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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 06, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 06, 2011Popular ReleasesIIS Tuner: IIS Tuner 1.0: IIS and ASP.NET performance optimization toolMinemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: The CRM 2011 OData Query Designer is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM 2011 Solution. This tool allows you to build OData queries by selecting filter criteria, select attributes and order by attributes. The tool also allows you to Execute the query and view the ATOM and JSON data returned. The look and feel of this component will improve and new functionality will be added in the near future so please provide feedback on your experience. Import this solution int...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.02 Beta: Major HighlightsFixed issue where "My Folder" was not available in the URL control and the Telerik HTML Editor Fixed issue where HTML Editor dialogs were not displaying correctly in alternate languages Fixed issue with Regex for email validation Fixed race condition in the core scheduler Fixed issue where editing Host page settings would result in broken host menu Fixed issue where "Apply to All Modules" setting was not propogating settings correctly. Fixed issue where browser lan...DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 (RC1): Release candidate 1 of 1.8.7GoogleTrail: TrailMap Beta 1: Trailmap beta 1 release Now we have updated custom map builder. Now we have complete gpx file editor. Now we have elevation data update service for any gpx file. (currently supports only google only).Chirpy - VS Add In For Handling Js, Css, DotLess, and T4 Files: Margogype Chirpy (ver 2.0): Chirpy loves Americans. Chirpy hates Americanos.ASP.NET: Sprite and Image Optimization Preview 3: The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images. This is the third preview of the feature and works with ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) projects. The binaries are also available via NuGet: AspNetSprites-Core AspNetSprites-WebFormsControl AspNetSprites-MvcAndRazorHelper It includes the foll...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.2.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. NOTE: The included help file and the online help have not been completely updated to reflect all changes in this release. A refresh will be issue...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Microsoft Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2554: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, we have added 4 new protocol parsers and updated 79 existing parsers in the NetworkMonitor_Pa...Image Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1: Prepare to have your minds blown. This is the first preview of what will eventually become 39613. There are still a lot of rough edges and plenty of areas still under construction, but for your basic needs, it should be relativly stable. Note: You will need the .NET Framework 4 installed to use this version. Below is a status report of where this release is in terms of the overall goal for version 3. If you're feeling a bit technically ambitious and want to check out some of the features th...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 1.1: updated GetAllJsonObjects() method and GetAllProperties() methods to JsonObject and Properties propertiesFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.0: Refer to http://computerbeacon.net for Documentation and Tutorial New features:added FQL support added Expires property to Api object added support for publishing to a user's friend / Facebook Page added support for posting and removing comments on posts added support for adding and removing likes on posts and comments added static methods for Page class added support for Iframe Application Tab of Facebook Page added support for obtaining the user's country, locale and age in If...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager small improvements for some helpers and AjaxDropdown has Data like the Lookup except it's value gets reset and list refilled if any element from data gets changedManaged Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 3: This release aims .net 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. Accordingly, there are two solutions files. The assemblies are named System.ComponentModel.Composition.Codeplex.dll as a way to avoid clashing with the version shipped with the 4th version of the framework. Introduced CompositionOptions to container instantiation CompositionOptions.DisableSilentRejection makes MEF throw an exception on composition errors. Useful for diagnostics Support for open generics Support for attribute-less registr...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.6 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.New Projectsasp.net mvc 3 simple cms: asp.net mvc3 cms for learling purpose.C++ Mini Framework: C++ Mini Framework is a simple and easy to use class library in source format to quickly do things you commonly need to do in native projects with the purpose to get you started specifically targeting new C++ developers hopping you will be productive from the very start.Community Megaphone Helpers: Community Megaphone Helpers is a project intended as a means of sharing and accepting contributions for reusable Razor helper modules for functionality used in the Community Megaphone events web application, including Bing maps and more. Supports Microsoft WebMatrix & MVC 3CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: The CRM 2011 OData Query Designer is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM 2011 Solution. The tool allows you to build OData REST queries by selecting filter criteria, select attributes and order by attributes. The tool also allows you to Execute the queryFaceted Search: Implementation of faceted (advanced) search with composite client side UI. Abstraction interfaces for intagration with different server side technologies, implementation for ASP.NET MVC. FileRenamePro: FileRenamePro makes it easier for users to rename files using advanced rules and regular expressions. It's developed in C#.GT5 Mobile: Gran-Turismo Remote Racing mobile site wrapper.KAT: KAT - Knowledge Assessment Tool is a Solution from IndERP in order to automate Performance and Process Management for a Technology/Job Oriented Companies. monopoly game: Monopoly is an open source project for educational purposes. The project will incorporate XNA, Silverlight, WCF technologies. The project will also show good design patterns considerations, and integration into Facebook App. The project will be written in C#.MuDB: MuDB is an embedded object-oriented database for the .NET Micro Framework which provides a simple yet useful interface for managing data.NDataStructure: A library providing a handful of useful data structures omitted from the .NET framework.Set NuGet version number: A simple command line tool that makes it easy to set the version number within a NuGet .nuspec package configuration file. This is useful for when you want to automatically update and publish a NuGet package from your build system.Sightreader: Small application to aid in the wrote learning of basic musical notation.SSAS Operations Templates: SSAS Operations Templates includes SSIS packages, scripts and code samples for automating maintenance of SSAS in a production environment. Includes operations such as backup the current state of cube designs in production, scripting paritition creation, etc.Team Run Log: Team Run LogTEDHelper: Download TED movie's subtitle. ?? TED ?????。testprojectit339: project339Ultimate Resume Repository: A class library and application for storing resumes of multiple people with the ability to export a targeted resume in various, configurable formats. Further additions may include cover letters, browser add-ons to populate applications, job search engine integration, etc...Umbraco: Inspired DataTypes: New datatypes that are not in the default install to make Umbraco have some new controls such as Content/Media Treeview, Content/Media Drop Down List with Treeview. Controls have options to restrict DocumentTypes or MediaType and the start location to retreive fromUsing different schemas in the same Orchestration Receive Port: Using different schemas in the same Orchestration Receive PortWF4Host: Examples in re-hosting Workflow 4 designer.WMP Hotkeys: WMP Hotkeys is a windows media player plugin that enable users to use VLC player like keyboard shortcuts(e.g SPACE to play/pause) in Windows Media Player.

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• SortedDictionary and SortedList

  - by Simon Cooper

  Apart from Dictionary<TKey, TValue>, there's two other dictionaries in the BCL - SortedDictionary<TKey, TValue> and SortedList<TKey, TValue>. On the face of it, these two classes do the same thing - provide an IDictionary<TKey, TValue> interface where the iterator returns the items sorted by the key. So what's the difference between them, and when should you use one rather than the other? (as in my previous post, I'll assume you have some basic algorithm & datastructure knowledge) SortedDictionary We'll first cover SortedDictionary. This is implemented as a special sort of binary tree called a red-black tree. Essentially, it's a binary tree that uses various constraints on how the nodes of the tree can be arranged to ensure the tree is always roughly balanced (for more gory algorithmical details, see the wikipedia link above). What I'm concerned about in this post is how the .NET SortedDictionary is actually implemented. In .NET 4, behind the scenes, the actual implementation of the tree is delegated to a SortedSet<KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>>. One example tree might look like this: Each node in the above tree is stored as a separate SortedSet<T>.Node object (remember, in a SortedDictionary, T is instantiated to KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>): class Node { public bool IsRed; public T Item; public SortedSet<T>.Node Left; public SortedSet<T>.Node Right; } The SortedSet only stores a reference to the root node; all the data in the tree is accessed by traversing the Left and Right node references until you reach the node you're looking for. Each individual node can be physically stored anywhere in memory; what's important is the relationship between the nodes. This is also why there is no constructor to SortedDictionary or SortedSet that takes an integer representing the capacity; there are no internal arrays that need to be created and resized. This may seen trivial, but it's an important distinction between SortedDictionary and SortedList that I'll cover later on. And that's pretty much it; it's a standard red-black tree. Plenty of webpages and datastructure books cover the algorithms behind the tree itself far better than I could. What's interesting is the comparions between SortedDictionary and SortedList, which I'll cover at the end. As a side point, SortedDictionary has existed in the BCL ever since .NET 2. That means that, all through .NET 2, 3, and 3.5, there has been a bona-fide sorted set class in the BCL (called TreeSet). However, it was internal, so it couldn't be used outside System.dll. Only in .NET 4 was this class exposed as SortedSet. SortedList Whereas SortedDictionary didn't use any backing arrays, SortedList does. It is implemented just as the name suggests; two arrays, one containing the keys, and one the values (I've just used random letters for the values): The items in the keys array are always guarenteed to be stored in sorted order, and the value corresponding to each key is stored in the same index as the key in the values array. In this example, the value for key item 5 is 'z', and for key item 8 is 'm'. Whenever an item is inserted or removed from the SortedList, a binary search is run on the keys array to find the correct index, then all the items in the arrays are shifted to accomodate the new or removed item. For example, if the key 3 was removed, a binary search would be run to find the array index the item was at, then everything above that index would be moved down by one: and then if the key/value pair {7, 'f'} was added, a binary search would be run on the keys to find the index to insert the new item, and everything above that index would be moved up to accomodate the new item: If another item was then added, both arrays would be resized (to a length of 10) before the new item was added to the arrays. As you can see, any insertions or removals in the middle of the list require a proportion of the array contents to be moved; an O(n) operation. However, if the insertion or removal is at the end of the array (ie the largest key), then it's only O(log n); the cost of the binary search to determine it does actually need to be added to the end (excluding the occasional O(n) cost of resizing the arrays to fit more items). As a side effect of using backing arrays, SortedList offers IList Keys and Values views that simply use the backing keys or values arrays, as well as various methods utilising the array index of stored items, which SortedDictionary does not (and cannot) offer. The Comparison So, when should you use one and not the other? Well, here's the important differences: Memory usage SortedDictionary and SortedList have got very different memory profiles. SortedDictionary... has a memory overhead of one object instance, a bool, and two references per item. On 64-bit systems, this adds up to ~40 bytes, not including the stored item and the reference to it from the Node object. stores the items in separate objects that can be spread all over the heap. This helps to keep memory fragmentation low, as the individual node objects can be allocated wherever there's a spare 60 bytes. In contrast, SortedList... has no additional overhead per item (only the reference to it in the array entries), however the backing arrays can be significantly larger than you need; every time the arrays are resized they double in size. That means that if you add 513 items to a SortedList, the backing arrays will each have a length of 1024. To conteract this, the TrimExcess method resizes the arrays back down to the actual size needed, or you can simply assign list.Capacity = list.Count. stores its items in a continuous block in memory. If the list stores thousands of items, this can cause significant problems with Large Object Heap memory fragmentation as the array resizes, which SortedDictionary doesn't have. Performance Operations on a SortedDictionary always have O(log n) performance, regardless of where in the collection you're adding or removing items. In contrast, SortedList has O(n) performance when you're altering the middle of the collection. If you're adding or removing from the end (ie the largest item), then performance is O(log n), same as SortedDictionary (in practice, it will likely be slightly faster, due to the array items all being in the same area in memory, also called locality of reference). So, when should you use one and not the other? As always with these sort of things, there are no hard-and-fast rules. But generally, if you: need to access items using their index within the collection are populating the dictionary all at once from sorted data aren't adding or removing keys once it's populated then use a SortedList. But if you: don't know how many items are going to be in the dictionary are populating the dictionary from random, unsorted data are adding & removing items randomly then use a SortedDictionary. The default (again, there's no definite rules on these sort of things!) should be to use SortedDictionary, unless there's a good reason to use SortedList, due to the bad performance of SortedList when altering the middle of the collection.

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• SO-overflow induced passivity - how to cope?

  - by Ruben

  After not really working on my pet project for a while, I discovered Stackoverflow and upon perusing it more intensely I was quite amazed. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so when I found eye-openers here highlighting many of the mistakes I made, I first wanted to fix everything. However, it's a pet project for a reason: I'm self-taught and I'm studying psychology, so programming skills can never become priority one (though it often helps, even in this field). Issues that stuck out were numerous security issues (e.g. CSRF-prevention and bcrypt eluded me) not object-oriented (at least the PHP part, the JS-part mostly is) no PHP framework used, so many of my DIY takes on commonly-tackled components (auth, ...) are either bad or inefficient really poor MySQL usage (no prepared statements, mysql extension, heard about setting proper indices two days ago) using mootools even though JQuery seems to be fashionable, so there's more probably always going to be better integration with services I'd like to use (like google visualization) So, my SO-induced frenzy turned into passivity. I can't do it all (soon) in the rather small amount of spare time I can spend on working on my project. I can leave some of the issues be in good conscience (speed stuff: an unfinished & unpublished project will never become popular, right?). No clear conscience without good security though and if I don't use a framework for auth and other complex stuff I'll regret having to do it myself. One obvious answer would probably be going open-source, but I think the project would need to become more impressive before others would commit to it. I can't afford to employ someone either. I do think the project deserves being worked on, though. How should I tackle it anyway? What's the best practice for little-practice people?

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• Game software design

  - by L. De Leo

  I have been working on a simple implementation of a card game in object oriented Python/HTML/Javascript and building on the top of Django. At this point the game is in its final stage of development but, while spotting a big issue about how I was keeping the application state (basically using a global variable), I reached the point that I'm stuck. The thing is that ignoring the design flaw, in a single-threaded environment such as under the Django development server, the game works perfectly. While I tried to design classes cleanly and keep methods short I now have in front of me an issue that has been keeping me busy for the last 2 days and that countless print statements and visual debugging hasn't helped me spot. The reason I think has to do with some side-effects of functions and to solve it I've been wondering if maybe refactoring the code entirely with static classes that keep no state and just passing the state around might be a good option to keep side-effects under control. Or maybe trying to program it in a functional programming style (although I'm not sure Python allows for a purely functional style). I feel that now there's already too many layers that the software (which I plan to make incredibly more complex by adding non trivial features) has already become unmanageable. How would you suggest I re-take control of my code-base that (despite being still only at < 1000 LOC) seems to have taken a life of its own?

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• Firefox clones for Ubuntu

  - by cipricus

  In Windows I use, beside the main Firefox installation, one or even two "Firefox clones" for different purposes (specifically oriented addons and configurations, light configuration without addons, configuration for a different user, etc). A clone of Firefox is a browser that is identical to Firefox except the name. (It may have more - but not less - features than FF and it must be installable beside Firefox, not on top/instead of it. So, a clone is not a replacement/exclusive alternative of FF: in the way Swiftfox is, taking all previous Firefox extensions and configuration.) For example, in Windows, Pale Moon, Cometbird and Wyzo are FF clones (but they do not have Linux support). Basically, Flock browser would also qualify, and it had support for Linux: but it was discontinued. What remains as closest to being a full clone is Seamonkey, has support for Linux, but it is not a complete clone (although it can use a lot of FF extensions): themes are not working, the interface is in general different and rather primitive. It has the merit of keeping the pace with FF 4+ (in contrast with Swiftweasel, for example.) Are such more browsers available in Ubuntu? (As for comments asking why I "really" need these clones, I am just used to doing that, I like two separate Firefox-like browsers: why pleasure, just like curiosity, would not be enough??)

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• Teaching myself, as a physicist, to become a better programmer

  - by user787267

  I've always liked physics, and I've always liked coding, so when I got the offer for a PhD position doing numerical physics (details are not relevant, it's mostly parallel programming for a cluster) at a university, it was a no-brainer for me. However, as most physicists, I'm self taught. I don't have broad background knowledge about how to code in an object oriented way, or the name of that specific algorithm that optimizes the search in some kD tree. Since all my work so far has been more concerned about the physics and the scientific results, I undoubtedly have some bad habits - more so because my coding is my own, and not really teamwork. I have mostly used C since it is very straightforward and "what you write is what you get" - no need for fancy abstractions. However, I have recently switched to C++ since I'd like to learn more about the power that comes with abstraction, and it's pretty C-like (syntax-wise at least). How do I teach myself to code in a good, abstract way like a graduate in computer science? I know my code is efficient, but I want it to be elegant as well, and readable. Keep in mind that I don't have time to read several 1000-page tomes about abstract programming. I need to spend time on actual, physics related research (my supervisor would laugh at me if he knew I spent time thinking about how to program elegantly). How do I assess if my work is also good from a programmer's perspective?

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• Why is there never any controversy regarding the switch statement? [closed]

  - by Nick Rosencrantz

  We all know that the gotostatement should only be used on very rare occasions if at all. It has been discouraged to use the goto statement countless places countless times. But why it there never anything like that about the switch statement? I can understand the position that the switch statement should always be avoided since anything with switch can always be expressed by if...else... which is also more readable and the syntax of the switch statement if difficult to remember. Do you agree? What are the arguments in favor of keeping the 'switch` statement? It can also be difficult to use if what you're testing changes from say an integer to an object, then C++ or Java won't be able to perform the switch and neither C can perform switch on something like a struct or a union. And the technique of fall-through is so very rarely used that I wonder why it was never presented any regret of having switch at all? The only place I know where it is best practice is GUI code and even that switch is probably better coded in a more object-oriented way.

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• How can a non-technical person learn to write a spec for small projects?

  - by Joseph Turian

  How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects? A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project. In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts to do what he now does by hand. However, my friend is extremely non-technical. He is poor at writing technical specs. When he does write a spec, it is written the way you would describe doing something in excel (go to this cell and then copy the value to that cell). It is also overly verbose, and does examples several times. I'm not sure if he properly describes corner cases. The first project he outsourced was a failure. I think he overdescribed some details, but underdescribed corner cases. That and/or the coder he hired didn't think through the corner cases and ask appropriate questions. I'm not sure. I got on IM with him and it took me half an hour to dig out a description that should have taken five minutes or less to describe. I wrote the scripts for him at the end, but didn't examine why his process with the coder failed. He has asked me for help. However, I refuse to get involved, because taking his spec and translating it into clear requirements is 10x more work than executing on a clearly written spec. What is the right way for him to learn? Are there resources he could use? Are there ways he can learn from small, low-pressure practice projects with coders? Most of his scripts are statistical and data processing oriented. e.g. take this column and run an average over it. Remove these rows under these conditions. So the challenge is different than spec'ing a web app.

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• Teach Your Kid to Code (&hellip;and Vote early!)

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Next Tuesday I will be at the CMAP main meeting presenting Teach Your Kid to Code. Next Tuesday is of course Election Day so you have to make sure you vote early in order to get over to CMAP for the 7:00PM presentation. I will be co-presenting this talk with my 5th grade son. Here is the abstract: Have you ever wanted a way to teach your kid to code? For that matter, have you ever wanted to simply be able to explain to your kid what you do for a living? Putting things in a context that a kid can understand is not as easy as it sounds. If you are someone curious about these concepts, this is a “can’t miss” presentation that will be co-presented by Justin Michelotti (5th grader) and his father. Bring your kid with you to CMAP for this fun and educational session. We will show tools you may not have been aware of like SmallBasic and Kodu – we’ll even throw in a little Visual Studio and Windows 8! Concepts such as variables, conditionals, loops, and functions will be covered while we introduce object oriented concepts without any of the confusing words. Kids are not required for entry! I promise this will be an entertaining presentation! We hope to see you (and your kids) there. Click here for details.

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• How can I connect to a mail server using SMTP over SSL using Python?

  - by jakecar

  Hello, So I have been having a hard time sending email from my school's email address. It is SSL and I could only find this code online by Matt Butcher that works with SSL: import smtplib, socket version = "1.00" all = ['SMTPSSLException', 'SMTP_SSL'] SSMTP_PORT = 465 class SMTPSSLException(smtplib.SMTPException): """Base class for exceptions resulting from SSL negotiation.""" class SMTP_SSL (smtplib.SMTP): """This class provides SSL access to an SMTP server. SMTP over SSL typical listens on port 465. Unlike StartTLS, SMTP over SSL makes an SSL connection before doing a helo/ehlo. All transactions, then, are done over an encrypted channel. This class is a simple subclass of the smtplib.SMTP class that comes with Python. It overrides the connect() method to use an SSL socket, and it overrides the starttles() function to throw an error (you can't do starttls within an SSL session). """ certfile = None keyfile = None def __init__(self, host='', port=0, local_hostname=None, keyfile=None, certfile=None): """Initialize a new SSL SMTP object. If specified, `host' is the name of the remote host to which this object will connect. If specified, `port' specifies the port (on `host') to which this object will connect. `local_hostname' is the name of the localhost. By default, the value of socket.getfqdn() is used. An SMTPConnectError is raised if the SMTP host does not respond correctly. An SMTPSSLError is raised if SSL negotiation fails. Warning: This object uses socket.ssl(), which does not do client-side verification of the server's cert. """ self.certfile = certfile self.keyfile = keyfile smtplib.SMTP.__init__(self, host, port, local_hostname) def connect(self, host='localhost', port=0): """Connect to an SMTP server using SSL. `host' is localhost by default. Port will be set to 465 (the default SSL SMTP port) if no port is specified. If the host name ends with a colon (`:') followed by a number, that suffix will be stripped off and the number interpreted as the port number to use. This will override the `port' parameter. Note: This method is automatically invoked by __init__, if a host is specified during instantiation. """ # MB: Most of this (Except for the socket connection code) is from # the SMTP.connect() method. I changed only the bare minimum for the # sake of compatibility. if not port and (host.find(':') == host.rfind(':')): i = host.rfind(':') if i >= 0: host, port = host[:i], host[i+1:] try: port = int(port) except ValueError: raise socket.error, "nonnumeric port" if not port: port = SSMTP_PORT if self.debuglevel > 0: print>>stderr, 'connect:', (host, port) msg = "getaddrinfo returns an empty list" self.sock = None for res in socket.getaddrinfo(host, port, 0, socket.SOCK_STREAM): af, socktype, proto, canonname, sa = res try: self.sock = socket.socket(af, socktype, proto) if self.debuglevel > 0: print>>stderr, 'connect:', (host, port) self.sock.connect(sa) # MB: Make the SSL connection. sslobj = socket.ssl(self.sock, self.keyfile, self.certfile) except socket.error, msg: if self.debuglevel > 0: print>>stderr, 'connect fail:', (host, port) if self.sock: self.sock.close() self.sock = None continue break if not self.sock: raise socket.error, msg # MB: Now set up fake socket and fake file classes. # Thanks to the design of smtplib, this is all we need to do # to get SSL working with all other methods. self.sock = smtplib.SSLFakeSocket(self.sock, sslobj) self.file = smtplib.SSLFakeFile(sslobj); (code, msg) = self.getreply() if self.debuglevel > 0: print>>stderr, "connect:", msg return (code, msg) def setkeyfile(self, keyfile): """Set the absolute path to a file containing a private key. This method will only be effective if it is called before connect(). This key will be used to make the SSL connection.""" self.keyfile = keyfile def setcertfile(self, certfile): """Set the absolute path to a file containing a x.509 certificate. This method will only be effective if it is called before connect(). This certificate will be used to make the SSL connection.""" self.certfile = certfile def starttls(): """Raises an exception. You cannot do StartTLS inside of an ssl session. Calling starttls() will return an SMTPSSLException""" raise SMTPSSLException, "Cannot perform StartTLS within SSL session." And then my code: import ssmtplib conn = ssmtplib.SMTP_SSL('HOST') conn.login('USERNAME','PW') conn.ehlo() conn.sendmail('FROM_EMAIL', 'TO_EMAIL', "MESSAGE") conn.close() And got this error: /Users/Jake/Desktop/Beth's Program/ssmtplib.py:116: DeprecationWarning: socket.ssl() is deprecated. Use ssl.wrap_socket() instead. sslobj = socket.ssl(self.sock, self.keyfile, self.certfile) Traceback (most recent call last): File "emailer.py", line 5, in conn = ssmtplib.SMTP_SSL('HOST') File "/Users/Jake/Desktop/Beth's Program/ssmtplib.py", line 79, in init smtplib.SMTP.init(self, host, port, local_hostname) File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/smtplib.py", line 239, in init (code, msg) = self.connect(host, port) File "/Users/Jake/Desktop/Beth's Program/ssmtplib.py", line 131, in connect self.sock = smtplib.SSLFakeSocket(self.sock, sslobj) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SSLFakeSocket' Thank you!

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• Questions about Mac Book Pro Keyboard and shortcuts

  - by SimonSolnes

  I have been researching a lot about this and I cannot seem to find any useful information about this topic, what so ever. I have now been using Ubuntu in one week, and have gotten pretty confident with almost everything. Except keyboard layout and shortcuts. If you know a tutorial or a documents explaining keyboard shortcuts in Ubuntu or linux in general, can you please list it? I use a Mac Book Pro with a Norwegian keyboard, and I have several questions about this: Is there a program for having a consise list of absolutely all keyboard shortcuts, and be able to change them? How do I use my fn keys? (fn button doesnt do the job for some reason) How can I use my alt+letter-key-or-number-key or alt+shift+letter-key-or-number-key to get fancy characters. (Like I do on Mac OS X) How can I swap cmd and ctrl key system wide? Also I really want to be oriented around this subject, since this is the only thing holding me back on Ubuntu, so if there exists some in-depth material on this, it would be great. Also, if there exists some programs or material out there making it easier with Mac hardware I would enjoy that. Sorry if my questions seems vague. Thank you very much Simon

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• 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards for Oracle Exalogic

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Companies from around the world were honored for their innovative solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. This year’s 27 award winners, representing 11 countries and a wide span of industries, wowed the judges with a range of projects across eight product categories. 4 awards were given out to customers who demonstrated innovative application of Oracle Exalogic for their mission-critical applications.Below is an overview of the 4 businesses that won the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award for Oracle Exalogic this year. Company: Netshoes About: Leading online retailer of sporting goods in Latin America.Challenges: Rapid business growth resulted in frequent outages and poor response-time of online store-front Conventional ad-hoc approach to horizontal scaling resulted in high CAPEX and OPEX Poor performance and unavailability of online store-front resulted in revenue loss from purchase abandonment Solution: Consolidated ATG Commerce and Oracle WebLogic running on Oracle Exalogic.Business Impact:Reduced abandonment rates resulting in a two-digit increase in online conversion rates translating directly into revenue up-liftCompany: ClaroAbout: Leading communications services provider in Latin America.Challenges: Support business growth over the next 3  - 5 years while maximizing re-use of existing middleware and application investments with minimal effort and risk Solution: Consolidated Oracle Fusion Middleware components (Oracle WebLogic, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Tuxedo) and JAVA applications onto Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. Business Impact:Improved partner SLA’s 7x while improving throughput 5X and response-time 35x for  JAVA applicationsCompany: ULAbout: Leading safety testing and certification organization in the world.Challenges: Transition from being a non-profit to a profit oriented enterprise and grow from a $1B to $5B in annual revenues in the next 5 years Undertake a massive business transformation by aligning change strategy with execution Solution: Consolidated Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, Siebel, BI, Hyperion) and Oracle Fusion Middleware (AIA, SOA Suite) on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Reduced financial and operating risk in re-architecting IT services to support new business capabilities supporting 87,000 manufacturersCompany: Ingersoll RandAbout: Leading manufacturer of industrial, climate, residential and security solutions.Challenges: Business continuity risks due to complexity in enforcing consistent operational and financial controls; Re-active business decisions reduced ability to offer differentiation and compete Solution: Consolidated Oracle E-business Suite on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle ExadataBusiness Impact:Service differentiation with faster order provisioning and a shorter lead-to-cash cycle translating into higher customer satisfaction and quicker cash-conversionCheck out the winners of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation awards in other categories here.

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• Inevitable Corporate Bureaucracy

  - by Ahsan Alam

  Top executives of most smaller organizations want their companies to be different from the larger corporations. They want their organizations smaller in size; but bigger in productivity by eliminating red tapes and corporate bureaucracy. When the company is smaller, people often work like firefighters – taking on new business and technology challenges without thinking about any procedures and guidelines. People also tend to wear many hats to accomplish tasks quickly in order to integrate new businesses. For example, software developers in smaller organizations may take on responsibilities of client interactions, requirements gathering, design and development, code deployment, production support, network infrastructure support, database design and maintenance along with countless other duties. In addition, systems in smaller organizations tend to be loosely guarded. So, people often don't follow many procedures in order to setup environments and implement technical projects. It's not uncommon to change code and deploy without anyone realizing. Similarly, business requirements may also get defined in an informal manner without any type of documentation. As the company grows, everything starts to change significantly impacting people and the overall business process. Suddenly, following procedures become extremely important. Consequently, new roles, guidelines and procedures start to emerge. Everything from business process to technology implementation start to become more and more process oriented. Organizations start to define and document steps, invent procedure to track process and systems level changes, and start restricting access to various systems for security reasons. At the same time, as a growing company start doing businesses with larger clienteles, they are automatically forced to abide by all sorts of industry compliance laws. Moreover, growing companies tend to recruit experienced individuals to fill new roles who usually bring their expertise from larger and more bureaucratic organizations.   Despite the best efforts from the top executives, it seems increased number of procedures and guidelines as well as new recruits automatically contribute to the evolution of corporate bureaucracy. Maybe, corporate bureaucracy is an inevitable side effect of a growing organization.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 21, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Fault Handling and Prevention - Part 1 | Guido Schmutz and Ronald van Luttikhuizen In this technical article, part one of a four part series, Oracle ACE Directors Guido Schmutz and Ronald van Luttikhuizen guide you through an introduction to fault handling in a service-oriented environment using Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus. One Stop Shop for Oracle Webcasts Webcasts can be a great way to get information about Oracle products without having to go cross-eyed reading yet another document off your computer screen. Oracle's new Webcast Center offers selectable filtering to make it easy to get to the information you want. Yes, you have to register to gain access, but that process is quick, and with over 200 webcasts to choose from you know you'll find useful content. Oracle on Oracle: Is that all? (Identity Management)| Darin Pendergraft Darin Pendergraft shares a discussion with Jaime Cardoso aboutthe latter's experience with Oracle's IDM products. What's particularly interesting is that the discussion grew out of Jaime's highly critical comment that Darin missed important pointsabout those products in an earlier interview Chirag Andani. If that ain't social engagement, I don't know what is. I.T. Chargeback : Core to Cloud Computing | Zero to Cloud "While chargeback has existed as a concept for many years (especially in mainframe environments), it is the move to this self-service model that has created a need for a new breed of chargeback applications for cloud," says Mark McGill. "Enabling self-service without some form of chargeback is like opening a shop where all of the goods are free." New Self-paced Online Oracle BPM 11g Developer Training | Dan Atwood Oracle ACE Dan Atwood of Avio Consulting shares a lot of information about a new Oracle BPM 11g Developer Workshop. JPA SQL and Fetching tuning ( EclipseLink ) | Edwin Biemond Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond's post illustrates how to "use the department and employee entity of the HR Oracle demo schema to explain the JPA options you have to control the SQL statements and the JPA relation Fetching." Thought for the Day "Team development is like a birthday cake. Everybody gets a piece." — Assaad Chalhoub Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario   Conventional Structures   Columnstore   Δ SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• 2D non-tile based map editor

  - by Jonesy

  I am currently developing a relatively simple 2D, topdown oriented adventure game for the iPhone and was wondering what would be the easiest way to create the maps for my game. I figured I would need some kind of visual editor that would give me immediate feedback and would allow me to place all objects in the world exactly where I want them. I could then load the saved representation of the world I create in the editor in my game. So, I am looking for a simple map editor that allows me to do this. All the objects in my game are simply textured rectangles build up from two triangles. All I need to be able to do is position different rectangles/objects in the map, and give them a texture. I am using texture atlases, so it would be useful to be able to assign portions of textures to the objects. I then need to be able to extract all the objects from the saved representation of my maps, together with the name/identifier of the texture(atlas) they use, and the area of the texture atlas. I have looked at some tile-based map editors like Tiled and Ogmo, but they don't seem to be able to do what I want. Any suggestions? EDIT: a more concrete example: something like the GameMaker level editor, but then with added export functionality in a handy format.

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• Ruby or Python?

  - by Bobby Tables

  Hi all, This question is extremely subjective and open-ended. It might even sound like something I should just research for myself and make my own decision. But I'd like to put it out there and get some thoughts from others. Long story short - I burned out with the rat race and am on a self-funded sabbatical this year. Much of it is to take a break from the corporate grind and travel around, but I also want to play around with new technologies and do some self-learning projects, to stay up to speed on programming, and well - I just love tinkering with programming, when there's no pressure! Here's the thing: I am a lifetime C/C++/Java programmer. I'm a bit of a squiggly bracket snob since I've been working with this family of languages for my entire programming career. So I'd like to learn a language which isn't so closely syntactically related to this group. What I'm basically looking for is a language which is relatively general purpose, fun to learn, has some new concepts that are different from C++/Java, and has a good community. A secondary consideration is that it has good web development frameworks. A tertiary consideration is that it's not totally academic (read: there are real world jobs out there using it). I've narrowed it down to Ruby or Python. My impression of Ruby is that it is extremely web oriented - that the only real application of it is as a server side scripting language for doing web stuff (mainly Ruby on Rails). For Python I'm not so sure. TL;DR and to put it as succinctly as possible: which of these would be better for a C++/Java guy to learn to get some new perspectives on programming? And which is more open and general purpose and applicable to a wider set of applications? I'm leaning towards Ruby at the moment, but I worry to an extent that it looks like it's used as nothing but a server side web language.

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• WebSocket Applications using Java: JSR 356 Early Draft Now Available (TOTD #183)

  - by arungupta

  WebSocket provide a full-duplex and bi-directional communication protocol over a single TCP connection. JSR 356 is defining a standard API for creating WebSocket applications in the Java EE 7 Platform. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will provide an introduction to WebSocket and how the JSR is evolving to support the programming model. First, a little primer on WebSocket! WebSocket is a combination of IETF RFC 6455 Protocol and W3C JavaScript API (still a Candidate Recommendation). The protocol defines an opening handshake and data transfer. The API enables Web pages to use the WebSocket protocol for two-way communication with the remote host. Unlike HTTP, there is no need to create a new TCP connection and send a chock-full of headers for every message exchange between client and server. The WebSocket protocol defines basic message framing, layered over TCP. Once the initial handshake happens using HTTP Upgrade, the client and server can send messages to each other, independent from the other. There are no pre-defined message exchange patterns of request/response or one-way between client and and server. These need to be explicitly defined over the basic protocol. The communication between client and server is pretty symmetric but there are two differences: A client initiates a connection to a server that is listening for a WebSocket request. A client connects to one server using a URI. A server may listen to requests from multiple clients on the same URI. Other than these two difference, the client and server behave symmetrically after the opening handshake. In that sense, they are considered as "peers". After a successful handshake, clients and servers transfer data back and forth in conceptual units referred as "messages". On the wire, a message is composed of one or more frames. Application frames carry payload intended for the application and can be text or binary data. Control frames carry data intended for protocol-level signaling. Now lets talk about the JSR! The Java API for WebSocket is worked upon as JSR 356 in the Java Community Process. This will define a standard API for building WebSocket applications. This JSR will provide support for: Creating WebSocket Java components to handle bi-directional WebSocket conversations Initiating and intercepting WebSocket events Creation and consumption of WebSocket text and binary messages The ability to define WebSocket protocols and content models for an application Configuration and management of WebSocket sessions, like timeouts, retries, cookies, connection pooling Specification of how WebSocket application will work within the Java EE security model Tyrus is the Reference Implementation for JSR 356 and is already integrated in GlassFish 4.0 Promoted Builds. And finally some code! The API allows to create WebSocket endpoints using annotations and interface. This TOTD will show a simple sample using annotations. A subsequent blog will show more advanced samples. A POJO can be converted to a WebSocket endpoint by specifying @WebSocketEndpoint and @WebSocketMessage. @WebSocketEndpoint(path="/hello")public class HelloBean {     @WebSocketMessage    public String sayHello(String name) {         return "Hello " + name + "!";     }} @WebSocketEndpoint marks this class as a WebSocket endpoint listening at URI defined by the path attribute. The @WebSocketMessage identifies the method that will receive the incoming WebSocket message. This first method parameter is injected with payload of the incoming message. In this case it is assumed that the payload is text-based. It can also be of the type byte[] in case the payload is binary. A custom object may be specified if decoders attribute is specified in the @WebSocketEndpoint. This attribute will provide a list of classes that define how a custom object can be decoded. This method can also take an optional Session parameter. This is injected by the runtime and capture a conversation between two endpoints. The return type of the method can be String, byte[] or a custom object. The encoders attribute on @WebSocketEndpoint need to define how a custom object can be encoded. The client side is an index.jsp with embedded JavaScript. The JSP body looks like: <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action="">     <input onclick="say_hello()" value="Say Hello" type="button">         <input id="nameField" name="name" value="WebSocket" type="text"><br>    </form> </div> <div id="output"></div> The code is relatively straight forward. It has an HTML form with a button that invokes say_hello() method and a text field named nameField. A div placeholder is available for displaying the output. Now, lets take a look at some JavaScript code: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/HelloWebSocket/hello";     var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri);     websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) };     websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) };     websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) };     function init() {         output = document.getElementById("output");     }     function say_hello() {      websocket.send(nameField.value);         writeToScreen("SENT: " + nameField.value);     } This application is deployed as "HelloWebSocket.war" (download here) on GlassFish 4.0 promoted build 57. So the WebSocket endpoint is listening at "ws://localhost:8080/HelloWebSocket/hello". A new WebSocket connection is initiated by specifying the URI to connect to. The JavaScript API defines callback methods that are invoked when the connection is opened (onOpen), closed (onClose), error received (onError), or a message from the endpoint is received (onMessage). The client API has several send methods that transmit data over the connection. This particular script sends text data in the say_hello method using nameField's value from the HTML shown earlier. Each click on the button sends the textbox content to the endpoint over a WebSocket connection and receives a response based upon implementation in the sayHello method shown above. How to test this out ? Download the entire source project here or just the WAR file. Download GlassFish4.0 build 57 or later and unzip. Start GlassFish as "asadmin start-domain". Deploy the WAR file as "asadmin deploy HelloWebSocket.war". Access the application at http://localhost:8080/HelloWebSocket/index.jsp. After clicking on "Say Hello" button, the output would look like: Here are some references for you: WebSocket - Protocol and JavaScript API JSR 356: Java API for WebSocket - Specification (Early Draft) and Implementation (already integrated in GlassFish 4 promoted builds) Subsequent blogs will discuss the following topics (not necessary in that order) ... Binary data as payload Custom payloads using encoder/decoder Error handling Interface-driven WebSocket endpoint Java client API Client and Server configuration Security Subprotocols Extensions Other topics from the API Capturing WebSocket on-the-wire messages

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• Happy Chinese New Year!

  - by Shaun

  Today is Dec the 29th in Chinese Traditional Calendar, that means on Thursday (3rd of Feb) we will have the Chinese New Year! For those who doesn’t know about the Chinese New Year please visit the wikipedia site. This is the most important holiday not only for the Chinese in China, but the Chinese all around the world. Here I would like to say: ????. (Chun Jie Kuai Le, Happy Chinese New Year). OK I have 3 news with my celebration: The new windows azure developer portal had been published for a while and the windows azure team wants to get to know how do we think about it. Here is a survey avaiable you can send your feedback. PS, please refer to my previous blog for the features of this new site. The latest Window Azure Platform Training Kit Jan Update had been released that you can download here. There is a demo and a hands-on lab about the Windows Phone 7 application with Windows Azure avaiable which should be interesting. If you have heard about the new feature for SQL Azure named SQL Azure Federation, you might know that it’s a cool feature and solution about database sharding. But for now there seems no similar solution for normal SQL Server and local database. I had created a library named PODA, which stands for Partition Oriented Data Access which partially implemented the features of SQL Azure Federation. I’m going to explain more about this project after the Chinese New Year but you can download the source code here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• XNA and C# vs the 360's in order processor

  - by Richard Fabian

  Having read this rant, I feel that they're probably right (seeing as the Xenon and the CELL BE are both highly sensitive to branchy and cache ignorant code), but I've heard that people are making games fine with C# too. So, is it true that it's impossible to do anything professional with XNA, or was the poster just missing what makes XNA the killer API for game development? By professional, I don't mean in the sense that you can make money from it, but more in the sense that the more professional games have phsyics models and animation systems that seem outside the reach of a language with such definite barriers to the intrinsics. If I wanted to write a collision system or fluid dynamics engine for my game, I don't feel like C# offers me the chance to do that as the runtime code generator and the lack of intrinsics gets in the way of performance. However, many people seem to be fine working within these constraints, making their successful games but seemingly avoiding any of the problems by omission. I've not noticed any XNA games do anything complex other than what's already provided by the libraries, or handled by shaders. Is this avoidance of the more complex game dynamics because of teh limitations of C#, or just people concentrating on getting it done? In all honesty, I can't believe that AI war can maintain that many units of AI without some data oriented approach, or some dirty C# hacks to make it run better than the standard approach, and I guess that's partly my question too, how have people hacked C# so it's able to do what games coders do naturally with C++?

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• My Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel

  - by Matt Christian

  For awhile now I've known that XNA Game Studio contains built-in scene management however I still built my own for each engine.  Obviously it was redundant and probably inefficient due to the amount of searching and such I was required to do.  And even though I knew this, why did I continue to do it? I've always been very detail oriented, probably part of my mild OCD.  But when it comes to technology I believe in both reinventing the wheel and not reinventing it all at the same time.  Here's what I imagine most programmers doing.  When they pick up XNA, they're typically focused on 'I want to make a game with as little code as possible'.  This is great and XNA GS is a great tool, but what will it do for programmers that want to make games with XNA?  If they don't have any prior experience with other tools they will probably not ever learn scene management. So is it better to leverage code and risk not learning valuable techniques, or write it all yourself and fight through the headaches and hours of time you may spend on something already built?

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• The road to become a programmer [closed]

  - by user68991

  I'm looking for a 'career' change, I don't actually have a career at the moment since I haven't been able to find a job since I graduated with a degree in Materials Engineering. One of my loves has always been computers and programming, though I have never studied it seriously. When I was 11 I wrote a very basic graphical 'game' using notepad and HTML, where I drew each possible position of the main character on the different 'maze' level in MSPaint, using pictures of arrows as links to a new page with the character in a new position, and various other buttons would pop up 'search box', 'press button' etc. At the time I thought this was an amazing achievement of my programming skills. I've used a little bit of FORTRAN 90 whilst I was at university, which rekindled my interest in programming. When I was a kid I mainly used C and HTML, but only very basically as my 'game' suggests. I want to learn a new programming language, I'm not entirely sure where I want to go with it, but the number one contender at the moment is android apps. I'm looking at learning Java, but I've read that it's a difficult place to begin with; so I've also looked at learning Visual Basic, which I believe is also object oriented(?) but a little easier to understand? (not that I know what an object is anyway). Any information people could give me regarding which language to learn, and if there are any good online tutorial for that language I'd really appreciate it. Some of the tutorials I've used so far are full or jargon I can't understand. Also, I'm not afraid of maths having got an engineering degree. Thanks in advance for any help/advice. James

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• 2D non-tile based map editor

  - by user5468

  I am currently developing a relatively simple 2D, topdown oriented adventure game for the iPhone and was wondering what would be the easiest way to create the maps for my game. I figured I would need some kind of visual editor that would give me immediate feedback and would allow me to place all objects in the world exactly where I want them. I could then load the saved representation of the world I create in the editor in my game. So, I am looking for a simple map editor that allows me to do this. All the objects in my game are simply textured rectangles build up from two triangles. All I need to be able to do is position different rectangles/objects in the map, and give them a texture. I am using texture atlases, so it would be useful to be able to assign portions of textures to the objects. I then need to be able to extract all the objects from the saved representation of my maps, together with the name/identifier of the texture(atlas) they use, and the area of the texture atlas. I have looked at some tile-based map editors like Tiled and Ogmo, but they don't seem to be able to do what I want. Any suggestions? EDIT: a more concrete example: something like the GameMaker level editor, but then with added export functionality in a handy format.

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• tile_static, tile_barrier, and tiled matrix multiplication with C++ AMP

  - by Daniel Moth

  We ended the previous post with a mechanical transformation of the C++ AMP matrix multiplication example to the tiled model and in the process introduced tiled_index and tiled_grid. This is part 2. tile_static memory You all know that in regular CPU code, static variables have the same value regardless of which thread accesses the static variable. This is in contrast with non-static local variables, where each thread has its own copy. Back to C++ AMP, the same rules apply and each thread has its own value for local variables in your lambda, whereas all threads see the same global memory, which is the data they have access to via the array and array_view. In addition, on an accelerator like the GPU, there is a programmable cache, a third kind of memory type if you'd like to think of it that way (some call it shared memory, others call it scratchpad memory). Variables stored in that memory share the same value for every thread in the same tile. So, when you use the tiled model, you can have variables where each thread in the same tile sees the same value for that variable, that threads from other tiles do not. The new storage class for local variables introduced for this purpose is called tile_static. You can only use tile_static in restrict(direct3d) functions, and only when explicitly using the tiled model. What this looks like in code should be no surprise, but here is a snippet to confirm your mental image, using a good old regular C array // each tile of threads has its own copy of locA, // shared among the threads of the tile tile_static float locA[16][16]; Note that tile_static variables are scoped and have the lifetime of the tile, and they cannot have constructors or destructors. tile_barrier In amp.h one of the types introduced is tile_barrier. You cannot construct this object yourself (although if you had one, you could use a copy constructor to create another one). So how do you get one of these? You get it, from a tiled_index object. Beyond the 4 properties returning index objects, tiled_index has another property, barrier, that returns a tile_barrier object. The tile_barrier class exposes a single member, the method wait. 15: // Given a tiled_index object named t_idx 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: // more code …in the code above, all threads in the tile will reach line 16 before a single one progresses to line 17. Note that all threads must be able to reach the barrier, i.e. if you had branchy code in such a way which meant that there is a chance that not all threads could reach line 16, then the code above would be illegal. Tiled Matrix Multiplication Example – part 2 So now that we added to our understanding the concepts of tile_static and tile_barrier, let me obfuscate rewrite the matrix multiplication code so that it takes advantage of tiling. Before you start reading this, I suggest you get a cup of your favorite non-alcoholic beverage to enjoy while you try to fully understand the code. 01: void MatrixMultiplyTiled(vector<float>& vC, const vector<float>& vA, const vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 02: { 03: static const int TS = 16; 04: array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 05: array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 06: array_view<writeonly<float>,2> c(M,N,vC); 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid.tile< TS, TS >(), 08: [=] (tiled_index< TS, TS> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) 09: { 10: int row = t_idx.local[0]; int col = t_idx.local[1]; 11: float sum = 0.0f; 12: for (int i = 0; i < W; i += TS) { 13: tile_static float locA[TS][TS], locB[TS][TS]; 14: locA[row][col] = a(t_idx.global[0], col + i); 15: locB[row][col] = b(row + i, t_idx.global[1]); 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: for (int k = 0; k < TS; k++) 18: sum += locA[row][k] * locB[k][col]; 19: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 20: } 21: c[t_idx.global] = sum; 22: }); 23: } Notice that all the code up to line 9 is the same as per the changes we made in part 1 of tiling introduction. If you squint, the body of the lambda itself preserves the original algorithm on lines 10, 11, and 17, 18, and 21. The difference being that those lines use new indexing and the tile_static arrays; the tile_static arrays are declared and initialized on the brand new lines 13-15. On those lines we copy from the global memory represented by the array_view objects (a and b), to the tile_static vanilla arrays (locA and locB) – we are copying enough to fit a tile. Because in the code that follows on line 18 we expect the data for this tile to be in the tile_static storage, we need to synchronize the threads within each tile with a barrier, which we do on line 16 (to avoid accessing uninitialized memory on line 18). We also need to synchronize the threads within a tile on line 19, again to avoid the race between lines 14, 15 (retrieving the next set of data for each tile and overwriting the previous set) and line 18 (not being done processing the previous set of data). Luckily, as part of the awesome C++ AMP debugger in Visual Studio there is an option that helps you find such races, but that is a story for another blog post another time. May I suggest reading the next section, and then coming back to re-read and walk through this code with pen and paper to really grok what is going on, if you haven't already? Cool. Why would I introduce this tiling complexity into my code? Funny you should ask that, I was just about to tell you. There is only one reason we tiled our extent, had to deal with finding a good tile size, ensure the number of threads we schedule are correctly divisible with the tile size, had to use a tiled_index instead of a normal index, and had to understand tile_barrier and to figure out where we need to use it, and double the size of our lambda in terms of lines of code: the reason is to be able to use tile_static memory. Why do we want to use tile_static memory? Because accessing tile_static memory is around 10 times faster than accessing the global memory on an accelerator like the GPU, e.g. in the code above, if you can get 150GB/second accessing data from the array_view a, you can get 1500GB/second accessing the tile_static array locA. And since by definition you are dealing with really large data sets, the savings really pay off. We have seen tiled implementations being twice as fast as their non-tiled counterparts. Now, some algorithms will not have performance benefits from tiling (and in fact may deteriorate), e.g. algorithms that require you to go only once to global memory will not benefit from tiling, since with tiling you already have to fetch the data once from global memory! Other algorithms may benefit, but you may decide that you are happy with your code being 150 times faster than the serial-version you had, and you do not need to invest to make it 250 times faster. Also algorithms with more than 3 dimensions, which C++ AMP supports in the non-tiled model, cannot be tiled. Also note that in future releases, we may invest in making the non-tiled model, which already uses tiling under the covers, go the extra step and use tile_static memory on your behalf, but it is obviously way to early to commit to anything like that, and we certainly don't do any of that today. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• How-to delete a tree node using the context menu

  - by frank.nimphius

  Hierarchical trees in Oracle ADF make use of View Accessors, which means that only the top level node needs to be exposed as a View Object instance on the ADF Business Components Data Model. This also means that only the top level node has a representation in the PageDef file as a tree binding and iterator binding reference. Detail nodes are accessed through tree rule definitions that use the accessor mentioned above (or nested collections in the case of POJO or EJB business services). The tree component is configured for single node selection, which however can be declaratively changed for users to press the ctrl key and selecting multiple nodes. In the following, I explain how to create a context menu on the tree for users to delete the selected tree nodes. For this, the context menu item will access a managed bean, which then determines the selected node(s), the internal ADF node bindings and the rows they represent. As mentioned, the ADF Business Components Data Model only needs to expose the top level node data sources, which in this example is an instance of the Locations View Object. For the tree to work, you need to have associations defined between entities, which usually is done for you by Oracle JDeveloper if the database tables have foreign keys defined Note: As a general hint of best practices and to simplify your life: Make sure your database schema is well defined and designed before starting your development project. Don't treat the database as something organic that grows and changes with the requirements as you proceed in your project. Business service refactoring in response to database changes is possible, but should be treated as an exception, not the rule. Good database design is a necessity – even for application developers – and nothing evil. To create the tree component, expand the Data Controls panel and drag the View Object collection to the view. From the context menu, select the tree component entry and continue with defining the tree rules that make up the hierarchical structure. As you see, when pressing the green plus icon  in the Edit Tree Binding  dialog, the data structure, Locations -  Departments – Employees in my sample, shows without you having created a View Object instance for each of the nodes in the ADF Business Components Data Model. After you configured the tree structure in the Edit Tree Binding dialog, you press OK and the tree is created. Select the tree in the page editor and open the Structure Window (ctrl+shift+S). In the Structure window, expand the tree node to access the conextMenu facet. Use the right mouse button to insert a Popup  into the facet. Repeat the same steps to insert a Menu and a Menu Item into the Popup you created. The Menu item text should be changed to something meaningful like "Delete". Note that the custom menu item later is added to the context menu together with the default context menu options like expand and expand all. To define the action that is executed when the menu item is clicked on, you select the Action Listener property in the Property Inspector and click the arrow icon followed by the Edit menu option. Create or select a managed bean and define a method name for the action handler. Next, select the tree component and browse to its binding property in the Property Inspector. Again, use the arrow icon | Edit option to create a component binding in the same managed bean that has the action listener defined. The tree handle is used in the action listener code, which is shown below: public void onTreeNodeDelete(ActionEvent actionEvent) {   //access the tree from the JSF component reference created   //using the af:tree "binding" property. The "binding" property   //creates a pair of set/get methods to access the RichTree instance   RichTree tree = this.getTreeHandler();   //get the list of selected row keys   RowKeySet rks = tree.getSelectedRowKeys();   //access the iterator to loop over selected nodes   Iterator rksIterator = rks.iterator();          //The CollectionModel represents the tree model and is   //accessed from the tree "value" property   CollectionModel model = (CollectionModel) tree.getValue();   //The CollectionModel is a wrapper for the ADF tree binding   //class, which is JUCtrlHierBinding   JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding =                  (JUCtrlHierBinding) model.getWrappedData();          //loop over the selected nodes and delete the rows they   //represent   while(rksIterator.hasNext()){     List nodeKey = (List) rksIterator.next();     //find the ADF node binding using the node key     JUCtrlHierNodeBinding node =                       treeBinding.findNodeByKeyPath(nodeKey);     //delete the row.     Row rw = node.getRow();       rw.remove();   }          //only refresh the tree if tree nodes have been selected   if(rks.size() > 0){     AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext =                          AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance();     adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(tree);   } } Note: To enable multi node selection for a tree, select the tree and change the row selection setting from "single" to "multiple". Note: a fully pictured version of this post will become available at the end of the month in a PDF summary on ADF Code Corner : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/index-101235.html 

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