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trying to use mod_proxy with httpd and tomcat

- by techsjs2012

I been trying to use mod_proxy with httpd and tomcat... I have on VirtualBox running Scientific Linux which has httpd and tomcat 6 on it.. I made two nodes of tomcat6. I followed this guide like 10 times and still cant get the 2nd node of tomcat working.. http://www.richardnichols.net/2010/08/5-minute-guide-clustering-apache-tomcat/ Here is the lines from my http.conf file <Proxy balancer://testcluster stickysession=JSESSIONID> BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8009 min=10 max=100 route=node1 loadfactor=1 BalancerMember ajp://127.0.0.1:8109 min=10 max=100 route=node2 loadfactor=1 </Proxy> ProxyPass /examples balancer://testcluster/examples <Location /balancer-manager> SetHandler balancer-manager AuthType Basic AuthName "Balancer Manager" AuthUserFile "/etc/httpd/conf/.htpasswd" Require valid-user </Location> Now here is my server.xml from node1 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>   <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" />  <GlobalNamingResources>  <Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase" description="User database that can be updated and saved" factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory" pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" /> </GlobalNamingResources>  <Service name="Catalina">         <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />   <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node1">      <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>  <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">     </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> now here is the server.xml file from node2 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>   <Server port="8105" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JreMemoryLeakPreventionListener" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.ServerLifecycleListener" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.mbeans.GlobalResourcesLifecycleListener" />  <GlobalNamingResources>  <Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase" description="User database that can be updated and saved" factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory" pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" /> </GlobalNamingResources>  <Service name="Catalina">         <Connector port="8109" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />   <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node2">      <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>  <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">     </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> I dont know what it is. but I been trying for days

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Informed TDD – Kata “To Roman Numerals”

- by Ralf Westphal

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/28/informed-tdd-ndash-kata-ldquoto-roman-numeralsrdquo.aspxIn a comment on my article on what I call Informed TDD (ITDD) reader gustav asked how this approach would apply to the kata “To Roman Numerals”. And whether ITDD wasn´t a violation of TDD´s principle of leaving out “advanced topics like mocks”. I like to respond with this article to his questions. There´s more to say than fits into a commentary. Mocks and TDD I don´t see in how far TDD is avoiding or opposed to mocks. TDD and mocks are orthogonal. TDD is about pocess, mocks are about structure and costs. Maybe by moving forward in tiny red+green+refactor steps less need arises for mocks. But then… if the functionality you need to implement requires “expensive” resource access you can´t avoid using mocks. Because you don´t want to constantly run all your tests against the real resource. True, in ITDD mocks seem to be in almost inflationary use. That´s not what you usually see in TDD demonstrations. However, there´s a reason for that as I tried to explain. I don´t use mocks as proxies for “expensive” resource. Rather they are stand-ins for functionality not yet implemented. They allow me to get a test green on a high level of abstraction. That way I can move forward in a top-down fashion. But if you think of mocks as “advanced” or if you don´t want to use a tool like JustMock, then you don´t need to use mocks. You just need to stand the sight of red tests for a little longer ;-) Let me show you what I mean by that by doing a kata. ITDD for “To Roman Numerals” gustav asked for the kata “To Roman Numerals”. I won´t explain the requirements again. You can find descriptions and TDD demonstrations all over the internet, like this one from Corey Haines. Now here is, how I would do this kata differently. 1. Analyse A demonstration of TDD should never skip the analysis phase. It should be made explicit. The requirements should be formalized and acceptance test cases should be compiled. “Formalization” in this case to me means describing the API of the required functionality. “[D]esign a program to work with Roman numerals” like written in this “requirement document” is not enough to start software development. Coding should only begin, if the interface between the “system under development” and its context is clear. If this interface is not readily recognizable from the requirements, it has to be developed first. Exploration of interface alternatives might be in order. It might be necessary to show several interface mock-ups to the customer – even if that´s you fellow developer. Designing the interface is a task of it´s own. It should not be mixed with implementing the required functionality behind the interface. Unfortunately, though, this happens quite often in TDD demonstrations. TDD is used to explore the API and implement it at the same time. To me that´s a violation of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) which not only should hold for software functional units but also for tasks or activities. In the case of this kata the API fortunately is obvious. Just one function is needed: string ToRoman(int arabic). And it lives in a class ArabicRomanConversions. Now what about acceptance test cases? There are hardly any stated in the kata descriptions. Roman numerals are explained, but no specific test cases from the point of view of a customer. So I just “invent” some acceptance test cases by picking roman numerals from a wikipedia article. They are supposed to be just “typical examples” without special meaning. Given the acceptance test cases I then try to develop an understanding of the problem domain. I´ll spare you that. The domain is trivial and is explain in almost all kata descriptions. How roman numerals are built is not difficult to understand. What´s more difficult, though, might be to find an efficient solution to convert into them automatically. 2. Solve The usual TDD demonstration skips a solution finding phase. Like the interface exploration it´s mixed in with the implementation. But I don´t think this is how it should be done. I even think this is not how it really works for the people demonstrating TDD. They´re simplifying their true software development process because they want to show a streamlined TDD process. I doubt this is helping anybody. Before you code you better have a plan what to code. This does not mean you have to do “Big Design Up-Front”. It just means: Have a clear picture of the logical solution in your head before you start to build a physical solution (code). Evidently such a solution can only be as good as your understanding of the problem. If that´s limited your solution will be limited, too. Fortunately, in the case of this kata your understanding does not need to be limited. Thus the logical solution does not need to be limited or preliminary or tentative. That does not mean you need to know every line of code in advance. It just means you know the rough structure of your implementation beforehand. Because it should mirror the process described by the logical or conceptual solution. Here´s my solution approach: The arabic “encoding” of numbers represents them as an ordered set of powers of 10. Each digit is a factor to multiply a power of ten with. The “encoding” 123 is the short form for a set like this: {1*10^2, 2*10^1, 3*10^0}. And the number is the sum of the set members. The roman “encoding” is different. There is no base (like 10 for arabic numbers), there are just digits of different value, and they have to be written in descending order. The “encoding” XVI is short for [10, 5, 1]. And the number is still the sum of the members of this list. The roman “encoding” thus is simpler than the arabic. Each “digit” can be taken at face value. No multiplication with a base required. But what about IV which looks like a contradiction to the above rule? It is not – if you accept roman “digits” not to be limited to be single characters only. Usually I, V, X, L, C, D, M are viewed as “digits”, and IV, IX etc. are viewed as nuisances preventing a simple solution. All looks different, though, once IV, IX etc. are taken as “digits”. Then MCMLIV is just a sum: M+CM+L+IV which is 1000+900+50+4. Whereas before it would have been understood as M-C+M+L-I+V – which is more difficult because here some “digits” get subtracted. Here´s the list of roman “digits” with their values: {1, I}, {4, IV}, {5, V}, {9, IX}, {10, X}, {40, XL}, {50, L}, {90, XC}, {100, C}, {400, CD}, {500, D}, {900, CM}, {1000, M} Since I take IV, IX etc. as “digits” translating an arabic number becomes trivial. I just need to find the values of the roman “digits” making up the number, e.g. 1954 is made up of 1000, 900, 50, and 4. I call those “digits” factors. If I move from the highest factor (M=1000) to the lowest (I=1) then translation is a two phase process: Find all the factors Translate the factors found Compile the roman representation Translation is just a look-up. Finding, though, needs some calculation: Find the highest remaining factor fitting in the value Remember and subtract it from the value Repeat with remaining value and remaining factors Please note: This is just an algorithm. It´s not code, even though it might be close. Being so close to code in my solution approach is due to the triviality of the problem. In more realistic examples the conceptual solution would be on a higher level of abstraction. With this solution in hand I finally can do what TDD advocates: find and prioritize test cases. As I can see from the small process description above, there are two aspects to test: Test the translation Test the compilation Test finding the factors Testing the translation primarily means to check if the map of factors and digits is comprehensive. That´s simple, even though it might be tedious. Testing the compilation is trivial. Testing factor finding, though, is a tad more complicated. I can think of several steps: First check, if an arabic number equal to a factor is processed correctly (e.g. 1000=M). Then check if an arabic number consisting of two consecutive factors (e.g. 1900=[M,CM]) is processed correctly. Then check, if a number consisting of the same factor twice is processed correctly (e.g. 2000=[M,M]). Finally check, if an arabic number consisting of non-consecutive factors (e.g. 1400=[M,CD]) is processed correctly. I feel I can start an implementation now. If something becomes more complicated than expected I can slow down and repeat this process. 3. Implement First I write a test for the acceptance test cases. It´s red because there´s no implementation even of the API. That´s in conformance with “TDD lore”, I´d say: Next I implement the API: The acceptance test now is formally correct, but still red of course. This will not change even now that I zoom in. Because my goal is not to most quickly satisfy these tests, but to implement my solution in a stepwise manner. That I do by “faking” it: I just “assume” three functions to represent the transformation process of my solution: My hypothesis is that those three functions in conjunction produce correct results on the API-level. I just have to implement them correctly. That´s what I´m trying now – one by one. I start with a simple “detail function”: Translate(). And I start with all the test cases in the obvious equivalence partition: As you can see I dare to test a private method. Yes. That´s a white box test. But as you´ll see it won´t make my tests brittle. It serves a purpose right here and now: it lets me focus on getting one aspect of my solution right. Here´s the implementation to satisfy the test: It´s as simple as possible. Right how TDD wants me to do it: KISS. Now for the second equivalence partition: translating multiple factors. (It´a pattern: if you need to do something repeatedly separate the tests for doing it once and doing it multiple times.) In this partition I just need a single test case, I guess. Stepping up from a single translation to multiple translations is no rocket science: Usually I would have implemented the final code right away. Splitting it in two steps is just for “educational purposes” here. How small your implementation steps are is a matter of your programming competency. Some “see” the final code right away before their mental eye – others need to work their way towards it. Having two tests I find more important. Now for the next low hanging fruit: compilation. It´s even simpler than translation. A single test is enough, I guess. And normally I would not even have bothered to write that one, because the implementation is so simple. I don´t need to test .NET framework functionality. But again: if it serves the educational purpose… Finally the most complicated part of the solution: finding the factors. There are several equivalence partitions. But still I decide to write just a single test, since the structure of the test data is the same for all partitions: Again, I´m faking the implementation first: I focus on just the first test case. No looping yet. Faking lets me stay on a high level of abstraction. I can write down the implementation of the solution without bothering myself with details of how to actually accomplish the feat. That´s left for a drill down with a test of the fake function: There are two main equivalence partitions, I guess: either the first factor is appropriate or some next. The implementation seems easy. Both test cases are green. (Of course this only works on the premise that there´s always a matching factor. Which is the case since the smallest factor is 1.) And the first of the equivalence partitions on the higher level also is satisfied: Great, I can move on. Now for more than a single factor: Interestingly not just one test becomes green now, but all of them. Great! You might say, then I must have done not the simplest thing possible. And I would reply: I don´t care. I did the most obvious thing. But I also find this loop very simple. Even simpler than a recursion of which I had thought briefly during the problem solving phase. And by the way: Also the acceptance tests went green: Mission accomplished. At least functionality wise. Now I´ve to tidy up things a bit. TDD calls for refactoring. Not uch refactoring is needed, because I wrote the code in top-down fashion. I faked it until I made it. I endured red tests on higher levels while lower levels weren´t perfected yet. But this way I saved myself from refactoring tediousness. At the end, though, some refactoring is required. But maybe in a different way than you would expect. That´s why I rather call it “cleanup”. First I remove duplication. There are two places where factors are defined: in Translate() and in Find_factors(). So I factor the map out into a class constant. Which leads to a small conversion in Find_factors(): And now for the big cleanup: I remove all tests of private methods. They are scaffolding tests to me. They only have temporary value. They are brittle. Only acceptance tests need to remain. However, I carry over the single “digit” tests from Translate() to the acceptance test. I find them valuable to keep, since the other acceptance tests only exercise a subset of all roman “digits”. This then is my final test class: And this is the final production code: Test coverage as reported by NCrunch is 100%: Reflexion Is this the smallest possible code base for this kata? Sure not. You´ll find more concise solutions on the internet. But LOC are of relatively little concern – as long as I can understand the code quickly. So called “elegant” code, however, often is not easy to understand. The same goes for KISS code – especially if left unrefactored, as it is often the case. That´s why I progressed from requirements to final code the way I did. I first understood and solved the problem on a conceptual level. Then I implemented it top down according to my design. I also could have implemented it bottom-up, since I knew some bottom of the solution. That´s the leaves of the functional decomposition tree. Where things became fuzzy, since the design did not cover any more details as with Find_factors(), I repeated the process in the small, so to speak: fake some top level, endure red high level tests, while first solving a simpler problem. Using scaffolding tests (to be thrown away at the end) brought two advantages: Encapsulation of the implementation details was not compromised. Naturally private methods could stay private. I did not need to make them internal or public just to be able to test them. I was able to write focused tests for small aspects of the solution. No need to test everything through the solution root, the API. The bottom line thus for me is: Informed TDD produces cleaner code in a systematic way. It conforms to core principles of programming: Single Responsibility Principle and/or Separation of Concerns. Distinct roles in development – being a researcher, being an engineer, being a craftsman – are represented as different phases. First find what, what there is. Then devise a solution. Then code the solution, manifest the solution in code. Writing tests first is a good practice. But it should not be taken dogmatic. And above all it should not be overloaded with purposes. And finally: moving from top to bottom through a design produces refactored code right away. Clean code thus almost is inevitable – and not left to a refactoring step at the end which is skipped often for different reasons. PS: Yes, I have done this kata several times. But that has only an impact on the time needed for phases 1 and 2. I won´t skip them because of that. And there are no shortcuts during implementation because of that.

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Oracle BPM: Adding an attachment during the Human Task Initialization

- by kyap

Recently I had the requirement from a customer to instantiate a Human Task, which can accept a payload containing a binary attribute (base64) representing an actual document. According to the same requirement, this attribute should be shown as a hyperlink in the Worklist UI to the assignee(s), from which the assignees can download the document on the local machine for review. Multiple options have been leverage, but most required heavy customization. In order to leverage as much as possible Oracle BPM out-of-the box functionalities, I decided to add this document as a readonly attachment. We can easily achieve this operation within Worklist Application, but it is a bit more challenging when we want to attach the document during the Human Task initialization. After some investigations (on BPM 11g PS4FP and PS5), here's the way to go: 1. Create an asynchronous BPM process, and use this xsd to create 2 Business Objects FullPayload and PartialPayload : 2. Create 2 process variables 'vFullPayload' and 'vPartialPayload' using this Business Objects created above 3. Implement the Start Event with the initial Data Association, with an input argument using 'FullPayload' Business Object type 4. Drag in an User Task into the process. Implement the User Task as usual by using 'vPartialPayload' type as the input type and assign the task to your favorite tester (mine is jcooper) 5. Here's the main course - Start the Data Association and map the payload into 'execData' as follow: FROM TO vFullPayload.attachment.mimetype execData.attachment[1].mimeType vFullPayload.attachment.filename execData.attachment[1].name bpmn:getDataObject('vFullPayload')/ns:attachment/ns:content execData.attachment[1].content 'BPM' execData.attachment[1].attachmentScope false() execData.attachment[1].doesBelongToParent 'weblogic' execData.attachment[1].updateBy xp20:current-dateTime() execData.attachment[1].updateDate (Note: Check the <Humantask>WorkflowTask.xsd file in your project xsd folder to discover the different options for attachmentScope & storageType) 6. Your process is completed. Just build a standard ADF UI and deploy the process/UI onto your BPM Server for the testing. Here's an example, with a base64 encoded pdf file: application-pdf.txt 7. Finally, go to the BPM Worklist application to check the result ! Please note that Oracle BPM, by default, limits the attachment document size to 2Mb. If you are planning to have bigger attachments in your process, it is recommended to store your documents in a Content Management server (such as Oracle UCM) and pass the reference instead. It is possible to configure Oracle BPM to store attachment directly into Oracle UCM too, and I believe we can use the storageType, ucmMetadataItem attributes for this purpose.... I will confirm once I have access onto an Oracle UCM for the testing :)

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NetBeans Java Hints: Quick & Dirty Guide

- by Geertjan

In NetBeans IDE 7.2, a new wizard will be found in the "Module Development" category in the New File dialog, for creating new Java Hints. Select a package in a NetBeans module project. Right click, choose New/Other.../Module Development/Java Hint: You'll then see this: Fill in: Class Name: the name of the class that should be generated. E.g. "Example". Hint Display Name: the display name of the hint itself (as will appear in Tools/Options). E.g. "Example Hint". Warning Message: the warning that should be produced by the hint. E.g. "Something wrong is going on". Hint Description: a longer description of the hint, will appear in Tools/Options and eventually some other places. E.g. "This is an example hint that warns about an example problem." Will also provide an Automatic Fix: whether the hint will provide some kind of transformation. E.g. "yes". Fix Display Name: the display name of such a fix/transformation. E.g. "Fix the problem". Click Finish. Should generate "Example.java", the hint itself: import com.sun.source.util.TreePath; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.CompilationInfo; import org.netbeans.spi.editor.hints.ErrorDescription; import org.netbeans.spi.editor.hints.Fix; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.ConstraintVariableType; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.ErrorDescriptionFactory; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.Hint; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.HintContext; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.JavaFix; import org.netbeans.spi.java.hints.TriggerPattern; import org.openide.util.NbBundle.Messages; @Hint(displayName = "DN_com.bla.Example", description = "DESC_com.bla.Example", category = "general") //NOI18N @Messages({"DN_com.bla.Example=Example Hint", "DESC_com.bla.Example=This is an example hint that warns about an example problem."}) public class Example { @TriggerPattern(value = "$str.equals(\"\")", //Specify a pattern as needed constraints = @ConstraintVariableType(variable = "$str", type = "java.lang.String")) @Messages("ERR_com.bla.Example=Something wrong is going on") public static ErrorDescription computeWarning(HintContext ctx) { Fix fix = new FixImpl(ctx.getInfo(), ctx.getPath()).toEditorFix(); return ErrorDescriptionFactory.forName(ctx, ctx.getPath(), Bundle.ERR_com.bla_Example(), fix); } private static final class FixImpl extends JavaFix { public FixImpl(CompilationInfo info, TreePath tp) { super(info, tp); } @Override @Messages("FIX_com.bla.Example=Fix the problem") protected String getText() { return Bundle.FIX_com_bla_Example(); } @Override protected void performRewrite(TransformationContext ctx) { //perform the required transformation } } } Should also generate "ExampleTest.java", a test for it. Unfortunately, the wizard infrastructure is not capable of handling changes related to test dependencies. So the ExampleTest.java has a todo list at its begining: /* TODO to make this test work: - add test dependency on Java Hints Test API (and JUnit 4) - to ensure that the newest Java language features supported by the IDE are available, regardless of which JDK you build the module with: -- for Ant-based modules, add "requires.nb.javac=true" into nbproject/project.properties -- for Maven-based modules, use dependency:copy in validate phase to create target/endorsed/org-netbeans-libs-javacapi-*.jar and add to endorseddirs in maven-compiler-plugin configuration */Warning: if this is a project for which tests never existed before, you may need to close&reopen the project, so that "Unit Test Libraries" node appears - a bug in apisupport projects, as far as I can tell. Thanks to Jan Lahoda for the above rough guide.

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Finding the lowest average Hamming distance when the order of the strings matter

- by user1049697

I have a sequence of binary strings that I want to find a match for among a set of longer sequences of binary strings. A match means that the compared sequence gives the lowest average Hamming distance when all elements in the shorter sequence have been matched against a sequence in one of the longer sets. Let me try to explain with an example. I have a set of video frames that have been hashed using a perceptual hashing algorithm so that the video frames that look the same has roughly the same hash. I want to match a short video clip against a set of longer videos, to see if the clip is contained in one of these. This means that I need to find out where the sequence of the hashed frames in the short video has the lowest average Hamming distance when compared with the long videos. The short video is the sub strings Sub1, Sub2 and Sub3, and I want to match them against the hashes of the long videos in Src. The clue here is that the strings need to match in the specific order that they are given in, e.g. that Sub1 always has to match the element before Sub2, and Sub2 always has to match the element before Sub3. In this example it would map thusly: Sub1-Src3, Sub2-Src4 and Sub3-Src5. So the question is this: is there an algorithm for finding the lowest average Hamming distance when the order of the elements compared matter? The naïve approach to compare the substring sequence to every source string won't cut it of course, so I need something that preferably can match a (much) shorter sub string to a set of million of elements. I have looked at MVP-trees, BK-trees and similar, but everything seems to only take into account one binary string and not a sequence of them. Sub1: 100111011111011101 Sub2: 110111000010010100 Sub3: 111111010110101101 Src1: 001011010001010110 Src2: 010111101000111001 Src3: 101111001110011101 Src4: 010111100011010101 Src5: 001111010110111101 Src6: 101011111111010101 I have added a calculation of the examples below. (The Hamming distances aren't correct, but it doesn't matter) **Run 1.** dist(Sub1, Src1) = 8 dist(Sub2, Src2) = 10 dist(Sub3, Src3) = 12 average = 10 **Run 2.** dist(Sub1, Src2) = 10 dist(Sub2, Src3) = 12 dist(Sub3, Src4) = 10 average = 11 **Run 3.** dist(Sub1, Src3) = 7 dist(Sub2, Src4) = 6 dist(Sub3, Src5) = 10 average = 8 **Run 4.** dist(Sub1, Src3) = 10 dist(Sub2, Src4) = 4 dist(Sub3, Src5) = 2 average = 5 So the winner here is sequence 4 with an average distance of 5.

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Have you ever wondered...?

- by diana.gray

I've often wondered why folks do the same thing over and over. For some of us, it's because we "don't get it" and there's an abundance of TV talk shows that will help us analyze the why of it. Dr. Phil is all too eager to ask "...and how's that working for you?". But I'm not referring to being stuck in a destructive pattern or denial. I'm really talking about doing something over and over because you have found a joy, a comfort, a boost of energy from an activity or event. For example, how many times have I planted bulbs in November or December only to be amazed by their reach, colors, and fragrance in early spring? Or baked fresh cookies and allowed the aroma to fill the house? Or kissed a sleeping baby held gently in my arms and being reminded of how tiny and fragile we all are. I've often wondered why it is that I get so much out of something I've done so many times. I think it's because I've changed. The activity may be the same but in the preceding days, months and years I've had new experiences, challenges, joys and sorrows that have shaped me. I'm different. The same is true about attending the Professional Businesswomen of California (PBWC) conference. Although the conference is an annual event held at San Francisco's Moscone Center, I still enjoy being with 3,000 other women like me. Yes, we work at different companies and in different industries, have different lifestyles and are at different stages in our professional careers and personal lives; but we are all alike in that we bring the NEW me each year that we attend. This year I can cheer when Safra Catz, President of Oracle, encourages us to trust our intuition; that "if something doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense". And I can warmly introduce myself to Lisa Askins, Cheryl Melching's business partner at Center Stage Group, when I would have been too intimated to do so last year. This year I can commit to new challenges such as "no whining, no excuses and no gossip" as suggested by Roxanne Emmerich, a goal that I would have wavered on last year. I can also embrace the suggestion given by Dr. Ian Smith to "spend one hour each day" on me - giving myself time to rejuvenate. A friend, when asked if she was attending PBWC this year, said "I've attended the conference several times and there's nothing new!" My perspective is that WE are what makes PBWC's annual conference new. We are far different in 2010 than we were in 2009. We are learning, growing, developing and shedding and that's what makes the conference fresh, vibrant, rewarding, and lasting. It is the diversity of women coming together that makes it new. By sharing our experiences, we discover. By meeting with one another professionally and personally, we connect. And by applying the wisdom learned, we shine. We are reNEW-ed. It shows in our fresh ideas, confident interactions, strategic decisions and successful businesses. This refreshed approach is what our companies want and need, our families depend on, our communities and nation look to for creative solutions to pressing concerns. Thanks Oracle for your continued support and thanks PBWC for providing an annual day to be reNEW-ed.

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AWS .NET SDK v2: setting up queues and topics

- by Elton Stoneman

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/13/aws-.net-sdk-v2-setting-up-queues-and-topics.aspxFollowing on from my last post, reading from SQS queues with the new SDK is easy stuff, but linking a Simple Notification Service topic to an SQS queue is a bit more involved. The AWS model for topics and subscriptions is a bit more advanced than in Azure Service Bus. SNS lets you have subscribers on multiple different channels, so you can send a message which gets relayed to email address, mobile apps and SQS queues all in one go. As the topic owner, when you request a subscription on any channel, the owner needs to confirm they’re happy for you to send them messages. With email subscriptions, the user gets a confirmation request from Amazon which they need to reply to before they start getting messages. With SQS, you need to grant the topic permission to write to the queue. If you own both the topic and the queue, you can do it all in code with the .NET SDK. Let’s say you want to create a new topic, a new queue as a topic subscriber, and link the two together. Creating the topic is easy with the SNS client (which has an expanded name, AmazonSimpleNotificationServiceClient, compare to the SQS class which is just called QueueClient): var request = new CreateTopicRequest(); request.Name = TopicName; var response = _snsClient.CreateTopic(request); TopicArn = response.TopicArn; In the response from AWS (which I’m assuming is successful), you get an ARN – Amazon Resource Name – which is the unique identifier for the topic. We create the queue using the same code from my last post, AWS .NET SDK v2: the message-pump pattern, and then we need to subscribe the queue to the topic. The topic creates the subscription request: var response = _snsClient.Subscribe(new SubscribeRequest { TopicArn = TopicArn, Protocol = "sqs", Endpoint = _queueClient.QueueArn }); That response will give you an ARN for the subscription, which you’ll need if you want to set attributes like RawMessageDelivery. Then the SQS client needs to confirm the subscription by allowing the topic to send messages to it. The SDK doesn’t give you a nice mechanism for doing that, so I’ve extended my AWS wrapper with a method that encapsulates it: internal void AllowSnsToSendMessages(TopicClient topicClient) { var policy = Policies.AllowSendFormat.Replace("%QueueArn%", QueueArn).Replace("%TopicArn%", topicClient.TopicArn); var request = new SetQueueAttributesRequest(); request.Attributes.Add("Policy", policy); request.QueueUrl = QueueUrl; var response = _sqsClient.SetQueueAttributes(request); } That builds up a policy statement, which gets added to the queue as an attribute, and specifies that the topic is allowed to send messages to the queue. The statement itself is a JSON block which contains the ARN of the queue, the ARN of the topic, and an Allow effect for the sqs:SendMessage action: public const string AllowSendFormat= @"{ ""Statement"": [ { ""Sid"": ""MySQSPolicy001"", ""Effect"": ""Allow"", ""Principal"": { ""AWS"": ""*"" }, ""Action"": ""sqs:SendMessage"", ""Resource"": ""%QueueArn%"", ""Condition"": { ""ArnEquals"": { ""aws:SourceArn"": ""%TopicArn%"" } } } ] }"; There’s a new gist with an updated QueueClient and a new TopicClient here: Wrappers for the SQS and SNS clients in the AWS SDK for .NET v2. Both clients have an Ensure() method which creates the resource, so if you want to create a topic and a subscription you can use: var topicClient = new TopicClient(“BigNews”, “ImListening”); And the topic client has a Subscribe() method, which calls into the message pump on the queue client: topicClient.Subscribe(x=>Log.Debug(x.Body)); var message = {}; //etc. topicClient.Publish(message); So you can isolate all the fiddly bits and use SQS and SNS with a similar interface to the Azure SDK.

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SQL Table stored as a Heap - the dangers within

- by MikeD

Nearly all of the time I create a table, I include a primary key, and often that PK is implemented as a clustered index. Those two don't always have to go together, but in my world they almost always do. On a recent project, I was working on a data warehouse and a set of SSIS packages to import data from an OLTP database into my data warehouse. The data I was importing from the business database into the warehouse was mostly new rows, sometimes updates to existing rows, and sometimes deletes. I decided to use the MERGE statement to implement the insert, update or delete in the data warehouse, I found it quite performant to have a stored procedure that extracted all the new, updated, and deleted rows from the source database and dump it into a working table in my data warehouse, then run a stored proc in the warehouse that was the MERGE statement that took the rows from the working table and updated the real fact table. Use Warehouse CREATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy (PolicyId int, PolicyTypeKey int, Premium money, Deductible money, EffectiveDate date, Operation varchar(5)) CREATE TABLE fact.Policy (PolicyKey int identity primary key, PolicyId int, PolicyTypeKey int, Premium money, Deductible money, EffectiveDate date) CREATE PROC Integration.MergePolicy as begin begin tran Merge fact.Policy as tgtUsing Integration.MergePolicy as SrcOn (tgt.PolicyId = Src.PolicyId) When not matched by Target then Insert (PolicyId, PolicyTypeKey, Premium, Deductible, EffectiveDate)values (src.PolicyId, src.PolicyTypeKey, src.Premium, src.Deductible, src.EffectiveDate) When matched and src.Operation = 'U' then Update set PolicyTypeKey = src.PolicyTypeKey,Premium = src.Premium,Deductible = src.Deductible,EffectiveDate = src.EffectiveDate When matched and src.Operation = 'D' then Delete ;delete from Integration.WorkPolicy commit end Notice that my worktable (Integration.MergePolicy) doesn't have any primary key or clustered index. I didn't think this would be a problem, since it was relatively small table and was empty after each time I ran the stored proc. For one of the work tables, during the initial loads of the warehouse, it was getting about 1.5 million rows inserted, processed, then deleted. Also, because of a bug in the extraction process, the same 1.5 million rows (plus a few hundred more each time) was getting inserted, processed, and deleted. This was being sone on a fairly hefty server that was otherwise unused, and no one was paying any attention to the time it was taking. This week I received a backup of this database and loaded it on my laptop to troubleshoot the problem, and of course it took a good ten minutes or more to run the process. However, what seemed strange to me was that after I fixed the problem and happened to run the merge sproc when the work table was completely empty, it still took almost ten minutes to complete. I immediately looked back at the MERGE statement to see if I had some sort of outer join that meant it would be scanning the target table (which had about 2 million rows in it), then turned on the execution plan output to see what was happening under the hood. Running the stored procedure again took a long time, and the plan output didn't show me much - 55% on the MERGE statement, and 45% on the DELETE statement, and table scans on the work table in both places. I was surprised at the relative cost of the DELETE statement, because there were really 0 rows to delete, but I was expecting to see the table scans. (I was beginning now to suspect that my problem was because the work table was being stored as a heap.) Then I turned on STATS_IO and ran the sproc again. The output was quite interesting.Table 'Worktable'. Scan count 0, logical reads 0, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.Table 'Policy'. Scan count 0, logical reads 0, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.Table 'MergePolicy'. Scan count 1, logical reads 433276, physical reads 60, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0. I've reproduced the above from memory, the details aren't exact, but the essential bit was the very high number of logical reads on the table stored as a heap. Even just doing a SELECT Count(*) from Integration.MergePolicy incurred that sort of output, even though the result was always 0. I suppose I should research more on the allocation and deallocation of pages to tables stored as a heap, but I haven't, and my original assumption that a table stored as a heap with no rows would only need to read one page to answer any query was definitely proven wrong. It's likely that some sort of physical defragmentation of the table may have cleaned that up, but it seemed that the easiest answer was to put a clustered index on the table. After doing so, the execution plan showed a cluster index scan, and the IO stats showed only a single page read. (I aborted my first attempt at adding a clustered index on the table because it was taking too long - instead I ran TRUNCATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy first and added the clustered index, both of which took very little time). I suspect I may not have noticed this if I had used TRUNCATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy instead of DELETE FROM Integration.MergePolicy, since I'm guessing that the truncate operation does some rather quick releasing of pages allocated to the heap table. In the future, I will likely be much more careful to have a clustered index on every table I use, even the working tables. Mike

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Somewhere to get inspiration - Pair up the creative with the tech

- by Morten Bergfall

I am a somewhat green developer; some work experience, last year of school. As most of you, I am constantly working on an assortment of personal projects. Since my mind often has a somewhat drifting characteristic; I am not always able to keep the projects in check. After some time they all exhibit the moral fiber of Vikings, harlots and chain-letter-knitters. This includes constant forking, round-abouting, eating of school assignments of rather mundane, and hence pretty yawn-inducing, specifications, and of course quite a bit of gathering of folder dust. Well, on to my question....is there a place, forum... or something with the purpose of linking people with ideas to the people actually being able to bring said ideas to life? Of course, I know of the professional ones, like rent-a-coder and such. And there seem to be a lot of open source projects available for participation. What I'm looking for doesn't really fit into any of those categories....the form would be somewhat like rent-a-coder, but this is ideas&inspiration, not bubble-sort-my-quarterly-for-a-buck. The possibilities for developing bonds, spicy code, and plain old fun seem quite possible.As I see it, the main benefit would be that we (that is the tech-flipside of the proverbial eCoin) get something worthwhile to do, rather than squeeze the last creative grain out of our code-heavy brains.To give it some perspective...: My last project consists of an absurd jQuery-plugin that includes animated png-robots migrating from Google Earth to drag a html-element of your choosing onto the map, where it gets color, for so to be dragged back by this poorly animated robot.... Often, the line between the creative and the tech is blurred, to say the least. I wouldn't think that would be a problem. Think someone who has developed a nifty little windows application, then sees possibility for a broader use, perhaps some sort of networking functionality. This fellow sadly lacks the skill to implememet this. So he, she or it would then seek a developer with the know-how and they could complete this project together. So, do any of you know of such a place, or can nudge in the right direction? And yes, I understand completely that I should be dedicating myself to doing school work, or applying for mundane developer positions, so please.... :-) UPDATE Sadly, I'm situated in Oslo, Norway, and the number of developers are somewhat limited...and I have had quite some ahem personality issues with the ones who are available ;-) So I feel I must go deeper; search the multitude of the web...

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How to use Object Type Converter

- by arun.x.sridharan(at)oracle.com

UseCase Description A person form where in user will enter String which has to be converted to Number while persisting. From the User Interface we might be getting a String value which has to be persisted in the database as a number in that scenario we can use converters to map the java object which is of type String to its database value which is a Number. For example , there is a 'Person' table in database which is used to store the user details passed from the User Interface. It has a 'Status' column which is of the value Number. But from the User Interface String values (Active/InActive) are passed . For persisting the user details we can use Object type converter and provide the mappings for status column corresponding to the String values. Object type converter can be used if you wanted to have a mapping for a field for example when departmentName on the entity was of String value and mapped to dept_name field on the database table which is of the value NUMBER. Implementation steps Sample EJB API for setting the value of status on Person Entity as a String public void createPerson(String status,String firstName,String lastName) { Person person = new Person(); // status will be set as a String value received from the User Interface person.setStatus(status); person.setFirstname(firstName); person.setLastname(lastName); persistPerson(person); } In the sample code shown above status is passed as a String, this has to be converted to Number. The String value obtained will be set on Person object and persistPerson API will be called for creating a new person from the values passed from the User Interface. Steps to configure Object type converter: 1. Navigate to Person Entity from persistence.xml and navigate to status field2. Click on Conversion tab and select Converted check box3. Select Object Type Converter radio button and set the Data Type Class to java.math.BigDecimal and Object Type Class to java.lang.String4. Specify the conversion values for all the values that can be passed from the user interface as shown below5. Set the Default Object value

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Writing an ASP.Net Web based TFS Client

- by Glav

So one of the things I needed to do was write an ASP.Net MVC based application for our senior execs to manage a set of arbitrary attributes against stories, bugs etc to be able to attribute whether the item was related to Research and Development, and if so, what kind. We are using TFS Azure and don’t have the option of custom templates. I have decided on using a string based field within the template that is not very visible and which we don’t use to write a small set of custom which will determine the research and development association. However, this string munging on the field is not very user friendly so we need a simple tool that can display attributes against items in a simple dropdown list or something similar. Enter a custom web app that accesses our TFS items in Azure (Note: We are also using Visual Studio 2012) Now TFS Azure uses your Live ID and it is not really possible to easily do this in a server based app where no interaction is available. Even if you capture the Live ID credentials yourself and try to submit them to TFS Azure, it wont work. Bottom line is that it is not straightforward nor obvious what you have to do. In fact, it is a real pain to find and there are some answers out there which don’t appear to be answers at all given they didn’t work in my scenario. So for anyone else who wants to do this, here is a simple breakdown on what you have to do: Go here and get the “TFS Service Credential Viewer”. Install it, run it and connect to your TFS instance in azure and create a service account. Note the username and password exactly as it presents it to you. This is the magic identity that will allow unattended, programmatic access. Without this step, don’t bother trying to do anything else. In your MVC app, reference the following assemblies from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0”: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.DataStoreLoader.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Common.dll If hosting this in Internet Information Server, for the application pool this app runs under, you will need to enable 32 Bit support. You also have to allow the TFS client assemblies to store a cache of files on your system. If you don’t do this, you will authenticate fine, but then get an exception saying that it is unable to access the cache at some directory path when you query work items. You can set this up by adding the following to your web.config, in the <appSettings> element as shown below: <appSettings>  <add key="WorkItemTrackingCacheRoot" value="C:\windows\temp" /> </appSettings> With all that in place, you can write the following code: var token = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SimpleWebTokenCredential("{you-service-account-name", "{your-service-acct-password}"); var clientCreds = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TfsClientCredentials(token); var currentCollection = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(“https://{yourdomain}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection”), clientCreds); TfsConfigurationServercurrentCollection.EnsureAuthenticated(); In the above code, not the URL contains the “defaultcollection” at the end of the URL. Obviously replace {yourdomain} with whatever is defined for your TFS in Azure instance. In addition, make sure the service user account and password that was generated in the first step is substituted in here. Note: If something is not right, the “EnsureAuthenticated()” call will throw an exception with the message being you are not authorised. If you forget the “defaultcollection” on the URL, it will still fail but with a message saying you are not authorised. That is, a similar but different exception message. And that is it. You can then query the collection using something like: var service = currentCollection.GetService<WorkItemStore>(); var proj = service.Projects[0]; var allQueries = proj.StoredQueries; for (int qcnt = 0; qcnt < allQueries.Count; qcnt++) { var query = allQueries[qcnt]; var queryDesc = string.format(“Query found named: {0}”,query.Name); } You get the idea. If you search around, you will find references to the ServiceIdentityCredentialProvider which is referenced in this article. I had no luck with this method and it all looked too hard since it required an extra KB article and other magic sauce. So I hope that helps. This article certainly would have helped me save a boat load of time and frustration.

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Process Centric Banking: Loan Origination Solution

- by Manish Palaparthy

There is an old proverb that goes, "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory". So, we keep doing numerous "Proof of Concepts" with our own products on various business cases to analyze them deeply, understand and explain to our customers. We then present our learnings as they happened. The awareness of each PoC should help readers increase the trustworthiness of the results coming out of these PoCs. I present one such PoC where we invested a lot of time&effort. Process Centric Banking : Loan Origination Solution Loan Origination is a process by which a borrower applies for a new loan and the lender processes that application. Loan origination includes the series of steps taken by the bank from the point the customer shows interest in a loan product all the way to disbursal of funds. The Loan Origination process is relevant for many kind of lenders in Financial services: Banks, Credit Unions, NBFCs(Non Banking Financial Companies) and so on. For simplicity sake, I will use "Bank" as the lending institution in the rest of my article. Loan Origination is one of the core processes for Banks as it is the process by which the it creates assets against which the Institution earns most of its profits from. A well tuned loan origination process can affect the Bank in many positive ways. Banks have always shown great interest in automating the loan origination process for the above reason. However, due the constant changes in customer environment, market dynamics, prevailing economic conditions, cost pressures & regulatory environment they run into lot of challenges. Let me categorize some of these challenges for you Customer Environment Multiple Channels: Customer can use any of the available channels (Internet Banking, Email, Fax, Branch, Phone Banking, ATM, Broker, Mobile, Snail Mail) to perform all or some of the activities related to her Visibility into the origination process: Expect immediate update on the status of loan processing & alert messages Reduced Turn Around Time: Expect loans to be processed with least turn around time Reduced loan processing fees: Partly due to market dynamics the customer expects the loan processing fee to be negligible Market Dynamics Competitive environment: The competition keeps creating many variants of loan products to attract customers, the bank needs to create similar product variants with better offers to attract customers or keep existing ones Ability to migrate loans from one vendor to another: It has become really easy for retail customers to move from one bank to the other given the low fee of loan processing and highly attractive offers. How does the bank protect it's customer base while actively engaging with potential customers banking with competitor banks Flexibility to react to market developments: Market development greatly influence loan processing, underwriting, asset valuation, risk mitigation rules. Can the bank modify rules and policies, the idea is not just to react to market developments but to pro-actively manage new developments Economic conditions Constant change in various rates and their implications on the rates and rules applied when on-boarding a loan: How quickly can the bank apply changes to rates offered to customers when the central bank changes various rates Requirements of Audit by the central banker: Tough economic conditions have demanded much more stringent audit rules and tests. The banks needs to produce ready reports(historic & operational) for audit compliance Risk Mitigation: While risk mitigation has always been a key concern for the bank, this is the area where the bank's underwriters & risk analysts spend the maximum time when processing a loan application. In order to reduce TAT the bank cannot compromise on its risk mitigation strategies Cost pressures Reduce Cost of processing per application: To deliver a reduced loan processing fee to the customer, the bank needs to keep its cost per processing loan application low. Meet customer TAT expectations while reducing the queues and the systems being used to process the loan application: The loan application could potentially be spending a lot of time waiting in the queue for further processing. Different volumes & patterns of applications demand different queuing algorithms. The bank needs to have real-time visibility into these queues and have the flexibility to change queuing algorithms at runtime Increase the use of electronic communication and reduce the branch channel usage: Lesser automation leads not only leads to Increased turn around time, it also impacts more costs to reach out to customers The objective of our PoC was to implement a Loan Origination Solution whose ownership lies with the bank and effectively meet the challenges listed above. We built a simple story board for the solution We then went about implementing our storyboard using Oracle BPM Suite, Webcenter Content : Imaging. The web UI has been built on ADF technolgies, while the integration with core-services has been implemented using the underlying SOA infrastructure. The BPM process model is quite exhaustive can meet all the challenges listed above to reasonable degree. A bank intending to implement an end-to-end Loan Origination Solution has multiple options at it's disposal. It can Develop a customer Loan Origination Application from scratch: Gives maximum opportunity to build what you want but inflexible to upgrade and maintain. Higher TCO in long term Buy a Packaged application & customize it: Customizing a generic loan application can be tedious and prove as difficult as above. Build it using many disparate & un-integrated tools: Initially seems easier than developing from scratch. But, without integrated tool sets this is not a viable approach either or A solution based on a Framework: Independent Services and Business Process Modeling provide decoupled architecture that is flexible. We built this framework end-to-end with processes the core process of loan origination & several sub-processes such as Analyse and define customer needs, customer credit verification, identity check processes, legal review process, New customer registration & risk assessment.

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To Bit or Not To Bit

- by Johnm

'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-14

- by Bob Rhubart

Duke's Choice Award Nominations Close Friday! | The Java Source The Duke's Choice Awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Nominate an individual, a group or company who show the best in Java innovation. Nominate at Java.net/dukeschoice. Nominations are open until this Friday, June 15. Whole Lotta Virtualization Goin' On | Rick Ramsey The OTN Garage's Rick Ramsey shares a list of recent Virtualization articles available on OTN, along with a link to a video by The Killer, Mr Jerry Lee Lewis. A Pragmatic Path to Navigating your Infrastructure to the Cloud | The WebLogic Server Blog Ruma Sanyal offers an overview of a recent Oracle webcast featuring Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Andy Butler and Vice President and Gartner Fellow Massimo Pezzini. Migrating C/C++ embedded SQL code | Tom Laszewski Cloud migration expert Tom Laszewski explains the how-to in 5 easy steps. Aetna Dumps Its Siloed Enterprise Architecture for SOA | CIO.com CIO writer Stephanie Overby tells the story of how one major health insurance provider put the "Enterprise" back in Enterprise Architecture. (H/T to Joe McKendrick for this story.) Downloading specific video renditions in WebCenter Content | Kyle Hatlestad How-to from Oracle WebCenter & ADF A-Team blogger Kyle Hatlestad. Eclipse DemoCamp - June 2012 - Redwood Shores, CA Location: Oracle HQ - 10 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood Shores, CA (Map) Date and Time: Wednesday, June 13, 2012. From 6pm - 9pm Agenda: The evolution of Java persistence, Doug Clarke, EclipseLink Project Lead, Oracle Integrating BIRT into Applications, Ashwini Verma, Actuate Corporation Leveraging OSGi In The Enterprise, Kamal Muralidharan, Lead Engineer, eBay Developing Rich ADF Applications with Java EE, Greg Stachnick, Oracle NVIDIA® NsightTM Eclipse Edition, Goodwin (Tech lead - Visual tools), Eugene Ostroukhov (Senior engineer – Visual tools) 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco Share your use of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions and how they help your organization drive business innovation. You just might win a free pass to Oracle Openworld 2012 in San Francisco. Deadline for submissions in July 17, 2012. BI Architecture Master Class for Partners – Oracle Architecture Unplugged Date: June 21, 2012 No slides, no fluff. This workshop will be highly interactive and is aimed at Oracle OPN member partners who are IT Architects and BI+W specialists. The focus will be on architectural issues and considerations. DevOps: Evolving to Handle Disruption | JP Morgenthal The subject of DevOps came up this week during an OTN ArchBeat podcast interview with Ron Batra and James Baty on the role of the cloud architect (that program will be available in a few weeks). Morgenthal's article for InfoQ offers a good overview of what DevOps is and how it works. Thought for the Day "Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure." — Edsger Dijkstra Source: softwarequotes.com

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Explanation of the definition of interface inheritance as described in GoF book

- by Geek

I am reading the first chapter of the Gof book. Section 1.6 discusses about class vs interface inheritance: Class versus Interface Inheritance It's important to understand the difference between an object's class and its type. An object's class defines how the object is implemented.The class defines the object's internal state and the implementation of its operations.In contrast,an object's type only refers to its interface--the set of requests on which it can respond. An object can have many types, and objects of different classes can have the same type. Of course, there's a close relationship between class and type. Because a class defines the operations an object can perform, it also defines the object's type . When we say that an object is an instance of a class, we imply that the object supports the interface defined by the class. Languages like c++ and Eiffel use classes to specify both an object's type and its implementation. Smalltalk programs do not declare the types of variables; consequently,the compiler does not check that the types of objects assigned to a variable are subtypes of the variable's type. Sending a message requires checking that the class of the receiver implements the message, but it doesn't require checking that the receiver is an instance of a particular class. It's also important to understand the difference between class inheritance and interface inheritance (or subtyping). Class inheritance defines an object's implementation in terms of another object's implementation. In short, it's a mechanism for code and representation sharing. In contrast,interface inheritance(or subtyping) describes when an object can be used in place of another. I am familiar with the Java and JavaScript programming language and not really familiar with either C++ or Smalltalk or Eiffel as mentioned here. So I am trying to map the concepts discussed here to Java's way of doing classes, inheritance and interfaces. This is how I think of of these concepts in Java: In Java a class is always a blueprint for the objects it produces and what interface(as in "set of all possible requests that the object can respond to") an object of that class possess is defined during compilation stage only because the class of the object would have implemented those interfaces. The requests that an object of that class can respond to is the set of all the methods that are in the class(including those implemented for the interfaces that this class implements). My specific questions are: Am I right in saying that Java's way is more similar to C++ as described in the third paragraph. I do not understand what is meant by interface inheritance in the last paragraph. In Java interface inheritance is one interface extending from another interface. But I think the word interface has some other overloaded meaning here. Can some one provide an example in Java of what is meant by interface inheritance here so that I understand it better?

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WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF–Part 5: Service Client (more Flexibility with WSTrustChannelFactory)

- by Your DisplayName here!

See the previous posts first. WIF includes an API to manually request tokens from a token service. This gives you more control over the request and more flexibility since you can use your own token caching scheme instead of being bound to the channel object lifetime. The API is straightforward. You first request a token from the STS and then use that token to create a channel to the relying party service. I’d recommend using the WS-Trust bindings that ship with WIF to talk to ADFS 2 – they are pre-configured to match the binding configuration of the ADFS 2 endpoints. The following code requests a token for a WCF service from ADFS 2: private static SecurityToken GetToken() { // Windows authentication over transport security var factory = new WSTrustChannelFactory( new WindowsWSTrustBinding(SecurityMode.Transport), stsEndpoint); factory.TrustVersion = TrustVersion.WSTrust13; var rst = new RequestSecurityToken { RequestType = RequestTypes.Issue, AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress(svcEndpoint), KeyType = KeyTypes.Symmetric }; var channel = factory.CreateChannel(); return channel.Issue(rst); } Afterwards, the returned token can be used to create a channel to the service. Again WIF has some helper methods here that make this very easy: private static void CallService(SecurityToken token) { // create binding and turn off sessions var binding = new WS2007FederationHttpBinding( WSFederationHttpSecurityMode.TransportWithMessageCredential); binding.Security.Message.EstablishSecurityContext = false; // create factory and enable WIF plumbing var factory = new ChannelFactory<IService>(binding, new EndpointAddress(svcEndpoint)); factory.ConfigureChannelFactory<IService>(); // turn off CardSpace - we already have the token factory.Credentials.SupportInteractive = false; var channel = factory.CreateChannelWithIssuedToken<IService>(token); channel.GetClaims().ForEach(c => Console.WriteLine("{0}\n {1}\n {2} ({3})\n", c.ClaimType, c.Value, c.Issuer, c.OriginalIssuer)); } Why is this approach more flexible? Well – some don’t like the configuration voodoo. That’s a valid reason for using the manual approach. You also get more control over the token request itself since you have full control over the RST message that gets send to the STS. One common parameter that you may want to set yourself is the appliesTo value. When you use the automatic token support in the WCF federation binding, the appliesTo is always the physical service address. This means in turn that this address will be used as the audience URI value in the SAML token. Well – this in turn means that when you have an application that consists of multiple services, you always have to configure all physical endpoint URLs in ADFS 2 and in the WIF configuration of the service(s). Having control over the appliesTo allows you to use more symbolic realm names, e.g. the base address or a completely logical name. Since the URL is never de-referenced you have some degree of freedom here. In the next post we will look at the necessary code to request multiple tokens in a call chain. This is a common scenario when you first have to acquire a token from an identity provider and have to send that on to a federation gateway or Resource STS. Stay tuned.

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how can I specify interleaved vertex attributes and vertex indices

- by freefallr

I'm writing a generic ShaderProgram class that compiles a set of Shader objects, passes args to the shader (like vertex position, vertex normal, tex coords etc), then links the shader components into a shader program, for use with glDrawArrays. My vertex data already exists in a VertexBufferObject that uses the following data structure to create a vertex buffer: class CustomVertex { public: float m_Position[3]; // x, y, z // offset 0, size = 3*sizeof(float) float m_TexCoords[2]; // u, v // offset 3*sizeof(float), size = 2*sizeof(float) float m_Normal[3]; // nx, ny, nz; float colour[4]; // r, g, b, a float padding[20]; // padded for performance }; I've already written a working VertexBufferObject class that creates a vertex buffer object from an array of CustomVertex objects. This array is said to be interleaved. It renders successfully with the following code: void VertexBufferObject::Draw() { if( ! m_bInitialized ) return; glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, m_nVboId ); glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, m_nVboIdIndex ); glEnableClientState( GL_VERTEX_ARRAY ); glEnableClientState( GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY ); glEnableClientState( GL_NORMAL_ARRAY ); glEnableClientState( GL_COLOR_ARRAY ); glVertexPointer( 3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(CustomVertex), ((char*)NULL + 0) ); glTexCoordPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(CustomVertex), ((char*)NULL + 12)); glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, sizeof(CustomVertex), ((char*)NULL + 20)); glColorPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(CustomVertex), ((char*)NULL + 32)); glDrawElements( GL_TRIANGLES, m_nNumIndices, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, ((char*)NULL + 0) ); glDisableClientState( GL_VERTEX_ARRAY ); glDisableClientState( GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY ); glDisableClientState( GL_NORMAL_ARRAY ); glDisableClientState( GL_COLOR_ARRAY ); glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0 ); glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0 ); } Back to the Vertex Array Object though. My code for creating the Vertex Array object is as follows. This is performed before the ShaderProgram runtime linking stage, and no glErrors are reported after its steps. // Specify the shader arg locations (e.g. their order in the shader code) for( int n = 0; n < vShaderArgs.size(); n ++) glBindAttribLocation( m_nProgramId, n, vShaderArgs[n].sFieldName.c_str() ); // Create and bind to a vertex array object, which stores the relationship between // the buffer and the input attributes glGenVertexArrays( 1, &m_nVaoHandle ); glBindVertexArray( m_nVaoHandle ); // Enable the vertex attribute array (we're using interleaved array, since its faster) glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vShaderArgs[0].nVboId ); glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, vShaderArgs[0].nVboIndexId ); // vertex data for( int n = 0; n < vShaderArgs.size(); n ++ ) { glEnableVertexAttribArray(n); glVertexAttribPointer( n, vShaderArgs[n].nFieldSize, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, vShaderArgs[n].nStride, (GLubyte *) NULL + vShaderArgs[n].nFieldOffset ); AppLog::Ref().OutputGlErrors(); } This doesn't render correctly at all. I get a pattern of white specks onscreen, in the shape of the terrain rectangle, but there are no regular lines etc. Here's the code I use for rendering: void ShaderProgram::Draw() { using namespace AntiMatter; if( ! m_nShaderProgramId || ! m_nVaoHandle ) { AppLog::Ref().LogMsg("ShaderProgram::Draw() Couldn't draw object, as initialization of ShaderProgram is incomplete"); return; } glUseProgram( m_nShaderProgramId ); glBindVertexArray( m_nVaoHandle ); glDrawArrays( GL_TRIANGLES, 0, m_nNumTris ); glBindVertexArray(0); glUseProgram(0); } Can anyone see errors or omissions in either the VAO creation code or rendering code? thanks!

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Oracle Fusion Middleware gives you Choice and Portability for Public and Private Cloud

- by Michelle Kimihira

Author: Margaret Lee, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Computing allows customers to quickly develop and deploy applications in a shared environment. The environment can span across hardward (IaaS), foundation layer software (PaaS), and end-user software (SaaS). Cloud Computing provides compelling benefits in terms of business agility and IT cost savings. However, with complex, existing heterogeneous architectures, and concerns for security and manageability, enterprises are challenged to define their Cloud strategy. For most enterprises, the solution is a hybrid of private and public cloud. Fusion Middleware supports customers’ Cloud requirements through choice and portability. Fusion Middleware supports a variety of cloud development and deployment models: Oracle [Public] Cloud; customer private cloud; hybrid of these two, and traditional dedicated, on-premise model Customers can develop applications in any of these models and deployed in another, providing the flexibility and portability they need Oracle Cloud is a public cloud offering. Within Oracle Cloud, Fusion Middleware provides two key offerings include the Developer cloud service and Java cloud deployment service. Developer Cloud Service Simplify Development: Automated provisioned environment; pre-configured and integrated; web-based administration Deploy Automatically: Fully integrated with Oracle Cloud for Java deployment; workflow ensures build & test Collaborate & Manage: Fits any size team; integrated team source repository; continuous integration; task/defect tracking Integrated with all major IDEs: Oracle JDeveloper; NetBeans; Eclipse Java Cloud Service Java Cloud service provides flexible Java deployment environment for departmental applications and development, staging, QA, training, and demo environments. It also supports customizations deployments for SaaS-based Fusion Applications customers. Some key features of Java Cloud Service include: WebLogic Server on Exalogic, secure, highly available infrastructure Database Service & IDE Integration Open, Standard-based Deploy Web Apps, Web Services, REST Services Fully managed and supported by Oracle For more information, please visit Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud Java Service and Oracle Cloud Developer Service. If your enterprise prefers a private cloud, for reasons such as security, control, manageability, and complex integration that prevent your applications from being deployed on a public cloud, Fusion Middleware also provide you with the products and tools you need. Sometimes called Private PaaS, private clouds have their predecessors in shared-services arrangements many large companies have been building in the past decade. The difference, however, are in the scope of the services, and depth of their capabilities. In terms of vertical stack depth, private clouds not only provide hardware and software infrastructure to run your applications, they also provide services such as integration and security, that your applications need. Horizontally, private clouds provide monitoring, management, lifecycle, and charge back capabilities out-of-box that shared-services platforms did not have before. Oracle Fusion Middleware includes the complete stack of hardware and software for you to build private clouds: SOA suite and BPM suite to support systems integration and process flow between applications deployed on your private cloud and the rest of your organization Identity and Access Management suite to provide security, provisioning, and access services for applications deployed on your private cloud WebLogic Server to run your applications Enterprise Manager's Cloud Management pack to monitor, manage, upgrade applications running on your private cloud Exalogic or optimized Oracle-Sun hardware to build out your private cloud The most important key differentiator for Oracle's cloud solutions is portability, between private and public clouds. This is unique to Oracle because portability requires the vendor to have product depth and breadth in both public cloud services and private cloud product offerings. Most public cloud vendors cannot provide the infrastructure and tools customers need to build their own private clouds. In reverse, traditional software tools vendors typically do not have the product and expertise breadth to build out and offer a public cloud. Oracle can. It is important for customers that the products and technologies Oracle uses to build its public is the same set that it sells to customers for them to build private clouds. Fundamentally, that enables skills reuse, as well as application portability. For more information on Oracle PaaS offerings, please visit Oracle's product information page. Resources Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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The Customer Experience Imperative: A Game Changer for Brands

- by Jeri Kelley

By Anthony Lye, SVP, Cloud Applications Strategy, Oracle We know that customer experience has emerged as a primary differentiator for businesses today. I’ve talked a lot about the new age of the empowered consumer. At Oracle we’ve spent a lot of time developing technologies and practices that our customers can implement to greatly improve their customer experience strategies. Of course I’m biased, but I think that we have created a portfolio of the best solutions on the planet to help organizations deal with the challenges of providing great customer experiences. We’ve done this because we started to witness some trends over the last few years. As the average person began to utilize social and mobile technologies more frequently and products commoditized, customer experience truly remained the only sustainable differentiator for businesses.In fact, we have seen that customer experience is often driving the success or the failure of a product or a brand. And as end customers have become more vocal about their experiences with companies on social and mobile channels, they now have the power to decide which brands will win and which brands will lose. To address this customer experience imperative, I believe that business today must do three things really well:Connect with your customers. You have to connect with customers whenever, wherever and however they want. Organizations must provide a great experience on their existing channels— the call center, the brick and mortar store, the field sales organizations, the websites and social properties. Businesses must also be great at managing and delivering journeys on these channels, while quickly adapting to embrace the new channels that emerge. You have to understand mobile. You have to understand social. You have to understand kiosks. These are all new routes to market, new channels where your customers may or may not show up. You have to interact with them where they are. You have to present information in a way that's meaningful to them. As well as providing what we would call a multichannel experience. We have to recognize that customers may start their experience on one channel, but end it on a different channel. It’s important that an organization’s technology solutions enable, not just a multichannel strategy, but a strategy that can power new channels and create customer journeys that cross these channels.Get to know your customers. Next, companies need to get to know the customer as intimately as the customer will allow. Today most customer interactions are anonymous, but it’s important for brands to know which customers drive value. Customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their opinions, but they want to know that those opinions are being heard and acted upon. For this to occur, we need to know much more about the customer and then reward them for their loyalty and for their advocacy.Enable connections. The last thing is to enable people to connect or transact with your brand. We've got to make it really, really simple for customers to do business with us. We can't make them repeat the steps; we can't make them tell us their identity for the fifth time as they move between organizations. These silos can no longer sustain or deliver a good customer experience. It's extremely important that companies be where customers want them to be—that we create profitable journeys for us and for them.Organizations have to make sure that there is a single source of truth that defines the customer. We have to make sure that the technology applications that we rely on understand not just the dimensions of multichannel, but of cross-channel too. We have to enable social at the very core of the overall architecture. We have to use historical analytics, real-time decisioning as well as predictive analytics to help personalize and drive an experience. And these are all technologies that IT needs, that IT is familiar with, but needs to enable for the line of business that in turn can enable for the end customer. This means that we've got to make our solutions available to the customers in the cloud.In this new age of the empowered consumer, businesses have to focus on delivery mechanisms that reduce the overall TCO, while driving a rapid rate of innovation and a more rapid rate of deployment. At the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, I’ll discuss these issues and more. I hope that you can join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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need some concrete examples on user stories, tasks and how they relate to functional and technical specifications

- by gideon

Little heads up, Im the only lonely dev building/planning/mocking my project as I go. Ive come up with a preview release that does only the core aspects of the system, with good business value and I've coded most of the UI as dirty throw-able mockups over nicely abstracted and very minimal base code. In the end I know quite well what my clients want on the whole. I can't take agile-ish cowboying anymore because Im completely dis-organized and have no paper plan and since my clients are happy, things are getting more complex with more features and ideas. So I started using and learning Agile & Scrum Here are my problems: I know what a functional spec is.(sample): Do all user stories and/or scenarios become part of the functional spec? I know what user stories and tasks are. Are these kinda user stories? I dont see any Business Value reason added to them. I made a mind map using freemind, I had problems like this: Actor : Finance Manager Can Add a Financial Plan into the system because well thats the point of it? What Business Value reason do I add for things like this? Example : A user needs to be able to add a blog article (in the blogger app) because..?? Its the point of a blogger app, it centers around that feature? How do I go into the finer details and system definitions: Actor: Finance Manager Action: Adds a finance plan. This adding is a complicated process with lots of steps. What User Story will describe what a finance plan in the system is ?? I can add it into the functional spec under definitions explaining what a finance plan is and how one needs to add it into the system, but how do I get to the backlog planning from there? Example: A Blog Article is mostly a textual document that can be written in rich text in the system. To add a blog article one must...... But how do you create backlog list/features out of this? Where are the user stories for what a blog article is and how one adds/removes it? Finally, I'm a little confused about the relations between functional specs and user stories. Will my spec contain user stories in them with UI mockups? Now will these user stories then branch out tasks which will make up something like a technical specification? Example : EditorUser Can add a blog article. Use XML to store blog article. Add a form to add blog. Add Windows Live Writer Support. That would be agile tasks but would that also be part of/or form the technical specs? Some concrete examples/answers of my questions would be nice!!

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Wireless not working on Dell Inspirion 1501 after upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 tried steps in other threads

- by mark burton

I updated to Ubuntu 12.04 and now my wireless is not working. No icon for it. Tried some of the troubleshooting in other threads but can't get it to work. Would really appreciate any help Thanks! " *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4311 802.11a/b/g vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0 version: 01 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:18 memory:c0200000-c0203fff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 02 serial: 00:19:b9:5c:d1:52 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=b44 driverversion=2.0 duplex=full ip=10.0.0.6 latency=64 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:21 memory:c0300000-c0301fff " lsub results Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:c526 Logitech, Inc. Nano Receiver $ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge 00:05.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge 00:06.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS480 PCI Bridge 00:12.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA 00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI0) 00:13.1 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI1) 00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI2) 00:13.3 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI3) 00:13.4 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB (OHCI4) 00:13.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 USB Controller (EHCI) 00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 13) 00:14.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 IDE 00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge 00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M] 05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11a/b/g (rev 01) 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02) 08:01.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19) 08:01.1 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 01) rfkill list all 0: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no

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Simple MVVM Walkthrough – Refactored

- by Sean Feldman

JR has put together a good introduction post into MVVM pattern. I love kick start examples that serve the purpose well. And even more than that I love examples that also can pass the real world projects check. So I took the sample code and refactored it slightly for a few aspects that a lot of developers might raise a brow. Michael has mentioned model (entity) visibility from view. I agree on that. A few other items that don’t settle are using property names as string (magical strings) and Saver class internal casting of a parameter (custom code for each Saver command). Fixing a property names usage is a straight forward exercise – leverage expressions. Something simple like this would do the initial job: class PropertyOf<T> { public static string Resolve(Expression<Func<T, object>> expression) { var member = expression.Body as MemberExpression; return member.Member.Name; } } With this, refactoring of properties names becomes an easy task, with confidence that an old property name string will not get left behind. An updated Invoice would look like this: public class Invoice : INotifyPropertyChanged { private int id; private string receiver; public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } public int Id { get { return id; } set { if (id != value) { id = value; OnPropertyChanged(PropertyOf<Invoice>.Resolve(x => x.Id)); } } } public string Receiver { get { return receiver; } set { receiver = value; OnPropertyChanged(PropertyOf<Invoice>.Resolve(x => x.Receiver)); } } } For the saver, I decided to change it a little so now it becomes a “view-model agnostic” command, one that can be used for multiple commands/view-models. Updated Saver code now accepts an action at construction time and executes that action. No more black magic internal class Command : ICommand { private readonly Action executeAction; public Command(Action executeAction) { this.executeAction = executeAction; } public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public void Execute(object parameter) { // no more black magic executeAction(); } } Change in InvoiceViewModel is instantiation of Saver command and execution action for the specific command. public ICommand SaveCommand { get { if (saveCommand == null) saveCommand = new Command(ExecuteAction); return saveCommand; } set { saveCommand = value; } } private void ExecuteAction() { DisplayMessage = string.Format("Thanks for creating invoice: {0} {1}", Invoice.Id, Invoice.Receiver); } This way internal knowledge of InvoiceViewModel remains in InvoiceViewModel and Command (ex-Saver) is view-model agnostic. Now the sample is not only a good introduction, but also has some practicality in it. My 5 cents on the subject. Sample code MvvmSimple2.zip

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Will polishing my current project be a better learning experience than starting a new one?

- by Alejandro Cámara

I started programming many years ago. Now I'm trying to make games. I have read many recommendations to start cloning some well known games like galaga, tetris, arkanoid, etc. I have also read that I should go for the whole game (including menus, sound, score, etc.). Yesterday I finished the first complete version of my arkanoid clone. But it is far from over. I can still work on it for months (I program as a hobby in my free time) implementing a screen resolution switcher, remap of the control keys, power-ups falling from broken bricks, and a huge etc. But I do not want to be forever learning how to clone ONE game. I have the urge to get to the next clone in order to apply some design ideas I have come upon while developing this arkanoid clone (at the same time I am reading the GoF book and much source code from Ludum Dare 21 game contest). So the question is: Should I keep improving the arkanoid clone until it has all the features the original game had? or should I move to the next clone (there are almost infinite games to clone) and start mending the things I did wrong with the previous clone? This can be a very subjective question, so please restrain the answers to the most effective way to learn how to make my own games (not cloning someone ideas). Thank you! CLARIFICATION In order to clarify what I have implemented I make this list: Features implemented: Bouncing capabilities (the ball bounces on walls, on bricks, and on the bar). Sounds when bouncing on bricks and the bar, and when the player wins or loses. Basic title menu (new game and exit only). Also in-game menu and win/lose menus. Only three levels, but the map system is so easy I do not think it will teach me much (am I wrong?). Features not-implemented: Power-ups when breaking the bricks. Complex bricks (with more than one "hit point" and invincible). Better graphics (I am not really good at it). Programming polishing (use more intensively the design patterns). Here's a link to its (minimal) webpage: http://blog.acamara.es/piperine/ I kind of feel ashamed to show it, so please do not hit me too hard :-) My question was related to the not-implemented features. I wondered what was the fastest (optimal) path to learn. 1) implement the not-implemented features in this project which is getting big, or 2) make a new game which probably will teach me those lessons and new ones. ANSWER I choose @ashes999 answer because, in my case, I think I should polish more and try to "ship" the game. I think all the other answers are also important to bear in mind, so if you came here having the same question, before taking a rush decision read all the discussion. Thank you all!

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SQL ADO.NET shortcut extensions (old school!)

- by Jeff

As much as I love me some ORM's (I've used LINQ to SQL quite a bit, and for the MSDN/TechNet Profile and Forums we're using NHibernate more and more), there are times when it's appropriate, and in some ways more simple, to just throw up so old school ADO.NET connections, commands, readers and such. It still feels like a pain though to new up all the stuff, make sure it's closed, blah blah blah. It's pretty much the least favorite task of writing data access code. To minimize the pain, I have a set of extension methods that I like to use that drastically reduce the code you have to write. Here they are... public static void Using(this SqlConnection connection, Action<SqlConnection> action) { connection.Open(); action(connection); connection.Close(); } public static SqlCommand Command(this SqlConnection connection, string sql){ var command = new SqlCommand(sql, connection); return command;}public static SqlCommand AddParameter(this SqlCommand command, string parameterName, object value){ command.Parameters.AddWithValue(parameterName, value); return command;}public static object ExecuteAndReturnIdentity(this SqlCommand command){ if (command.Connection == null) throw new Exception("SqlCommand has no connection."); command.ExecuteNonQuery(); command.Parameters.Clear(); command.CommandText = "SELECT @@IDENTITY"; var result = command.ExecuteScalar(); return result;}public static SqlDataReader ReadOne(this SqlDataReader reader, Action<SqlDataReader> action){ if (reader.Read()) action(reader); reader.Close(); return reader;}public static SqlDataReader ReadAll(this SqlDataReader reader, Action<SqlDataReader> action){ while (reader.Read()) action(reader); reader.Close(); return reader;} It has been awhile since I've really revisited these, so you will likely find opportunity for further optimization. The bottom line here is that you can chain together a bunch of these methods to make a much more concise database call, in terms of the code on your screen, anyway. Here are some examples: public Dictionary<string, string> Get(){ var dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>(); _sqlHelper.GetConnection().Using(connection => connection.Command("SELECT Setting, [Value] FROM Settings") .ExecuteReader() .ReadAll(r => dictionary.Add(r.GetString(0), r.GetString(1)))); return dictionary;} or... public void ChangeName(User user, string newName){ _sqlHelper.GetConnection().Using(connection => connection.Command("UPDATE Users SET Name = @Name WHERE UserID = @UserID") .AddParameter("@Name", newName) .AddParameter("@UserID", user.UserID) .ExecuteNonQuery());} The _sqlHelper.GetConnection() is just some other code that gets a connection object for you. You might have an even cleaner way to take that step out entirely. This looks more fluent, and the real magic sauce for me is the reader bits where you can put any kind of arbitrary method in there to iterate over the results.

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Investment scheme for a PC game the project

- by Alex Kamen

Good day everyone, I am working on a PC game project that has 3 phases planned, micro, macro and mmo versions [if confused, see a brief description at the bottom]. I have found a potential investor for the micro version of the game, but naturally, he requested a detailed plan of how the game will pay back. And the problem is that micro version itself is not supposed to be monetized much, other than some ads and limited in-game currency utilization. The idea is that with this combat demo already at hand, it should be possible to get a really large enough investment (millions of dollars) and use it to pay back the initial small one (thousands of dollars) and take the project into macro phase, which will really make profit. This way, everybody is going to win, provided that I can deliver the end-product. Yet while I am confident of that both the conception of the macro and the real game-play of the micro versions are going to be appealing, I don’t know how to obtain any guarantee of that I will be able to get funded once I have the prototype ready. And without that, I won’t receive the funds for the prototype in the first place! To summarize, my question is: how to figure out my future possibilities of getting funded once I have combat demo out, basically “whom to write to and what”. Ideally, I would like some sort of a preliminary agreement with a game publisher, something that would basically state “If the developer provides the product in time and in quality corresponding to the specifications given, the publisher guarantees to allocate funds for distribution and further development, thereby acquiring the right to X part of all future profits”. Does this sound sane? It’s just that I don’t want to sell all of my rights out straight away by taking a big outside investment while the project is in such early stage. I would appreciate if you would share your thoughts on this kind of scheme, and be sure to ask questions as I am sure I must have forgotten to mention a ton of important things, like the fact that initial funds are going to be spent on outsourcing (living in Siberia is really just great). [here’s a brief outline of what each version will feature] [micro] 1) turn based tactical combat rules 2) character development 3) arena/tournament system [macro] 4) ai-ruled dynamic interactive worlds 5) global map adventuring 6) strategic rpg + god simulator gameplay [mmo] 7) Persistent worlds system 8) Social structures system (“guilds/clans”) 9) god-simulation on the mmo scale P.S. Obviously, these features are incremental, so that mmo version has all 9.

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