camera.View); spriteBatch.Draw (tool, new Vector2 (toolPos.X, toolPos.Y), null, Color.White, RotationAngle, originOfToolTexture, 1, SpriteEffects.None, 1); spriteBatch.End (); base.Draw (gameTime); }

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• Free hosting solution for a very low-traffic website [duplicate]

  - by user966939

  This question already has an answer here: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? 4 answers I run a very low-traffic website (about 40 users, basically all of which are daily active on the site). I don't see it changing anytime soon either, as there is no way to sign up on the site right now. Until now I have just been using a sub-directory on a friend's host (shared), to host the web site. But in only a few weeks from now, his subscription will end, and he has no plans on renewing it. So of course this means I'll have to move on to something else. But I don't think I'll find someone who'd be willing to share a... shared host with me again. And besides, the software used on that server is ancient (PHP 4.4.9 + MySQL 4.1.22). There's one obvious solution that comes to mind, I guess: choose a better host and pay for it myself. The problem here is that I have no real fixed income, as I'm only a student. So even if the pricing is dirt cheap, I just can't be certain I will be able to afford it, every single month, for... at least 2 years maybe? So I've looked at free hosting solutions instead. The least requirement I had was that it was completely free of ads. But no matter where I look, I always find something in a corner or two ("what can you expect from a free host?" - yeah I know, but I guess it was worth a shot). For example, on Byethost (one of the free hosts I tried), if you trigger a PHP error while error reporting is set to E_ALL, you will spawn some hidden ad... Besides Byethost, I've tried 000Webhost, x10Hosting, 2Freehosting/1Freehosting, Wink.ws, and they are only worse. Okay, I'm running low on ideas. But! What if I just hosted the site myself, on my own computer? That could work. I actually do have my computer on practically 24/7. But not really. Sometimes I need to reboot it, and sometimes we even have power outages. And what if the hardware needs an upgrade? It's not such a big deal for me if the site went down, because I know what's going on; but what about the users? If I do decide to host it myself, is there some way to show users an alternate page instead of them just seeing a generic "server not found" page in the browser when the site is not accessible? Or is there something I have been missing out on? Is there a different kind of "web hosting" solution out there that I haven't heard of? Here is what I'm really looking for: Free (as in, no costs) NO ads Bandwidth enough for a low-traffic forum with roughly 40 users (Semi-)Up-to-date PHP and MySQL (at least not older than a year) No standard (non-extension) PHP functions turned off - such as sleep() The mbstring extension is enabled Disk space: at least 5 MB At least one MySQL database Some bonus points would be: Max execution time of PHP scripts can be set Remote access to MySQL database What would be the best solution for me? Is there one?

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• Getting Audio from a Zone

  - by bleonard

  Now that I have Firefox and Java Web Start running from a zone, the last piece of the puzzle was audio (essential because most Flash content is accompanied by sound).  In the global zone there's a nice little utility called audiotest for testing your sound: bleonard@solaris:~$ audiotest Sound subsystem and version: SunOS Audio 4.0 (0x00040003) Platform: SunOS 5.11 snv_151a i86pc *** Scanning sound adapter #1 *** /dev/sound/audio810:0dsp (audio engine 0): audio810#0 - Performing audio playback test... <left> ................OK <right> ...............OK <stereo> ..............OK <measured sample rate 47727.00 Hz (-0.57%)> *** All tests completed OK *** Of course, before you can try audiotest in a zone, it must be installed: root@myzone:~# pkg install audio-utilities Packages to install: 1 Create boot environment: No DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 1/1 6/6 0.4/0.4 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 20/20 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 However, we'll need to do more than just install audiotest: root@myzone:~# audiotest /dev/mixer: No such file or directory The device file is missing from /dev. The audio devices also need to be added to the zone. For this we modify the zone configuration as follows: bleonard@solaris:~$ sudo zonecfg -z myzone Password: zonecfg:myzone> add device zonecfg:myzone:device> set match=/dev/audio* zonecfg:myzone:device> end zonecfg:myzone> add device zonecfg:myzone:device> set match=/dev/sound/* zonecfg:myzone:device> end zonecfg:myzone> add device zonecfg:myzone:device> set match=/dev/mixer* zonecfg:myzone:device> end zonecfg:myzone> add device zonecfg:myzone:device> set match=/dev/sndstat zonecfg:myzone:device> end zonecfg:myzone> verify zonecfg:myzone> exit Then reboot the zone: bleonard@solaris:~$ sudo zoneadm -z myzone reboot After which, audiotest should work: root@myzone:~# audiotest Sound subsystem and version: SunOS Audio 4.0 (0x00040003) Platform: SunOS 5.11 snv_151a i86pc *** Scanning sound adapter #1 *** /dev/sound/audio810:0dsp (audio engine 0): audio810#0 - Performing audio playback test... <left> ................OK <right> ...............OK <stereo> ..............OK <measured sample rate 48208.00 Hz (0.43%)> *** All tests completed OK *** You can also examine /dev/sndstat for additional information: root@myzone:~# cat /dev/sndstat SunOS Audio Framework Audio Devices: 0: audio810#0 Intel AC'97, ICH (DUPLEX) Mixers: 0: audio810#0 Intel AC'97, ICH AC'97 codec: SigmaTel STAC9700 However, when testing the sound from Firefox (from a user account other than root), such as this recent Flash presentation on Solaris availability, you may still be disappointed. This is simply a permissions problem, as the devices only have read and write permissions for root: root@myzone:~# ls -l /dev/audio* crw------- 1 root root 99, 3 Jul 1 10:21 /dev/audio crw------- 1 root root 99, 4 Jul 1 10:21 /dev/audioctl To address this: root@myzone:~# chmod 777 /dev/audio* root@myzone:~# chmod 777 /dev/sound/* And you should be all set.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercising Externally

  - by simonc

  Over the next few weeks, we'll be performing experiments on SmartAssembly to confirm or refute various hypotheses we have about how people use the product, what is stopping them from using it to its full extent, and what we can change to make it more useful and easier to use. Some of these experiments can be done within the team, some within Red Gate, and some need to be done on external users. External testing Some external testing can be done by standard usability tests and surveys, however, there are some hypotheses that can only be tested by building a version of SmartAssembly with some things in the UI or implementation changed. We'll then be able to look at how the experimental build is used compared to the 'mainline' build, which forms our baseline or control group, and use this data to confirm or refute the relevant hypotheses. However, there are several issues we need to consider before running experiments using separate builds: Ideally, the user wouldn't know they're running an experimental SmartAssembly. We don't want users to use the experimental build like it's an experimental build, we want them to use it like it's the real mainline build. Only then will we get valid, useful, and informative data concerning our hypotheses. There's no point running the experiments if we can't find out what happens after the download. To confirm or refute some of our hypotheses, we need to find out how the tool is used once it is installed. Fortunately, we've applied feature usage reporting to the SmartAssembly codebase itself to provide us with that information. Of course, this then makes the experimental data conditional on the user agreeing to send that data back to us in the first place. Unfortunately, even though this does limit the amount of useful data we'll be getting back, and possibly skew the data, there's not much we can do about this; we don't collect feature usage data without the user's consent. Looks like we'll simply have to live with this. What if the user tries to buy the experiment? This is something that isn't really covered by the Lean Startup book; how do you support users who give you money for an experiment? If the experiment is a new feature, and the user buys a license for SmartAssembly based on that feature, then what do we do if we later decide to pivot & scrap that feature? We've either got to spend time and money bringing that feature up to production quality and into the mainline anyway, or we've got disgruntled customers. Either way is bad. Again, there's not really any good solution to this. Similarly, what if we've removed some features for an experiment and a potential new user downloads the experimental build? (As I said above, there's no indication the build is an experimental build, as we want to see what users really do with it). The crucial feature they need is missing, causing a bad trial experience, a lost potential customer, and a lost chance to help the customer with their problem. Again, this is something not really covered by the Lean Startup book, and something that doesn't have a good solution. So, some tricky issues there, not all of them with nice easy answers. Turns out the practicalities of running Lean Startup experiments are more complicated than they first seem! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Career-Defining Moments

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2013/06/25/career-defining-moments.aspx Fear holds us back from many things. A little fear is healthy, but don’t let it overwhelm you into missing opportunities. In every career there is a moment when you can either step forward and define yourself, or sit down and regret it later. Why do we hold back: is it fear, constraints, family concerns, or that we simply can't do it? I think in many cases it comes to the unknown, and we are good at fearing the unknown. Some people hold back because they are fearful of what they don’t know. Some hold back because they are fearful of learning new things. Some hold back simply because to take on a new challenge it means they have to give something else up. The phrase sometimes used is “It’s the devil you know versus the one you don’t.” That fear sometimes allows us to miss great opportunities. In many people’s case it is the opportunity to go into business for yourself, to start something that never existed. Most hold back hear for a fear of failing. We’ve all heard the phrase “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”, which is intended to get people to think about the opportunities they might create. A better term I heard recently on the Ruby Rogues podcast was “What would be worth doing even if you knew you were going to fail?” I think that wording suits the intent better. If you knew (or thought) going in that you were going to fail and you didn’t care, it would open you up to the possibility of paying more attention to the journey and not the outcome. In my case it is a fear of acceptance. I am fearful that I may not learn what I need to learn or may not do a good enough job to be accepted. At the same time that fear drives me and makes me want to leap forward. Some folks would define this as “The Flinch”. I’m learning Ruby and Puppet right now. I have limited experience with both, limited to the degree it scares me some that I don’t know much about either. Okay, it scares me quite a bit! Some people’s defining moment might be going to work for Microsoft. All of you who know me know that I am in love with automation, from low-tech to high-tech automation. So for me, my “mecca” is a little different in that regard. Awhile back I sat down and defined where I wanted my career to go and it had to do more with DevOps, defined as applying developer practices to system administration operations (I could not find this definition when I searched). It’s an area that interests me and why I really want to expand chocolatey into something more awesome. I want to see Windows be as automatable and awesome as other operating systems that are out there. Back to the career-defining moment. Sometimes these moments only come once in a lifetime. The key is to recognize when you are in one of these moments and step back to evaluate it before choosing to dive in head first. So I am about to embark on what I define as one of these “moments.”  On July 1st I will be joining Puppet Labs and working to help make the Windows automation experience rock solid! I’m both scared and excited about the opportunity!

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• How do I add a header to a VB.NET 2008 SOAP request? [migrated]

  - by robokev

  I have a VB.NET 2008 program that accesses a Siebel web service defined by a WSDL and using the SOAP protocol. The Siebel web service requires that a header containing the username, password and session type be included with the service request, but the header is not defined in the WSDL. So, when I test the WSDL using the soapUI utility, the request as defined by the WSDL looks like this: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:lov="http://www.siebel.com/xml/LOVService" xmlns:lis="http://www.siebel.com/xml/ListQuery"> <soapenv:Header/> <soapenv:Body> <lov:EAILOVGetListOfValues_Input> <lis:ListsQuery> <lis:ListQuery> <lis:Active>Y</lis:Active> <lis:LanguageCode>ENU</lis:LanguageCode> <lis:Type>CUT_ACCOUNT_TYPE</lis:Type> </lis:ListQuery> </lis:ListsQuery> </lov:EAILOVGetListOfValues_Input> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> But the above does not work because it contains an empty header that is missing user and session credentials. It only works if I manually replace <soapenv:Header/> with a header containing the username, password, and session type as follows: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:lov="http://www.siebel.com/xml/LOVService" xmlns:lis="http://www.siebel.com/xml/ListQuery"> <soapenv:Header> <UsernameToken xmlns="http://siebel.com/webservices">TESTUSER</UsernameToken> <PasswordText xmlns="http://siebel.com/webservices">TESTPASSWORD</PasswordText> <SessionType xmlns="http://siebel.com/webservices">None</SessionType> </soapenv:Header> <soapenv:Body> <lov:EAILOVGetListOfValues_Input> <lis:ListsQuery> <lis:ListQuery> <lis:Active>Y</lis:Active> <lis:LanguageCode>ENU</lis:LanguageCode> <lis:Type>CUT_ACCOUNT_TYPE</lis:Type> </lis:ListQuery> </lis:ListsQuery> </lov:EAILOVGetListOfValues_Input> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> My problem is that I cannot sort out how to translate the above into VB.NET 2008 code. I have no problem importing the WSDL into Visual Studio 2008, defining the service in VB code and referencing the web service methods. However, I cannot sort out how to define the web service in VB such that the updated header in included in the web service request instead of the empty header. Consequently all my service requests from VB fail. I can define a class that inherits from the SoapHeader class... Public Class MySoapHeader : Inherits System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHeader Public Username As String Public Password As String Public SessionType As String End Class ...but how do I include this header in the SOAP request made from VB?

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• Faster Memory Allocation Using vmtasks

  - by Steve Sistare

  You may have noticed a new system process called "vmtasks" on Solaris 11 systems: % pgrep vmtasks 8 % prstat -p 8 PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP 8 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 9:10:59 0.0% vmtasks/32 What is vmtasks, and why should you care? In a nutshell, vmtasks accelerates creation, locking, and destruction of pages in shared memory segments. This is particularly helpful for locked memory, as creating a page of physical memory is much more expensive than creating a page of virtual memory. For example, an ISM segment (shmflag & SHM_SHARE_MMU) is locked in memory on the first shmat() call, and a DISM segment (shmflg & SHM_PAGEABLE) is locked using mlock() or memcntl(). Segment operations such as creation and locking are typically single threaded, performed by the thread making the system call. In many applications, the size of a shared memory segment is a large fraction of total physical memory, and the single-threaded initialization is a scalability bottleneck which increases application startup time. To break the bottleneck, we apply parallel processing, harnessing the power of the additional CPUs that are always present on modern platforms. For sufficiently large segments, as many of 16 threads of vmtasks are employed to assist an application thread during creation, locking, and destruction operations. The segment is implicitly divided at page boundaries, and each thread is given a chunk of pages to process. The per-page processing time can vary, so for dynamic load balancing, the number of chunks is greater than the number of threads, and threads grab chunks dynamically as they finish their work. Because the threads modify a single application address space in compressed time interval, contention on locks protecting VM data structures locks was a problem, and we had to re-scale a number of VM locks to get good parallel efficiency. The vmtasks process has 1 thread per CPU and may accelerate multiple segment operations simultaneously, but each operation gets at most 16 helper threads to avoid monopolizing CPU resources. We may reconsider this limit in the future. Acceleration using vmtasks is enabled out of the box, with no tuning required, and works for all Solaris platform architectures (SPARC sun4u, SPARC sun4v, x86). The following tables show the time to create + lock + destroy a large segment, normalized as milliseconds per gigabyte, before and after the introduction of vmtasks: ISM system ncpu before after speedup ------ ---- ------ ----- ------- x4600 32 1386 245 6X X7560 64 1016 153 7X M9000 512 1196 206 6X T5240 128 2506 234 11X T4-2 128 1197 107 11x DISM system ncpu before after speedup ------ ---- ------ ----- ------- x4600 32 1582 265 6X X7560 64 1116 158 7X M9000 512 1165 152 8X T5240 128 2796 198 14X (I am missing the data for T4 DISM, for no good reason; it works fine). The following table separates the creation and destruction times: ISM, T4-2 before after ------ ----- create 702 64 destroy 495 43 To put this in perspective, consider creating a 512 GB ISM segment on T4-2. Creating the segment would take 6 minutes with the old code, and only 33 seconds with the new. If this is your Oracle SGA, you save over 5 minutes when starting the database, and you also save when shutting it down prior to a restart. Those minutes go directly to your bottom line for service availability.

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• Upgrade to Xubuntu 13.10 - Saucy Salamander

  As a common 'fashion' it is possible to upgrade an existing installation of Ubuntu or one of its derivates every six months. Of course, you might opt-in for the adventure and directly keep your system always on the latest version (including alphas and betas), or you might like to play safe and stay on the long-term support (LTS) versions which are updated every two years only. As for me, I'd like to jump from release to release on my main desktop machine. And since 17th October Saucy Salamander or also known as Ubuntu 13.10 has been released for general use. The following paragraphs document the steps I went in order to upgrade my system to the recent version. Don't worry about the fact that I'm actually using Xubuntu. It's mainly a flavoured version of Ubuntu running Xfce 4.10 as default X Window manager. Well, I have Gnome and LXDE on the same system... just out of couriosity. Preparing the system Before you think about upgrading you have to ensure that your current system is running on the latest packages. This can be done easily via a terminal like so: $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade --fix-missing Next, we are going to initiate the upgrade itself: $ sudo update-manager As a result the graphical Software Updater should inform you that a newer version of Ubuntu is available for installation. Ubuntu's Software Updater informs you whether an upgrade is available Running the upgrade After clicking 'Upgrade...' you will be presented with information about the new version. Details about Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Simply continue with the procedure and your system will be analysed for the next steps. Analysing the existing system and preparing the actual upgrade to 13.10 Next, we are at the point of no return. Last confirmation dialog before having a coffee break while your machine is occupied to download the necessary packages. Not the best bandwidth at hand after all... yours might be faster. Are you really sure that you want to start the upgrade? Let's go and have fun! Anyway, bye bye Raring Ringtail and Welcome Saucy Salamander! In case that you added any additional repositories like Medibuntu or PPAs you will be informed that they are going to be disabled during the upgrade and they might require some manual intervention after completion. Ubuntu is playing safe and third party repositories are disabled during the upgrade Well, depending on your internet bandwidth this might take something between a couple of minutes and some hours to download all the packages and then trigger the actual installation process. In my case I left my PC unattended during the night. Time to reboot Finally, it's time to restart your system and see what's going to happen... In my case absolutely nothing unexpected. The system booted the new kernel 3.11.0 as usual and I was greeted by a new login screen. Honestly, 'same' system as before - which is good and I love that fact of consistency - and I can continue to work productively. And also Software Updater confirms that we just had a painless upgrade: System is running Ubuntu 13.10 - Saucy Salamander - and up to date See you in six months again... ;-) Post-scriptum In case that you would to upgrade to the latest development version of Ubuntu, run the following command in a console: $ sudo update-manager -d And repeat all steps as described above.

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• Is my implementation of A* wrong?

  - by Bloodyaugust

  I've implemented the A* algorithm in my program. However, it would seem to be functioning incorrectly at times. Below is a screenshot of one such time. The obviously shorter line is to go immediately right at the second to last row. Instead, they move down, around the tower, and continue to their destination (bottom right from top left). Below is my actual code implementation: nodeMap.prototype.findPath = function(p1, p2) { var openList = []; var closedList = []; var nodes = this.nodes; for (var i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++) { //reset heuristics and parents for nodes var curNode = nodes[i]; curNode.f = 0; curNode.g = 0; curNode.h = 0; curNode.parent = null; if (curNode.pathable === false) { closedList.push(curNode); } } openList.push(this.getNode(p1)); while(openList.length > 0) { // Grab the lowest f(x) to process next var lowInd = 0; for(i=0; i<openList.length; i++) { if(openList[i].f < openList[lowInd].f) { lowInd = i; } } var currentNode = openList[lowInd]; if (currentNode === this.getNode(p2)) { var curr = currentNode; var ret = []; while(curr.parent) { ret.push(curr); curr = curr.parent; } return ret.reverse(); } closedList.push(currentNode); for (i = 0; i < openList.length; i++) { //remove currentNode from openList if (openList[i] === currentNode) { openList.splice(i, 1); break; } } for (i = 0; i < currentNode.neighbors.length; i++) { if(closedList.indexOf(currentNode.neighbors[i]) !== -1 ) { continue; } if (currentNode.neighbors[i].isPathable === false) { closedList.push(currentNode.neighbors[i]); continue; } var gScore = currentNode.g + 1; // 1 is the distance from a node to it's neighbor var gScoreIsBest = false; if (openList.indexOf(currentNode.neighbors[i]) === -1) { //save g, h, and f then save the current parent gScoreIsBest = true; currentNode.neighbors[i].h = currentNode.neighbors[i].heuristic(this.getNode(p2)); openList.push(currentNode.neighbors[i]); } else if (gScore < currentNode.neighbors[i].g) { //current g better than previous g gScoreIsBest = true; } if (gScoreIsBest) { currentNode.neighbors[i].parent = currentNode; currentNode.neighbors[i].g = gScore; currentNode.neighbors[i].f = currentNode.neighbors[i].g + currentNode.neighbors[i].h; } } } return false; } Towers block pathability. Is there perhaps something I am missing here, or does A* not always find the shortest path in a situation such as this? Thanks in advance for any help.

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