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• Pro SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Solutions

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Oh yeah baby, it’s out finally! This book is what I wanted to write for so long now, but never really got a chance to. For SharePoint 2007, I authored the SharePoint section of “Smart BI Solutions with SQL Server 2008” for MS Press. But never really got the time, to author a full book that this topic deserved. Until SharePoint 2010, we actually have a full book on this topic. So first things first, I didn’t actually write it. My role was limited to the overall concept, the outline, the layout, completion of it, code samples, identifying what we need in here, vouching for technical accuracy, identifying authors etc. The real work was done by Srini (5 chapters), and Steve (1 chapter). So credit given where it is due. But, with that said, this is a pretty good book. It has always been a challenge to find the superman that knows both, data ware housing concepts, and SharePoint concepts. The data ware housing concepts include basic stuff you need to know to work in the BI area such as cubes, MDX queries, etc. So chapter 1 covers that – and if you’re a hardcore DBA, feel free to skip Chapter 1. Then beyond that, we take every single SharePoint 2010 BI topic, and slice and dice it in detail. The topics we deal with are - Visio Services Reporting services Business Connectivity Services Excel Services PerformancePoint Services And in covering each of these topics, we ensure that a general layout was followed for each topic, to ensure completeness of content. We make sure we cover Setup related issues and advice Point and click usage Code usage, i.e. extensibility using visual studio and a walkthrough of the administration side of things, including powershell. (Yes, I insisted on that in being there in every chapter). Writing a book is always a lot of work, so we hope you find it useful. And it should go very well with the other book I just reviewed, which is Microsoft ADO.NET 4, step by step. Comment on the article ....

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• SEO to ensure visibility for a narrow, non-competitive, non-commercial site

  - by hen3ry

  I'm webmaster of a non-commercial site in English. A non-native-English speaker asked me why our site doesn't produce hits in Google searches she conducts for relevant keywords in her native language. I asked her for a list of keywords in her native language, and I naively tried inserting those into the META info in the page headers and waited a couple of weeks. No help. A little searching informed me that Google doesn't use the META info, and has not done so for a very long time. D'oh! To be entirely concrete, suppose the StackExchange folks want Russian speakers to find this site, Pro Webmasters. The direct translation in Russian of "webmaster" --thanks, Google Translator-- is: "?????????". (Not sure this will render properly, but that's not essential to my question.) Assuming Pro Webmasters has a common template for all pages it generates, inserting "?????????" into the Keywords META for that template won't help, it seems. What could StackExchange do to make this site visible to users searching with the Russian keyword "?????????" ? Pretty much all the advice I've seen boils down to this, if I understand correctly: use the desired search term often (but not too often) among site content, and the problem will be solved. That's great, but I don't think sprinkling "?????????" visibly all over Pro Webmasters is going to fly. Just for completeness, crawlers must be long immune to the invisible-to-visitors scheme, e.g, format "?????????" in a tiny text size in a color the same as an existing background, e.g. white-over-white. Or, put that text inside a div styled: ' style="visibility: hidden" '. Probably some other equivalents. I can only think of one slightly effective method, along these lines: place an unobtrusive link on the common template to a page titled "for international users" , and on that page list desired synonyms for "webmaster" in various languages on that page. A test case --admittedly, just one-- using my site implies that a Google search for "international users" ????????? will produce a hit for this page, and thus make the site minimally visible, despite the fact that the page will almost never be visited. At the moment, anyway. Note: All the SEO discussions I have found so far are about competitive and --almost certainly-- commercial sites. To repeat: my site is non-commercial, and it is about an obscure, narrow topic that is of interest to only a small number of people worldwide. This isn't about clawing our way to the top of competitive rankings, just making this content minimally visible to interested non-native-English speakers. Ideas? TIA

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• Using HBase or Cassandra for a token server

  - by crippy

  I've been trying to figure out how to use HBase/Cassandra for a token system we're re-implementing. I can probably squeeze quite a lot more from MySQL, but it just seems it has come to clinging on to the wrong tool for the task just because we know it well. Eventually will hit a wall (like happened to us in other areas). Naturally I started looking into possible NoSQL solutions. The prominent ones (at least in terms of buzz) are HBase and Cassandra. The story is more or less like this: A user can send a gift other users. Each gift has a list of recipients or is public in which case limited by number or expiration date For each gift sent we generate some token that uniquely identifies that gift. For each gift we track the list of potential recipients and their current status relating to that gift (accepted, declinded etc). A user can request to see all his currently pending gifts A can request a list of users he has sent a gift to today (used to limit number of gifts sent) Required the ability to "dump" or "ignore" expired gifts (x day old gifts are considered expired) There are some other requirements but I believe the above covers the essentials. How would I go and model that using HBase or Cassandra? Well, the wall was performance. A few 10s of millions of records per day over 2 tables kept for 2 weeks (wish I could have kept it for more but there was no way). The response times kept getting slower and slower until eventually we had to start cutting down number of days we kept data. Caching helps here but it's not an ideal solution since a big part of the ops are updates. Also, as I hinted in my original post. We use MySQL extensively. We know exactly what it can and can't do both in naive implementations followed by native partitioning and finally by horizontally sharding our dataset on the application level to reside on multiple DB nodes. It can be done, but that's not really what I'm trying to get from this. I asked a very specific question about designing a solution using a NoSQL solution since it's very hard to find examples for designs out there. Brainlag, not trying to come off as rude. I actually appreciate it a lot that you are the only one who even bothered to respond. but I see it over and over again. People ask questions and others assume they have no idea what they're talking about and give an irrelevant answer. Ignore RDBMS please. The question is about nosql.

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• Multiple country-specific domains or one global domain [closed]

  - by CJM

  Possible Duplicate: How should I structure my urls for both SEO and localization? My company currently has its main (English) site on a .com domain with a .co.uk alias. In addition, we have separate sites for certain other countries - these are also hosted in the UK but are distinct sites with a country-specific domain names (.de, .fr, .se, .es), and the sites have differing amounts of distinct but overlapping content, For example, the .es site is entirely in Spanish and has a page for every section of the UK site but little else. Whereas the .de site has much more content (but still less than the UK site), in German, and geared towards our business focus in that country. The main point is that the content in the additional sites is a subset of the UK, is translated into the local language, and although sometimes is simply only a translated version of UK content, it is usually 'tweaked' for the local market, and in certain areas, contains unique content. The other sites get a fraction of the traffic of the UK site. This is perfectly understandable since the biggest chunk of work comes from the UK, and we've been established here for over 30 years. However, we are wanting to build up our overseas business and part of that is building up our websites to support this. The Question: I posed a suggestion to the business that we might consider consolidating all our websites onto the .com domain but with /en/de/fr/se/etc sections, as plenty of other companies seem to do. The theory was that the non-english sites would benefit from the greater reputation of the parent .com domain, and that all the content would be mutually supporting - my fear is that the child domains on their own are too small to compete on their own compared to competitors who are established in these countries. Speaking to an SEO consultant from my hosting company, he feels that this move would have some benefit (for the reasons mentioned), but they would likely be significantly outweighed by the loss of the benefits of localised domains. Specifically, he said that since the Panda update, and particularly the two sets of changes this year, that we would lose more than we would gain. Having done some Panda research since, I've had my eyes opened on many issues, but curiously I haven't come across much that mentions localised domain names, though I do question whether Google would see it as duplicated content. It's not that I disagree with the consultant, I just want to know more before I make recommendations to my company. What is the prevailing opinion in this case? Would I gain anything from consolidating country-specific content onto one domain? Would Google see this as duplicate content? Would there be an even greater penalty from the loss of country-specific domains? And is there anything else I can do to help support the smaller, country-specific domains?

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• Can a 10-bit monitor connection preserve all tones in 8-bit sRGB gradients on a wide-gamut monitor?

  - by hjb981

  This question is about color management and the use of a higher color depth, 10 bits per channel (30 bits in total, resulting in 1.07 billion colors, or 1024 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "deep color") compared to the standard of 8 bits per channel (24 bits in total, 16.7 million colors, 256 shades of gray, sometimes referred to as "true color"). Do not confuse with "32 bit color", which usually refers to standard 8 bit color with an extra channel ("alpha channel") for transparency (used to achieve effects like semi-transparent windows etc). The following can be assumed to be in place: 1: A wide-gamut monitor that supports 10-bit input. Further, it can be assumed that the monitor has been calibrated to its native gamut and that an ICC color profile has been created. 2: A graphics card that supports 10-bit output (and is connected to the monitor via DisplayPort). 3: Drivers for the graphics card that support 10-bit output. If applications that support 10-bit output and color profiles would be used, I would expect them to display images that were saved using different color spaces correctly. For example, both an sRGB and an adobeRGB image should be displayed correctly. If an sRGB image was saved using 8 bits per channel (almost always the case), then the 10-bit signal path would ensure that no tonal gradients were lost in the conversion from the sRGB of the image to the native color space of the monitor. For example: If the image contains a pixel that is pure red in 8 bits (255,0,0), the corresponding value in 10 bits would be (1023,0,0). However, since the monitor has a larger color space than sRGB, sending the signal (1023,0,0) to the monitor would result in a red that was too saturated. Therefore, according to the ICC color profile, the signal would be transformed into a different value with less red saturation, for example (987,0,0). Since there are still plenty of levels left between 0 and 987, all 256 values (0-255) for red in the sRGB color space of the file could be uniquely mapped to color-corrected 10-bit values in the monitor's native color space. However, if the conversion was done in 8 bits, (255,0,0) would be translated to (246,0,0), and there would now only be 247 available levels for the red channel instead of 256, degrading the displayed image quality. My question is: how does this work on Ubuntu? Let's say that I use Firefox (which is color-aware and uses ICC color profiles). Would I get 10-bit processing, thus preserving all levels of an 8-bit picture? What is the situation like for other applications, especially photo applications like Shotwell, Rawtherapee, Darktable, RawStudio, Photivo etc? Does Ubuntu differ from other operating systems (Linux and others) on this point?

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• Wrong statistics in AUX_STATS$ might puzzle the optimizer

  - by Mike Dietrich

  We do recommend the creation of System Statistics for quite a long time. Since Oracle 9i the optimizer works with a CPU and IO cost based model. And in order to give the optimizer some knowledge about the IO subsystem's performance and throughput - once System Statistics are collected - they'll get stored in AUX_STATS$. For this purpose in the old Oracle 9i days some default values had been defined - and you'll still find those defaults in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 in AUX_STATS$. But these old values don't reflect the performance of modern IO systems. So it might be a good best practice post upgrade to create fresh System Statistics if you haven't done this before.  You can collect System Statistics with: exec DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS('start'); and end it later by executing: exec DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS('stop'); You could also run DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS('interval', interval=>N) instead where N is the number of minutes when statistics gathering is stopped automatically. Please make sure you'll do this on a real workload period. It won't make sense to gather these values while the database is in an idle state. You should do this ideally for several hours. It doesn't affect performance in a negative way as the values are anyway collected in V$SYSSTAT and V$SESSTAT. And in case you'd like to delete the stats and revert to the old default values you'd simply execute:exec DBMS_STATS.DELETE_SYSTEM_STATS; The tricky thing in Oracle Database 11.2 - and that's why I'm actually writing this blog post today - is bug9842771. This leads to wrong values in AUX_STATS$ for SREADTIM and MREADTIM by factor 1000 guiding the optimizer sometimes into the totally wrong directon. The workaround is to overwrite these values manually and divide them by 1000. Use the DBMS_STATS.SET_SYSTEM_STATS procedure. See this MOS Note:9842771.8 for the above bug for some further information. This issue is fixed in Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 and above. To get some background information about the statistics collected in please read this section in the Oracle Database 11.2 Performance Tuning Guide. And gathering System Statistics might have some implication if you have mixed workloads - and interacts with DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT. For more information please read section 13.4.1.2.

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• 2D game - Missile shooting problem on Android

  - by Niksa

  Hello, I have to make a tank that sits still but moves his turret and shoots missiles. As this is my first Android application ever and I haven't done any game development either, I've come across a few problems... Now, I did the tank and the moving turret once I read the Android tutorial for the LunarLander sample code. So this code is based on the LunarLander code. But I'm having trouble doing the missile firing then SPACE button is being pressed. private void doDraw(Canvas canvas) { canvas.drawBitmap(backgroundImage, 0, 0, null); // draws the tank canvas.drawBitmap(tank, x_tank, y_tank, new Paint()); // draws and rotates the tank turret canvas.rotate((float) mHeading, (float) x_turret + mTurretWidth, y_turret); canvas.drawBitmap(turret, x_turret, y_turret, new Paint()); // draws the grenade that is a regular circle from ShapeDrawable class bullet.setBounds(x_bullet, y_bullet, x_bullet + width, y_bullet + height); bullet.draw(canvas); } UPDATE GAME method private void updateGame() throws InterruptedException { long now = System.currentTimeMillis(); if (mLastTime > now) return; double elapsed = (now - mLastTime) / 1000.0; mLastTime = now; // dUP and dDown, rotates the turret from 0 to 75 degrees. if (dUp) mHeading += 1 * (PHYS_SLEW_SEC * elapsed); if (mHeading >= 75) mHeading = 75; if (dDown) mHeading += (-1) * (PHYS_SLEW_SEC * elapsed); if (mHeading < 0) mHeading = 0; if (dSpace){ // missile Logic, a straight trajectorie for now x_bullet -= 1; y_bullet -= 1; //doesn't work, has to be updated every pixel or what? } boolean doKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent msg) { boolean handled = false; synchronized (mSurfaceHolder) { if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SPACE){ dSpace = true; handled = true; } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_UP){ dUp = true; handled = true; } if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_DOWN){ dDown = true; handled = true; } return handled; } } } a method run that runs the game... public void run() { while (mRun) { Canvas c = null; try { c = mSurfaceHolder.lockCanvas(null); synchronized (mSurfaceHolder) { if (mMode == STATE_RUNNING) updateGame(); doDraw(c); } } catch (InterruptedException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } finally { // do this in a finally so that if an exception is thrown // during the above, we don't leave the Surface in an // inconsistent state if (c != null) { mSurfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(c); } } } } So the question would be, how do I make that the bullet is fired on a single SPACE key press from the turret to the end of the screen? Could you help me out here, I seem to be in the dark here... Thanks, Niksa

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• determine if udp socket can be accessed via external client

  - by JohnMerlino

  I don't have access to company firewall server. but supposedly the port 1720 is open on my one ubuntu server. So I want to test it with netcat: sudo nc -ul 1720 The port is listening on the machine ITSELF: sudo netstat -tulpn | grep nc udp 0 0 0.0.0.0:1720 0.0.0.0:* 29477/nc The port is open and in use on the machine ITSELF: lsof -i -n -P | grep 1720 gateway 980 myuser 8u IPv4 187284576 0t0 UDP *:1720 Checked the firewall on current server: sudo ufw allow 1720/udp Skipping adding existing rule Skipping adding existing rule (v6) sudo ufw status verbose | grep 1720 1720/udp ALLOW IN Anywhere 1720/udp ALLOW IN Anywhere (v6) But I try echoing data to it from another computer (I replaced the x's with the real integers): echo "Some data to send" | nc xx.xxx.xx.xxx 1720 But it didn't write anything. So then I try with telnet from the other computer as well: telnet xx.xxx.xx.xxx 1720 Trying xx.xxx.xx.xxx... telnet: connect to address xx.xxx.xx.xxx: Operation timed out telnet: Unable to connect to remote host Although I don't think telnet works with udp sockets. I ran nmap from another computer within the same local network and this is what I got: sudo nmap -v -A -sU -p 1720 xx.xxx.xx.xx Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 15:41 EDT NSE: Loaded 36 scripts for scanning. Initiating Ping Scan at 15:41 Scanning xx.xxx.xx.xx [4 ports] Completed Ping Scan at 15:41, 0.10s elapsed (1 total hosts) Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 15:41 Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 15:41, 0.00s elapsed Initiating UDP Scan at 15:41 Scanning xtremek.com (xx.xxx.xx.xx) [1 port] Completed UDP Scan at 15:41, 0.07s elapsed (1 total ports) Initiating Service scan at 15:41 Initiating OS detection (try #1) against xtremek.com (xx.xxx.xx.xx) Retrying OS detection (try #2) against xtremek.com (xx.xxx.xx.xx) Initiating Traceroute at 15:41 Completed Traceroute at 15:41, 0.01s elapsed NSE: Script scanning xx.xxx.xx.xx. NSE: Script Scanning completed. Nmap scan report for xtremek.com (xx.xxx.xx.xx) Host is up (0.00013s latency). PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION 1720/udp closed unknown Too many fingerprints match this host to give specific OS details Network Distance: 1 hop TRACEROUTE (using port 1720/udp) HOP RTT ADDRESS 1 0.13 ms xtremek.com (xx.xxx.xx.xx) Read data files from: /usr/share/nmap OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://nmap.org/submit/ . Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 2.04 seconds Raw packets sent: 27 (2128B) | Rcvd: 24 (2248B). The only thing I can think of is a firewall or vpn issue. Is there anything else I can check for before requesting that they look at the firewall server again?

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• Certification Notes: 70-583 Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Last Updated: 02/01/2011 It’s time for another certification, and we’ve just release the 70-583 exam on Windows Azure. I’ve blogged my “study plans” here before on other certifications, so I thought I would do the same for this one. I’ll also need to take exam 70-513 and 70-516; but I’ll post my notes on those separately. None of these are “brain dumps” or any questions from the actual tests - just the books, links and notes I have from my studies. I’ll update these references as I’m studying, so bookmark this site and watch my Twitter and Facebook posts for when I’ll update them, or just subscribe to the RSS feed. A “Green” color on the check-block means I’ve done that part so far, red means I haven’t. First, I need to refresh my memory on some basic coding, so along with the Azure-specific information I’m reading the following general programming books: Introducing Microsoft .NET (Pro-Developer): link   Head First C#, 2E: A Learner's Guide to Real-World Programming with Visual C# and .NET: link Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Step by Step: link  c The first place to start is at the official site for the certification. link c On that page you’ll find several resources, and the first you should follow is the “Save to my learning” so you have a place to track everything. Then click the “Related Learning Plans” link and follow the videos and read the documentation in each of those bullets. There are six areas on the learning plan that you should focus on - make sure you open the learning plan to drill into the specifics. c Designing Data Storage Architecture (18%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Optimizing Data Access and Messaging (17%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Designing the Application Architecture (19%) Books I’m Reading: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform: link Links: My Notes: c Preparing for Application and Service Deployment (15%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Investigating and Analyzing Applications (16%) Books I’m Reading: Links: My Notes: c Designing Integrated Solutions (15%) Books I’m Reading: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform (2nd mention) Links: My Notes:

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• CES 2011–Microsoft Keynote Impressions

  - by guybarrette

  Microsoft has been kicking off the CES for a number of years by doing a keynote the evening of the event first day.  This year, SteveB talked about Xbox, Kinect, Windows 7 new laptops, Surface 2 and Windows vNext running on the ARM architecture. Some of the design of the new laptops showed are quite amazing.  This one has a dual screen with no physical keyboard.  The image is split between both screens.  A software keyboard appears when you place your 10 fingers on the lower screen. This one from Samsung has a sliding keyboard somewhat like numerous cell phones have. What I found the most amazing is that Intel was able to miniaturized a full Intel architecture (CPU, motherboard, memory) in a tiny form factor.  Imagine having the power of a full PC running .NET apps in a Zune/iPod form factor! They also showed V2 of the Surface device.  This one is called the Samsung SUR40 for Surface PC.  It’s much sleeker and it will likely loose the BAT (Big Ass Table) moniker  More info here SteveB announced that Windows vNext will run on ARM chips.  I’m intrigued by this announcement (you can read about it here) and I have many questions: -In the past ARM devices were slow, what now makes the ARM architecture able to run Windows? -ARM is 32-bit only, I think. -Does this mean that Intel wasn't able to provide such a lightweight architecture or simply that they weren't interested? -From what I understand, apps would need to be recompiled for ARM. Will we need to do that from an ARM PC or could it be done natively on Intel or on an Intel PC running in an ARM VM?  VS 2012? Ahhhh, smells like a cool PDC is coming up    Clearly it looks like PC have enough power for most of us right now and that the race is now about miniaturization, power consumption and battery life. You can watch the Microsoft CES 2011 keynote here var addthis_pub="guybarrette";

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• Disk drive for / not ready on boot after upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04

  - by Mathieu M-Gosselin

  After upgrading (using the Upgrade button from the update manager) from 10.04.4 to 12.04.1, I cannot boot anymore. Upon booting, I am greeted with the Ubuntu logo and the error "The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present". I have the option to wait, to skip and to access a basic shell. Waiting overnight did nothing, skipping just gives me the same error for /tmp, /home, then for a UUID and finally it just goes to a black screen with a white "_" in the top left corner. My setup is a dual boot one with XP on a single hard drive, I use separate partitions for / and /home. Back in the day I installed 8.04 directly from the CD while leaving a partition for XP, which I installed after. This setup had never caused any such issues, even when upgrading from 8.04 to 10.04. I have done plenty of research regarding this issue, as many others seem to have had similar issues after doing the same upgrade as me. However, while for most what fixed the problem was running: apt-get -f install after remounting / in read-write, it didn't do it for me. I got dependency errors (see here), which I also investigated. I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-defaults/+bug/990740 where most people say the solution that worked is (prior to running the above command) running: apt-get install -o APT::Immediate-Configure=false -f apt python-minimal but that also got me a lot of dependencies errors as output (see here), similar to #34 in the above thread. I also read that running: dpkg --configure -a could help, at first it wouldn't run because it had trouble parsing /var/lib/dpkg/status since there was an extra blank line in a package description (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/916799) but I removed it using vim (and then reran the command). It still gives me output that looks like an error, though. Here it is: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1338074/. I also tried re-running the above apt-get commands after that, to no avail. I'm running out of things to try in the hope of getting this fixed, your help would be very much appreciated! Thank you in advance.

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• How to refactor my design, if it seems to require multiple inheritance?

  - by Omega

  Recently I made a question about Java classes implementing methods from two sources (kinda like multiple inheritance). However, it was pointed out that this sort of need may be a sign of a design flaw. Hence, it is probably better to address my current design rather than trying to simulate multiple inheritance. Before tackling the actual problem, some background info about a particular mechanic in this framework: It is a simple game development framework. Several components allocate some memory (like pixel data), and it is necessary to get rid of it as soon as you don't need it. Sprites are an example of this. Anyway, I decided to implement something ala Manual-Reference-Counting from Objective-C. Certain classes, like Sprites, contain an internal counter, which is increased when you call retain(), and decreased on release(). Thus the Resource abstract class was created. Any subclass of this will obtain the retain() and release() implementations for free. When its count hits 0 (nobody is using this class), it will call the destroy() method. The subclass needs only to implement destroy(). This is because I don't want to rely on the Garbage Collector to get rid of unused pixel data. Game objects are all subclasses of the Node class - which is the main construction block, as it provides info such as position, size, rotation, etc. See, two classes are used often in my game. Sprites and Labels. Ah... but wait. Sprites contain pixel data, remember? And as such, they need to extend Resource. But this, of course, can't be done. Sprites ARE nodes, hence they must subclass Node. But heck, they are resources too. Why not making Resource an interface? Because I'd have to re-implement retain() and release(). I am avoiding this in virtue of not writing the same code over and over (remember that there are multiple classes that need this memory-management system). Why not composition? Because I'd still have to implement methods in Sprite (and similar classes) that essentially call the methods of Resource. I'd still be writing the same code over and over! What is your advice in this situation, then?

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• Wrapping REST based Web Service

  - by PaulPerry

  I am designing a system that will be running online under Microsoft Windows Azure. One component is a REST based web service which will really be a wrapper (using proxy pattern) which calls the REST web services of a business partner, which has to do with BLOB storage (note: we are not using azure storage). The majority of the functionality will be taking a request, calling our partner web service, receiving the request and then passing that back to the client. There are a number of reasons for doing this, but one of the big ones is that we are going to support three clients: our desktop application (win and mac), mobile apps (iOS), and a web front end. Having a single API which we then send to our partner protects us if that partner ever changes. I want our service to support both JSON and XML for the data transfer format, JSON for web and probably XML for the desktop and mobile (we already have an XML parser in those products). Our partner also supports both of these formats. I was planning on using ASP.NET MVC 4 with the Web API. As I design this, the thing that concerns me is the static type checking of C#. What if the partner adds or removes elements from the data? We can probably defensively code for that, but I still feel some concern. Also, we have to do a fair amount of tedious coding, to setup our API and then to turn around and call our partner’s API. There probably is not much choice on it though. But, in the back of my mind I wonder if maybe a more dynamic language would be a better choice. I want to reach out and see if anybody has had to do this before, what technology solutions they have used to (I am not attached to this one, these days Azure can host other technologies), and if anybody who has done something like this can point out any issues that came up. Thanks! Researching the issue seems to only find solutions which focus on connecting a SOAP web service over a proxy server, and not what I am referring to here. Note: Cross posted (by suggestion) from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11906802/wrapping-rest-based-web-service Thank you!

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• The State of the Internet -- Retail Edition

  - by David Dorf

  Over at Business Insider, there's a great presentation on the State of the Internet done in the Mary Meeker style.  Its 138 slides so I took the liberty of condensing it down to the 15 slides that directly apply to the retail industry.  However, I strongly recommend looking at the entire deck when you have time.  And while you're at it, Business Insider just launched a retail portal that's dedicated to retail industry content.  Please check it out as well.  My take-aways are below after the slide show. &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; [Source: Business Insider] Here are a few things I took away from the statistics: Facebook and Twitter are in their infancy.  While all retailers should have social programs, search is still the driver and therefore should receive the lions share of investment.  Facebook referrals are up 92% year-over-year, but Google still does 80% of the referrals. E-commerce continues to grow at breakneck speed, but in-store commerce is still king. Stores are not showrooms yet.  And social commerce pure-plays like Gilt and Groupon are tiny but worthy of some attention. There are more smartphones than PCs on the internet, and the disparity will continue to grow. PC growth will be flat and Tablet use will continue to grow. Mobile accounts for 12% of all internet traffic. A quarter of smartphone sales come from China, so anyone with a presence there better have a strong mobile strategy. 38% of people have used their smartphone to make a purchase, and many use their smartphones inside stores.  Smartphones are a critical consumer tool for shopping. Mobile is starting to drive significant traffic to e-commerce sites, especially tablets.  Tablet strategies are crucial for retailers. Mobile payments from the likes of Paypal and Square are growing quickly.  It will be interesting to see how NFC plays in this area. Mobile operating systems are losing market share to iOS and Android.  I wonder in Microsoft can finally make a dent? The internet is being dominated by mobile devices, and retailers had better have a strong mobile strategy to meet consumer demand.

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• Pathfinding for fleeing

  - by Philipp

  As you know there are plenty of solutions when you wand to find the best path in a 2-dimensional environment which leads from point A to point B. But how do I calculate a path when an object is at point A, and wants to get away from point B, as fast and far as possible? A bit of background information: My game uses a 2d environment which isn't tile-based but has floating point accuracy. The movement is vector-based. The pathfinding is done by partitioning the game world into rectangles which are walkable or non-walkable and building a graph out of their corners. I already have pathfinding between points working by using Dijkstras algorithm. The use-case for the fleeing algorithm is that in certain situations, actors in my game should perceive another actor as a danger and flee from it. The trivial solution would be to just move the actor in a vector in the direction which is opposite from the threat until a "safe" distance was reached or the actor reaches a wall where it then covers in fear. The problem with this approach is that actors will be blocked by small obstacles they could easily get around. As long as moving along the wall wouldn't bring them closer to the threat they could do that, but it would look smarter when they would avoid obstacles in the first place: Another problem I see is with dead ends in the map geometry. In some situations a being must choose between a path which gets it faster away now but ends in a dead end where it would be trapped, or another path which would mean that it wouldn't get that far away from the danger at first (or even a bit closer) but on the other hand would have a much greater long-term reward in that it would eventually get them much further away. So the short-term reward of getting away fast must be somehow valued against the long-term reward of getting away far. There is also another rating problem for situations where an actor should accept to move closer to a minor threat to get away from a much larger threat. But completely ignoring all minor threats would be foolish, too (that's why the actor in this graphic goes out of its way to avoid the minor threat in the upper right area): Are there any standard solutions for this problem?

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• Once installed geos library (C++, and C), and then trying to install rgeos package (R), it reports geos-config missing!

  - by user1873888

  Knowing that the package rgeos, from the R language, requieres a prior installation of geos libraries, I installed, both, libgeos and libgeos-c1 (3.2.2), using the synaptic installer in my Ubuntu 12.04 (32 bit) machine. Then I tried to install rgeos directly from the R console, and it issued a message in the sense that geos-config was not found. The output is as follows: > install.packages("rgeos") Installing package(s) into ‘/home/checo/R/i486-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.15’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified) also installing the dependency ‘sp’ probando la URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/sp_1.0-9.tar.gz' Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 882102 bytes (861 Kb) URL abierta ================================================== downloaded 861 Kb probando la URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/rgeos_0.2-19.tar.gz' Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 221471 bytes (216 Kb) URL abierta ================================================== downloaded 216 Kb * installing *source* package ‘sp’ ... ** package ‘sp’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked ** libs gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c R centroid.c -o Rcentroid.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c gcdist.c -o gcdist.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c init.c -o init.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c pip.c -o pip.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c pip2.c -o pip2.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c sp_xports.c -o sp_xports.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c surfaceArea.c -o surfaceArea.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O3 -pipe -g -c zerodist.c -o zerodist.o gcc -std=gnu99 -shared -o sp.so Rcentroid.o gcdist.o init.o pip.o pip2.o sp_xports.o surfaceArea.o zerodist.o -L/usr/lib/R/lib -lR installing to /home/checo/R/i486-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.15/sp/libs ** R ** data ** demo ** inst ** preparing package for lazy loading ** help *** installing help indices ** building package indices ** installing vignettes ‘intro_sp.Rnw’ ‘over.Rnw’ ** testing if installed package can be loaded * DONE (sp) * installing *source* package ‘rgeos’ ... ** package ‘rgeos’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked configure: CC: gcc -std=gnu99 configure: CXX: g++ configure: rgeos: 0.2-17 checking for /usr/bin/svnversion... no configure: svn revision: 394 checking geos-config usability... ./configure: line 1385: geos-config: command not found no configure: error: geos-config not usable ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘rgeos’ * removing ‘/home/checo/R/i486-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.15/rgeos’ Warning in install.packages : installation of package ‘rgeos’ had non-zero exit status Forgive my ignorance, but I don't know where this file, "geos-config", comes from: should it be generated by the gcc compilations above, or should it be previously installed when the libgeos libraries were intalled? I learnt, from another machine, that "geos-config" is an executable and that it should be installed in /usr/bin. Do you have any idea on what's wrong with my procedure? Thanks, -Sergio.

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• Another Custom Property Locator: a Library of Books

  - by Cindy McMullen

  Introduction The previous post gave an introduction to custom property locators and showed how create one using JDeveloper.  This post continues on the custom locator theme, with a slightly more complex locator: a library of books.  It demonstrates using the DAO pattern to delegate data access from the Locator, which is likely how many actual backing stores will integrate with the Locator.  You can imagine, rather than a library of books, the data store might be a user database of sorts.  The same sort of pattern would apply. This post uses the BookLocator example originally shown in the WebCenter documentation, but has: updated the source code to reflect the final Property APIs includes the steps for generating the namespace and property definition files via JDeveloper detailed usage of the PropertyService APIs Getting Started If you're new to JDeveloper, you might want to check out this tutorial.  There is also the "Jump-Start to using Personalization" blog post that you might find useful.  Otherwise, if you're already familiar with both, you can skip those tutorials and jump right in to using JDeveloper. Download the BookLocator.zip file (which has been updated from the original post) and unzip it to a new directory.  Start JDeveloper, navigate to the BookLocator.jws file, and open it.   It should look something like this: The Properties Namespace file contains the property definitions and property set definitions you define.  It is explained more in detail in the Namespace documentation.  Although this example doesn't show it, the property set definitions have the ability to reference multiple locators per property.   This can be done by right-clicking on the 'Locator Info' box.  Configure the contents of the Locator Map  by editing locators and mapping them to available property names in the property set definition. Compiling, deploying, and running your locator The rest of the steps in this tutorial basically follow those in the previous blog on custom locators, and won't be repeated here.   A scenario to invoke your locator is included with the sample app: see BookProperties.scenarios_diagram above.  Summary This post demonstrates a simple library of books accessed by the BookPropertyLocator via the DAO layer.  This is a useful pattern for more realistic property retrievals, such as a backing user store.  It also points out the possibility of retrieving properties from multiple locators, which would be quite handy to retrieve user attributes from multiple sources.

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• The Birth of SSAS Compare

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  Noemi Moreno, Red Gate Business Intelligence Specialist Software vendors – even Microsoft – tend to forget about the needs of business intelligence developers. We are a rare and rather invisible species. For example, BIDS remained in VS 2008 until SQL Server 2012. It took until this release before we got something as simple as an “undo” function. Before I joined Red Gate as a BI specialist, I worked on SQL Development. I’ll never forget the time I discovered Red Gate’s SQL Compare tool and how it reduced the task of preparing a database release from a couple of days to ten minutes. When I moved to SSAS, MDX and cubes, I became frustrated with the deployment process because I couldn’t find a tool that made Cube releases as easy as they are with SQL Compare. This became my quest. I pitched the idea to a few people in Red Gate’s regular Down Tools Week, when everyone puts down their day-to-day tasks and works on their own projects. My task was to reason with a roomful of cynical developers, hardened to the blandishments of project managers, for help to develop a tool that would compare two different SSAS databases and create the script to process only the objects that needed processing, thereby reducing release time to only a few minutes. I walked to the podium and gave them the full story of the distressed BI specialists, doomed to spend tedious hours preparing deployment scripts. A few developers recovered from their torpor to cast a languid eye at my presentation. It wasn’t enough. In a sudden impulse, I blurted out a promise to perform a flamenco dance for just the team if the tool was able to successfully compare two SSAS databases and generate a script by the end of the week. I was lucky enough that some of them believed me and jumped in: David Pond (Dev), Matt Burton (Dev), Tilman Bregler (Dev), Shobana Sekar (Test), Ruchija Raj (Test), Nick Sutherland (Product Manager) and Irma Tanovic (BI). They didn’t know that Irma and I would be away on a conference in Amsterdam and would leave them without our support. But to my surprise, they had a working tool by the time we came back – basic, and with a few bugs, but a working tool nonetheless! Seeing it compare a very basic SSAS database, detect the changes and generate the scripts was amazing! Something that normally takes half a day was done in under a minute. Since then, a few months have passed and a BI Tools team has been created at Red Gate to work full time on BI tools for BI developers, starting with SSAS Compare. How cool is that? So download the free beta and give us your feedback. And the flamenco? I still need to deliver that. Tilman reminds me every day! I need to get the full flamenco costume.

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• Legitimate use of the Windows "Documents" folder in programs.

  - by romkyns

  Anyone who likes their Documents folder to contain only things they place there knows that the standard Documents folder is completely unsuitable for this task. Every program seems to want to put its settings, data, or something equally irrelevant into the Documents folder, despite the fact that there are folders specifically for this job1. So that this doesn't sound empty, take my personal "Documents" folder as an example. I don't ever use it, in that I never, under any circumstances, save anything into this folder myself. And yet, it contains 46 folders and 3 files at the top level, for a total of 800 files in 500 folders. That's 190 MB of "documents" I didn't create. Obviously any actual documents would immediately get lost in this mess. My question is: can anything be done to improve the situation sufficiently to make "Documents" useful again, say over the next 5 years? Can programmers be somehow educated en-masse not to use it as a dumping ground? Could the OS start reporting some "fake" location hidden under AppData through the existing APIs, while only allowing Explorer and the various Open/Save dialogs to know where the "real" Documents folder resides? Or are any attempts completely futile or even unnecessary? 1For the record, here's a quick summary of the various standard directories that should be used instead of "Documents": RoamingAppData for user-specific data and settings. This is the directory to use for user-specific non-temporary data. Anything placed here will be available on any machine that a given user logs on to in networks where this is configured. Do not place large files here though, because they slow down login/logout in such environments. LocalAppData for user-and-machine-specific data and settings. This data differs for every user and every machine. This is also where very large user-specific data should be placed. ProgramData for machine-specific data and settings. These are the same regardless of which user is logged on, and will not roam to other machines in a network. GetTempPath for all files that may be wiped without loss of data when not in use. This is also the place for things like caches, because like temporary data, a cache does not need to be backed up. Place your huge cache here and you'll save your user some backup trouble. "Documents" itself should only ever be used if the user specified it manually by entering a path or selecting it in a Save dialog. That is the only time it is ever appropriate to save stuff in "Documents".

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• Interesting Topics in Comp. Sci. for New Students?

  - by SoulBeaver

  I hope this is the right forum to ask this question. Last friday I was in a discussion with my professors about the students' lack of motivation and interest in the field of Computer Science. All of the students are enrolled, but through questionnaires and other questions that my professor posed it was revealed that over 90% of all enrolled students are just in it for the reward of getting a job sometime in the future (since it's a growing field with high job potential) I asked my professor for the permission to take over the first couple of lectures and try and motivate, interest and inspire students for the field of Computer Science and programming in particular (this is the Intro to Programming course). This request was granted and I now have a week to come up with a lecture topic for my professor's five groups. My main goal isn't to teach, I just want to get students to be as interested in the field as I am. I want to show them what's possible, what awesome magical things have been done in the field, the future we are heading towards using programming and Comp. Sci. Therefore, I would like to pose this question: I have a few topics, materials and sample projects that I would like to talk about: -- Grace Hopper (It is my hope to interest the female programmers in the class. There are never more than two or three per group and they, more than males, are prone to jumping ship and abandoning Comp. Sci.) -- The Singularity Institute -- Alan Turing -- Robotics -- Programming not as a chore or a must, but the idea that we are, at our core, the nexus to which anything anybody does in the digital world is connected to. We are the problem solvers; we assemble all the parts together and we are the ones that, essentially, make the vision a reality. -- Give them an idea for a programming project which, through the help of the professor, could be significant to every student (I want students to not only feel interested in the topic, but they should feel important, that what they do here makes a difference) Do you have interesting topics worthy of discussion, something I can tell the students which they can get interested about? How would you approach the lecture? If you had 90 minutes worth of time to try and get students interested in the project, what would you do?

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• How do I maintain a really poorly written code base?

  - by onlineapplab.com

  Recently I got hired to work on existing web application because of NDA I'm not at liberty to disclose any details but this application is working online in sort of a beta testing stage before official launch. We have a few hundred users right now but this number is supposed to significantly increase after official launch. The application is written in PHP (but it is irrelevant to my question) and is running on a dual xeon processor standalone server with severe performance problems. I have seen a lot of bad PHP code but this really sets new standards, especially knowing how much time and money was invested in developing it. it is as badly coded as possible there is PHP, HTML, SQL mixed together and code is repeated whenever it is necessary (especially SQL queries). there are not any functions used, not mentioning any OOP there are four versions of the app (desktop, iPhone, Android + other mobile) each version has pretty much the same functionality but was created by copying the whole code base, so now there are some differences between each version and it is really hard to maintain the database is really badly designed, which is causing severe performance problems also for fixing some errors in PHP code there is a lot of database triggers used which are updating data on SELECT and on INSERT so any testing is a nightmare Basically, any sin of a bad programming you can imagine is there for example it is not only possible to use SQL injections in literally every place but you can log into app if you use a login which doesn't exist and an empty password. The team which created this app is not working on it any more and there is an outsourced team which suggested that there are some problems but was never willing to deal with the elephant in the room partially because they've got a very comfortable contract and partially due to lack of skills (just my opinion). My job was supposed to be fixing some performance problems and extending existing functionality but first thing I was asked to do was a review of the existing code base. I've made my review and it was quite a shock for the management but my conclusions were after some time finally confirmed by other programmers. Management made it clear that it is not possible to start rewriting this app from scratch (which in my opinion should be done). We have to maintain its operable state and at the same time fix performance errors and extend the functionality. My question is, as I don't want just to patch the existing code, how to transform this into properly written app while keeping the existing code working at the same time? My plan is: Unify four existing versions into common code base (fixing only most obvious errors). Redesign db and use triggers to populate it with data (so data will be maintained in two formats at the same time) All new functionality will be written as separate project. Step by step transfer existing functionality into the new project After some time everything will be in the new project Some explanation about #2, right now it is practically impossible to make any updates in existing db any change requires reviewing whole code and making changes in many places. Is such plan feasible at all? Another solution is to walk away and leave the headache to someone else.

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• Designing a completly new database/gui solution for my compnay

  - by user1277304

  I'm no expert when it come to Everything Visual Studio 2010 and utilizing SQL server 2008. I'm sure some of my personal projects I've built for personal use would get laughed off the face of the planet, but SQLCe has been the solution I was looking for those home type of projects. And they work, flawlessly. Now I feel it's time to step up to the big league. I want to develop a complete, unified and module based solution for my compnay that I'm working for. We're still using stuff from the 80s for goodness sake! I use Excel and query the ancient database on my own because I can't stand the GUI. Nothing against people of age, but the IDE our programmers are using is from the stone age, and they use APL of all things with it. I've yet to see a radio buttton control anywhere in the GUI where it would make sense. Anyway, I want to do this right from the ground up. I'm by no means a newbie when it comes to programming in .NET 2010, however, I want the entire solution to be professionaly done. I want version control, test projects, project flow, SQL 2008 integration and all the bells and whistles that come with that. I know for a fact that if we had something like that runnning, not only would development costs and time be slashed four fold, but the possibilities for expansion and performance would sky rocket. (Between the GUI an our DB engine, it can only use ONE CORE! ONE! It's 2012 for goodness sake!) Our buisness is growing and our current ancient solution just can't keep up, and I'd hate to see our buisness go down in flames because our programmer is stuck in the 80's and refuses to use anything current. So I ask you guys, the experts and know-it-alls, where do I start? Are there any gems of good books out there in the haystack of all "This for dummies" type of deals? I already have several people backing me in this endevour, and while it may seem brash to just usurp the current programmers, I'm doing this for the company as a whole. Thank you guys for your time.

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• Showrooming: What's the big deal?

  - by David Dorf

  There's been lots of chatter recently on how retailers will combat showrooming this holiday season.  Best Buy and Target, for example, plan to price-match certain online sites.  But from my perspective, the whole showrooming concept is overblown.  Yes, mobile phones make is easier to comparison-shop, but consumers have been doing that all along.  Retailers have to work hard to merchandise their stores with the right products at the right price with the right promotions.  Its Retail 101. Yeah ok, many websites don't have to charge tax so they have an advantage, but they also have to cover shipping costs. Brick-and-mortar stores have the opportunity to provide expertise, fit, and instant gratification all of which are pretty big advantages. I see lots of studies that claim a large percentage of shoppers are showrooming.  Now I don't do much shopping, but when I do I rarely see anyone scanning UPC codes in the aisles.  If you dig into those studies, the question is usually something like, "have you used your mobile phone to price compare while shopping in the last year."  Well yeah, I did it once -- out of the 20 shopping trips.  And by the way, the in-store price was close enough to just buy the item.  Based on casual observation and informal surveys of friends, showrooming is not the modus-operandi for today's busy shoppers. I never see people showrooming in grocery stores, and most people don't bother for fashion.  For big purchases like appliances and furniture, I bet most people do their research online before entering the store.  The cases where I've done it was to see if a promotion was in fact a good deal.  Or even to make sure the in-store price is the same as the online price for the same brand. So, if you think you're a victim of showrooming, I suggest you look at the bigger picture.  Are you providing an engaging store experience?  Are you allowing customers to shop the way they want to shop, using various touchpoints?  Are you monitoring the competition to ensure prices are competitive?  Are your promotions attracting the right customers? Hubert Jolly, CEO of Best Buy, recently commented that showrooming might just get more people into his stores. "Once customers are in our stores, they're ours to lose."

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• Paranoid management, contractor checking work [closed]

  - by user833345

  Just wanted to get some opinions and experiences on an issue I'm having at work. First, a little background. I've been working at a company for some time (past any probation periods) and rewriting a horrendous system. No tests, incomplete and broken functionality everywhere, enough copypasta to feed a small village, redundant code, more unused SQL tables than used ones and terrible performance. I've never seen such bad code, pretty much all of it is worthy of being posted on TheDailyWTF. The company has been operating for a number of years and have had a string of bad developers working on this system. I made a call on rewriting instead of refactoring since I judged it to be less work overall and decided that the result will address the requirements more appropriately, since the central requirement is to have a future-proof system for the next decade with plenty of room to scale up. Refactoring would have entailed untangling a huge ball of yarn and at the same time integrating it with a proper foundation or building a foundation from scratch. I've introduced the latest spiffy framework, unit & functional testing, CI, a bug tracker and agile workflow to the environment. I've fixed most of the performance issues of the old system (there were no indexes on any of the tables, for example). I've created an automated deployment process for the old system. The CTO has been maintaining the old system while I have been building the new one and he has been advising management that everything is being done as per best practices. However, management is hiring a contractor to come in and verify my work. In my experience, this is unprecedented. I can understand their reasoning to an extent, since they've had bad luck in the past, but can't help but feel somewhat offended at the fact that they distrust two senior developers who have been working with them for some time enough that a third party is being brought in. And it's not just me who is under watch - people's emails are constantly checked, someone had a remote desktop application installed on their computer of which I was asked to check the usage logs to try to determine if they were stealing sensitive data and there are CCTV cameras in one of the rooms. It's the first time I've decided to disable my Skype history at work. Am I right to feel indignant here? Has anyone else ever encountered such a situation? If so, how did it work out in the end? Was it worth sticking around? Should I just find another job?

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• What kind of position matches my skills, experience and interests? [closed]

  - by Ryan

  I work in a large firm and my current job covers a variety of different duties. Due to several factors I am seriously considering finding a new job (hours, pay-cut, limited career growth). I have worked for the company nearly 4 years and almost 2 years ago I transitioned into more of a business analyst role (previously I was working in a client facing role for our audit group). In this role I have overseen all aspects of the development of a large scale re-platforming of our firm's key tool in analyzing investment portfolios. I gathered requirements, wrote specs, designed the UI and functionality, worked closely with developers (onshore and offshore) to see to it the implementation was correct, managed schedules and was the lead tester. This is a large scale system used by thousands of people around the world. I've also written Excel macros, reports in SQL, given trainings, written technical manuals, interfaced with senior managers and partners, etc. I've been on a couple interviews sporadically, most of which were for positions aimed at higher management consulting type positions, dealing with strategy, overall process management, project management, etc. What really interests me is the technical stuff and overseeing a project from beginning to end (although I would rather not have to do so many of the tasks on my own). I genuinely like a lot of what I do, but the company culture and attitude towards overworking people combined with my recent pay-cut (my overtime was cut due to a promotion to a higher level) has lead me to want to seek work elsewhere. The problem is - what type of work could I realistically do? I feel like traditional business analysis is too much business and not enough tech stuff, and I've really taken a shine lately to beefing up my programming abilities and creating small programs to automate things around work. I also feel that because my actual years of experience as a business analyst (figure 1.5 years realistically) puts me at a junior level doing a lot of grunt requirements gathering, when the work that I have been doing with my current company is more in line with what a Program Manager does (depending on your definition I guess). So in reality, when I'm job hunting I get a bit perplexed because I feel like the traditional BA stuff wouldn't really suit me, and even if it did it's usually something along the lines of 5-10 years experience for the type of work that is similar to what I've done (and I've also found most BA jobs to be contract only which at the moment I'm not too keen on). Program Manager is something that interests me, but again I feel like the experience is lacking because that's a much more senior position. Am I in some kind of career no-man's land? Any idea what would best suit me given my experience and abilities, as well as my interests? I plan to keep learning programming on the side, but don't expect to get a job being a straight programmer given my relative inexperience with programming.

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