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• Christian Radio Locator iPhone app

  - by Tim Hibbard

  For the last three months or so I've been working on an iPhone (and iPad) app in my spare time. It all started when I took the kids to Minneapolis and had a hard time finding radio stations to listen to on the trip. I looked in the App Store for an app that would use my GPS to show me Christian radio stations nearby, but there wasn't one. So I decided to build my own. Using public information from the FCC and a few other sources, I built a database in Google docs that contains the frequency for all Christian radio stations, where the tower is located and how far the tower can reach. I also included any streaming audio information and other contact information like Facebook or Twitter that I could find. Google spreadsheets publish in JSON format (yes, really) and Xcode can automatically deserialize JSON into a properly formatted entity. This is one area that Xcode is far superior to C#. In a just a few lines of code, I can have a list of in-memory strongly typed objects from a web-based JSON feed. To accomplish the same thing natively in .NET would be much more work and wouldn't feel nearly as clean when it was said and done. The snazzy icon shown above was built by my very talented wife. She hasn't yet provided any feedback on the app's user interface, which is why it is so plain and boring. I used a navigation view controller and EGO pull to refresh table view to construct the main window. Pulling down to refresh initiates a GPS lookup, which queries the database for radio stations in range (yes, you can pass parameters to Google spreadsheets and get a subset back in JSON). Pulling up on the table extends the range of the search and includes stations that may not be close enough to get clear audio. This feature is not that intuitive and the next version contains an update to that functionality. Tapping a cell will show a detail view that displays additional information about the station. The user can click to view the station on a map, click to listen to an online stream (if available) or click to see the station's Facebook or Twitter pages. Swiping back and forth on the table changes the information that is displayed on the right hand side of the table cell. It scrolls through the city where the tower is located, how far the phone is from the tower, the range of the tower and in the next version a signal strength indicator. This was pretty easy to implement once I figured out how to assign the gesture recognizer delegate.  Tapping and holding on a cell will jump the user to the map view screen. Which is pretty cool, but very hard for even a power user to discover. To tackle the issue of discoverability, the next version has a series of instructions displayed at the bottom of the screen to show the user the various shortcuts. Once the user has performed the swipes and long holds, the instructions disappear. I've learned a lot developing this app. Spending over a decade exclusively in .NET made the learning curve a bit steep, but once I learned the structure and syntax of Objective-C, I've learned to appreciate the power and simplicity of it. Here are a few screenshots. I would really appreciate any feedback and especially iTunes reviews. Technically it is open source and a smart googler could probably find it. I just haven't promoted it as open source.     Cross posted from timhibbard.com

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• IntelliTrace As a Learning Tool for MVC2 in a VS2010 Project

  - by Sam Abraham

  IntelliTrace is a new feature in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition. I see this valuable tool as a “Program Execution Recorder” that captures information about events and calls taking place as soon as we hit the VS2010 play (Start Debugging) button or the F5 key. Many online resources already discuss IntelliTrace and the benefit it brings to both developers and testers alike so I see no value of just repeating this information.  In this brief blog entry, I would like to share with you how I will be using IntelliTrace in my upcoming talk at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig .Net User Group Meeting on April 20th 2010 (check http://www.fladotnet.com for more information), as a learning tool to demonstrate the internals of the lifecycle of an MVC2 application.  I will also be providing some helpful links that cover IntelliTrace in more detail at the end of my article for reference. IntelliTrace is setup by default to only capture execution events. Microsoft did such a great job on optimizing its recording process that I haven’t even felt the slightest performance hit with IntelliTrace running as I was debugging my solutions and projects.  For my purposes here however, I needed to capture more information beyond execution events, so I turned on the option for capturing calls in addition to events as shown in Figures 1 and 2. Changing capture options will require us to stop our debugging session and start over for the new settings to take place. Figure 1 – Access IntelliTrace options via the Tools->Options menu items Figure 2 – Change IntelliTrace Options to capture call information as well as events Notice the warning with regards to potentially degrading performance when selecting to capture call information in addition to the default events-only setting. I have found this warning to be sure true. My subsequent tests showed slowness in page load times compared to rendering those same exact pages with the “event-only” option selected. Execution recording is auto-started along with the new debugging session of our project. At this point, we can simply interact with the application and continue executing normally until we decide to “playback” the code we have executed so far.  For code replay, first step is to “break” the current execution as show in Figure 3.   Figure 3 – Break to replay recording A few tries later, I found a good process to quickly find and demonstrate the MVC2 page lifecycle. First-off, we start with the event view as shown in Figure 4 until we find an interesting event that needs further studying.  Figure 4 – Going through IntelliTrace’s events and picking as specific entry of interest We now can, for instance, study how the highlighted HTTP GET request is being handled, by clicking on the “Calls View” for that particular event. Notice that IntelliTrace shows us all calls that took place in servicing that GET request. Double clicking on any call takes us to a more granular view of the call stack within that clicked call, up until getting to a specific line of code where we can do a line-by-line replay of the execution from that point onwards using F10 or F11 just like our typical good old VS2008 debugging helped us accomplish. Figure 5 – switching to call view on an event of interest Figure 6 – Double clicking on call shows a more granular view of the call stack. In conclusion, the introduction of IntelliTrace as a new addition to the VS developers’ tool arsenal enhances development and debugging experience and effectively tackles the “no-repro” problem. It will also hopefully enhance my audience’s experience listening to me speaking about  an MVC2 page lifecycle which I can now easily visually demonstrate, thereby improving the probability of keeping everybody awake a little longer. IntelliTrace References: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336126.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264944(VS.100).aspx

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• How To Clear An Alert - Part 2

  - by werner.de.gruyter

  There were some interesting comments and remarks on the original posting, so I decided to do a follow-up and address some of the issues that got raised... Handling Metric Errors First of all, there is a significant difference between an 'error' and an 'alert'. An 'alert' is the violation of a condition (a threshold) specified for a given metric. That means that the Agent is collecting and gathering the data for the metric, but there is a situation that requires the attention of an administrator. An 'error' on the other hand however, is a failure to collect metric data: The Agent is throwing the error because it cannot determine the value for the metric Whereas the 'alert' guarantees continuity of the metric data, an 'error' signals a big unknown. And the unknown aspect of all this is what makes an error a lot more serious than a regular alert: If you don't know what the current state of affairs is, there could be some serious issues brewing that nobody is aware of... The life-cycle of a Metric Error Clearing a metric error is pretty much the same workflow as a metric 'alert': The Agent signals the error after it failed to execute the metric The error is uploaded to the OMS/repository, where it becomes visible in the Console The error will remain active until the Agent is able to execute the metric successfully. Even though the metric is still getting scheduled and executed on a regular basis, the error will remain outstanding as long as the Agent is not capable of executing the metric correctly Knowing this, the way to fix the metric error should be obvious: Take the 'problem' away, and as soon as the metric is executed again (based on the frequency of the metric), the error will go away. The same tricks used to clear alerts can be used here too: Wait for the next scheduled execution. For those metrics that are executed regularly (like every 15 minutes or so), it's just a matter of waiting those minutes to see the updates. The 'Reevaluate Alert' button can be used to force a re-execution of the metric. In case a metric is executed once a day, this will be a better way to make sure that the underlying problem has been solved. And if it has been, the metric error will be removed, and the regular data points will be uploaded to the repository. And just in case you have to 'force' the issue a little: If you disable and re-enable a metric, it will get re-scheduled. And that means a new metric execution, and an update of the (hopefully) fixed problem. Database server-generated alerts and problem checkers There are various ways the Agent can collect metric data: Via a script or a SQL statement, reading a log file, getting a value from an SNMP OID or listening for SNMP traps or via the DBMS_SERVER_ALERTS mechanism of an Oracle database. For those alert which are generated by the database (like tablespace metrics for 10g and above databases), the Agent just 'waits' for the database to report any new findings. If the Agent has lost the current state of the server-side metrics (due to an incomplete recovery after a disaster, or after an improper use of the 'emctl clearstate' command), the Agent might be still aware of an alert that the database no longer has (or vice versa). The same goes for 'problem checker' alerts: Those metrics that only report data if there is a problem (like the 'invalid objects' metric) will also have a problem if the Agent state has been tampered with (again, the incomplete recovery, and after improper use of 'emctl clearstate' are the two main causes for this). The best way to deal with these kinds of mismatches, is to simple disable and re-enable the metric again: The disabling will clear the state of the metric, and the re-enabling will force a re-execution of the metric, so the new and updated results can get uploaded to the repository. Starting 10gR5, the Agent performs additional checks and verifications after each restart of the Agent and/or each state change of the database (shutdown/startup or failover in case of DataGuard) to catch these kinds of mismatches.

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• Databases in Source Control

  - by Grant Fritchey

  I’ve been working as a database professional for quite a long time. But originally, I was a developer. And I loved being a developer. There was this constant feedback loop of a job well done, your code compiled and it ran. Every time this happened successfully, you’d check it into source control. These days you have to add another step; the code passed all the tests, unit, line, regression, qa, whatever, then into source control it goes. As a matter of fact, when I first made the jump from developer to DBA/database developer/database professional, source control was the one thing I couldn’t believe was missing from the DBA toolbox. Come to find out, source control was only the beginning of what was missing from your standard DBAs set of skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disrespecting the DBA. They’re focused where they should be, on your production data. But there has to be a method for developing applications that include databases and the database side of that development and deployment process has long been lacking. This lack of development and deployment methodologies is a part of what has given rise to some of the wackier implementations of Object Relational Mapping tools, the NoSQL movement, and some of the other foul cursing that is directed towards databases, DBAs, and database development by application developers. Some of that is well earned. A lot isn’t. But it is a fact that database professionals, in general, do not have as sophisticated a model for managing development and deployment as application developers do. We could charge out and start trying to come up with our own standards and methods. I’m sure people have done exactly that. However, I’m lazy, and not terribly bright. Rather than try to invent a whole new process, I’m going to look to my developer roots and choose instead to emulate the developers. They’re sitting over there across the hall from me working with SCRUM/Agile/Waterfall/Object Driven/Feature Driven/Test Driven development processes that they’ve been polishing for years. What if I just started working on database development the same way they work on code development? Win! Ah, but now I have to have a mechanism for treating my database like application code. First, I need a method for getting it into source control. That’s where Red Gate’s SQL Source Control comes into the picture. SQL Source Control works within SQL Server Management Studio to connect your database objects up to the source control system of your choice. Right out of the box SQL Source Control can link to TFS, SVN or Vault. With a little work you can connect it to Git or just about any other source control system. With the ability to get my database into source control, a lot of possibilities for more direct integration with the application development teams open up.

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• Introducing functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in understanding and using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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• Understanding MotionEvent to implement a virtual DPad and Buttons on Android (Multitouch)

  - by Fabio Gomes

  I once implemented a DPad in XNA and now I'm trying to port it to android, put, I still don't get how the touch events work in android, the more I read the more confused I get. Here is the code I wrote so far, it works, but guess that it will only handle one touch point. public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { if (event.getPointerCount() == 0) return true; int touchX = -1; int touchY = -1; pressedDirection = DPadDirection.None; int actionCode = event.getAction() & MotionEvent.ACTION_MASK; if (actionCode == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP) { if (event.getPointerId(0) == idDPad) { pressedDirection = DPadDirection.None; idDPad = -1; } } else if (actionCode == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN || actionCode == MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE) { touchX = (int)event.getX(); touchY = (int)event.getY(); if (rightRect.contains(touchX, touchY)) pressedDirection = DPadDirection.Right; else if (leftRect.contains(touchX, touchY)) pressedDirection = DPadDirection.Left; else if (upRect.contains(touchX, touchY)) pressedDirection = DPadDirection.Up; else if (downRect.contains(touchX, touchY)) pressedDirection = DPadDirection.Down; if (pressedDirection != DPadDirection.None) idDPad = event.getPointerId(0); } return true; } The logic is: Test if there is a "DOWN" or "MOVED" event, then if one of this events collides with one of the 4 rectangles of my DPad, I set the pressedDirectin variable to the side of the touch event, then I read the DPad actual pressed direction in my Update() event on another class. The thing I'm not sure, is how do I get track of the touch points, I store the ID of the touch point which generated the diretion that is being stored (last one), so when this ID is released I set the Direction to None, but I'm really confused about how to handle this in android, here is the code I had in XNA: public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { PressedDirection = DpadDirection.None; foreach (TouchLocation _touchLocation in TouchPanel.GetState()) { if (_touchLocation.State == TouchLocationState.Released) { if (_touchLocation.Id == _idDPad) { PressedDirection = DpadDirection.None; _idDPad = -1; } } else if (_touchLocation.State == TouchLocationState.Pressed || _touchLocation.State == TouchLocationState.Moved) { _intersectRect.X = (int)_touchLocation.Position.X; _intersectRect.Y = (int)_touchLocation.Position.Y; _intersectRect.Width = 1; _intersectRect.Height = 1; if (_intersectRect.Intersects(_rightRect)) PressedDirection = DpadDirection.Right; else if (_intersectRect.Intersects(_leftRect)) PressedDirection = DpadDirection.Left; else if (_intersectRect.Intersects(_upRect)) PressedDirection = DpadDirection.Up; else if (_intersectRect.Intersects(_downRect)) PressedDirection = DpadDirection.Down; if (PressedDirection != DpadDirection.None) { _idDPad = _touchLocation.Id; continue; } } } base.Update(gameTime); } So, first of all: Am I doing this correctly? if not, why? I don't want my DPad to handle multiple directions, but I still didn't get how to handle the multiple touch points, is the event called for every touch point, or all touch points comes in a single call? I still don't get it.

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• OWB 11gR2 &ndash; OLAP and Simba

  - by David Allan

  Oracle Warehouse Builder was the first ETL product to provide a single integrated and complete environment for managing enterprise data warehouse solutions that also incorporate multi-dimensional schemas. The OWB 11gR2 release provides Oracle OLAP 11g deployment for multi-dimensional models (in addition to support for prior releases of OLAP). This means users can easily utilize Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (see here for details and cost) which allows you to use the powerful and popular ad hoc query and analysis capabilities of Microsoft Excel PivotTables® and PivotCharts® with your Oracle OLAP business intelligence data. The extensions to the dimensional modeling capabilities have been built on established relational concepts, with the option to seamlessly move from a relational deployment model to a multi-dimensional model at the click of a button. This now means that ETL designers can logically model a complete data warehouse solution using one single tool and control the physical implementation of a logical model at deployment time. As a result data warehouse projects that need to provide a multi-dimensional model as part of the overall solution can be designed and implemented faster and more efficiently. Wizards for dimensions and cubes let you quickly build dimensional models and realize either relationally or as an Oracle database OLAP implementation, both 10g and 11g formats are supported based on a configuration option. The wizard provides a good first cut definition and the objects can be further refined in the editor. Both wizards let you choose the implementation, to deploy to OLAP in the database select MOLAP: multidimensional storage. You will then be asked what levels and attributes are to be defined, by default the wizard creates a level bases hierarchy, parent child hierarchies can be defined in the editor. Once the dimension or cube has been designed there are special mapping operators that make it easy to load data into the objects, below we load a constant value for the total level and the other levels from a source table.   Again when the cube is defined using the wizard we can edit the cube and define a number of analytic calculations by using the 'generate calculated measures' option on the measures panel. This lets you very easily add a lot of rich analytic measures to your cube. For example one of the measures is the percentage difference from a year ago which we can see in detail below. You can also add your own custom calculations to leverage the capabilities of the Oracle OLAP option, either by selecting existing template types such as moving averages to defining true custom expressions. The 11g OLAP option now supports percentage based summarization (the amount of data to precompute and store), this is available from the option 'cost based aggregation' in the cube's configuration. Ensure all measure-dimensions level based aggregation is switched off (on the cube-dimension panel) - previously level based aggregation was the only option. The 11g generated code now uses the new unified API as you see below, to generate the code, OWB needs a valid connection to a real schema, this was not needed before 11gR2 and is a new requirement since the OLAP API which OWB uses is not an offline one. Once all of the objects are deployed and the maps executed then we get to the fun stuff! How can we analyze the data? One option which is powerful and at many users' fingertips is using Microsoft Excel PivotTables® and PivotCharts®, which can be used with your Oracle OLAP business intelligence data by utilizing Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP (see Simba site for details of cost). I'll leave the exotic reporting illustrations to the experts (see Bud's demonstration here), but with Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP its very simple to easily access the analytics stored in the database (all built and loaded via the OWB 11gR2 release) and get the regular features of Excel at your fingertips such as using the conditional formatting features for example. That's a very quick run through of the OWB 11gR2 with respect to Oracle 11g OLAP integration and the reporting using Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. Not a deep-dive in any way but a quick overview to illustrate the design capabilities and integrations possible.

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• Having Fun with Coding4Fun&rsquo;s Windows Phone 7 Controls

  - by mbcrump

  I’m a big believer in having a hobby project as you can probably tell from the first sentence in my “personal webpage using Silverlight” article. One of my current hobby projects is to re-do my current WP7 application in the marketplace. I knew up front that I needed a “Loading” animation and a better “About” box. After starting to develop my own, I noticed a great set of WP7 controls by Coding4Fun and decided to use them in my new application. Before I go any further they are FREE and Open-Source. It is really simple to get started, just go to the CodePlex site and click the download button. After you have downloaded it then extract it to a Folder and you will have 4 DLL files. They are listed below: Now create a Windows Phone 7 Project and add references to the DLL’s by right clicking on the References folder and clicking “Add references”.   After adding the references, we can get started. I needed a ProgressOverlay animation or “Loading Screen” while my RSS feed is downloading. Basically, you just need to add the following namespace to whatever page you want the control on: xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls;assembly=Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls" And then the code inside your Grid or wherever you want the Loading screen placed. <Controls:ProgressOverlay Name="progressOverlay" > <Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> <TextBlock>Loading</TextBlock> </Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> </Controls:ProgressOverlay> Bam, you now have a great looking loading screen. Of course inside the ProgressOverlay, you may want to add a Visibility property to turn it off after your data loads if you are using MVVM or similar pattern.   Next up, I needed a nice clean “About Box” that looks good but is also functional. Meaning, if they click on my twitter name, web or email to launch the appropriate task. Again, this is only a few lines of code: var p = new AboutPrompt(); p.VersionNumber = "2.0"; p.Show("Michael Crump", "@mbcrump", "[email protected]", @"http://michaelcrump.net"); A nice clean “About” box with just a few lines of code! I’m all for code that I don’t have to write. It also comes with a pretty sweet InputPrompt for grabbing info from a user: The code for this is also very simple: InputPrompt input = new InputPrompt(); input.Completed += (s, e) => { MessageBox.Show(e.Result.ToString()); }; input.Title = "Input Box"; input.Message = "What does a \"Developer Large\" T-Shirt Mean? "; input.Show(); I also enjoyed the PhoneHelper that allows you to get data out of the WMAppManifest File very easy. So for example if I wanted the Version info from the WMAppManifest file. I could write one line and get it. PhoneHelper.GetAppAttribute("Version") Of course you would want to make sure you add the following using statement: using Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls.Data; You can’t have all these cool controls without a great set of Converters. The included BooleanToVisibility converter will convert a Boolean to and from a Visibility value. This is excellent when using something like a CheckBox to display a TextBox when its checked. See the example below: The code is below: <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <Converters:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter"/> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <CheckBox x:Name="checkBox"/> <TextBlock Text="Display Text" Visibility="{Binding ElementName=checkBox, Path=IsChecked, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter} }"/> That’s not all the goodies included. They also provide a RoundedButton, TimePicker and several other converters. The documentation is great and I would recommend you give them a shot if you need any of this functionality. Btw, thank Brian Peek for his awesome work on Coding4Fun!  Subscribe to my feed

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• Java Script – Content delivery networks (CDN) can bit you in the butt.

  - by Ryan Ternier

  As much as I love the new CDN’s that Google, Microsoft and a few others have publically released, there are some strong gotchas that could come up and bite you in the ass if you’re not careful. But before we jump into that, for those that are not 100% sure what a CDN is (besides Canadian).   Content Delivery Network. A way of distributing your static content across various servers in different physical locations.  Because this static content is stored on many servers around the world, whenever a user needs to access this content, they are given the closest server to their location for this data. Already you can probably see the immediate bonuses to a system like this: Lower bandwidth Even small script files downloaded thousands of times will start to take a noticeable hit on your bandwidth meter. Less connections/hits to your web server which gives better latency If you manage many servers, you don’t need to manually update each server with scripts. A user will download a script for each website they visit. If a user is redirected to many domains/sub-domains within your web site, they might download many copies of the same file. When a system sees multiple requests from the same  domain, they will ignore the download   Those are just a handful of the many bonuses a CDN will give you. And for the average website, a CDN is great choice. Check out the following CDN links for their solutions: Google AJAX Library: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/ Microsoft Ajax library: http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx The Gotcha There is always a catch. Here are some issues I found with using CDN’s that hopefully can help you make your decision. HTTP / HTTPS If you are running a website behind SSL, make sure that when you reference your CDN data that you use https:// vs. http://. If you forget this users will get a very nice message telling them that their secure connection is trying to access unsecure data. For a developer this is fairly simple, but general users will get a bit anxious when seeing this. Trusted Sites Internet Explorer has this really nifty feature that allows users to specify what sites they trust, and by some defaults IE7 only allows trusted sites to be viewed.  No problem, they set your website as trusted. But what about your CDN? If a user sets your websites to trusted, but not the CDN, they will not download those static files. This has the potential to totally break your web site. Pedantic Network Admins This alone is sometimes the killer of projects. However, always be careful when you are going to use a CDN for a professional project. If a network / security admin sees that you’re referencing an outside source, or that a call from a website might hit an outside domain.. panties will be bunched, emails will be spewed out and well, no one wants that.

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• Book Reviews: Art of Community and Eyetracking Web Usability

  - by ultan o'broin

  Holidays time offers a chance to catch up on some user experience and user assistance related material. So, two short book reviews (which I considered using my new Tumblr blog for. More about that another time) coming up. The Art of Community by Jono Bacon Excellent starting point for anyone wanting to get going in the community software (FLOSS, for example) space or understand how to set up, manage, and leverage the collective intelligence of communities for whatever ends. The book is a little too long in my opinion, and of course, usage of what Jono is recommending needs to be nuanced and adapted for enterprise applications space (hardly surprising there is a lot about Ubuntu, Lug Radio, and so on given Jono's interests). Shame there wasn't more information on international, non-English community considerations too. Still, some great ideas and insight into setting up and managing communities that I will leverage (watch out for the results on this blog, later in 2011). One section, on collaborative writing really jumped out. It reinforced the whole idea that to successful community initiatives are based on instigators knowing what makes the community tick in the first place. How about this for insight into user profiles for people who write community user assistance (OK then, "doc") and what tools they might use (in this case, we're talking about Jokosher): "Most people who write documentation for open source software projects would fall into the category of power user. They are technology enthusiasts who are not interested in the super-technical avenues of programming, but want to help out. Many of these people have good writing skills and a good knowledge of using the software, so the documentation fit is natural. With Jokosher we wanted to acknowledge this profile of user. As such, instead of focussing on complex text processing tools, we encouraged our documentation contributors to use a wiki." The book is available for free here, and well as being available from usual sources. Eyetracking Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Prentice Another fine book by established experts. I have some field experience of eyetracking studies myself --in the user assistance for enterprise applications space--though Jakob and Kara concentrate on websites for their research here. I would caution how much about websites transfers easily to the applications space, especially enterprise applications, as claimed in the book too. However, Jakob and Kara do make the case very well that understanding design goals (for example, productivity improvement in the case of applications) and the context of the software use is critical. Executing a study using eyetracking technology requires that you know what you want to test, can set up realistic tasks for testing by representative testers, and then analyze the results. Be precise, as lots of data will be generated (I think the authors underplay the effort in analyzing data too). What I found disappointing was the lack of emphasis on eyetracking as only part of the usability solution. It's really for fine-tuning designs in my opinion, and should be used after other design reviews. I also wasn't that crazy about the level of disengagement between the qualitative and quantitative side of this kind of testing that the book indicated. I think it is useful to have testers verbalize their thoughts and for test engineers to prompt, intervene, or guide as necessary. More on cultural or international aspects to usability testing might have been included too (websites are available to everyone). To conclude, I enjoyed the book, took on board some key takeaways about methodologies and found the recommendations sensible and easy to follow (for example about Forms layouts). Applying enterprise applications requirements such as those relating to user profiles, design goals, and overall context of use in conjunction with what's in this book would be the way to go here. It also made me think of how interesting it would be to compare eyetracking findings between website and enterprise applications usage.

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• Managing User & Role Security with Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  With the advent of SQL Developer v3.0, users have had access to some powerful database administration features. Version 3.1 introduced more powerful features such as an interface to Data Pump and RMAN. Today I want to talk about some very simple but frequently ran tasks that SQL Developer can assist with, like: identifying privs granted to users managing role privs assigning new roles and privs to users & roles Before getting started, you’ll need a connection to the database with the proper privileges. The common ROLE used to accomplish this is the ‘DBA‘ role. Curious as to what the DBA role is actually comprised of? Let’s find out! Open the DBA Console First make sure you’re connected to the database you want to manage security on with a privileged administrator account. Then open the View menu and select ‘DBA.’ Accessing the DBA panel ‘Create’ a Connection Click on the green ‘+’ button in the DBA panel. It will ask you to choose a previously defined SQL Developer connection. Defining a DBA connection in Oracle SQL Developer Once connected you will see a tree list of DBA features you can start interacting with. Expand the ‘Security’ Tree Node As you click on an object in the DBA panel, the ‘viewer’ will open on the right-hand-side, just like you are accustomed to seeing when clicking on a table or stored procedure. Accessing the DBA role If I’m a newly hired Oracle DBA, the first thing I might want to do is become very familiar with the DBA role. People will be asking you to grant them this role or a subset of its privileges. Once you see what the role can do, you will become VERY protective of it. My favorite 3-letter 4-letter word is ‘ANY’ and the DBA role is littered with privileges like this: ANY TABLE privs granted to DBA role So if this doesn’t freak you out, then maybe you should re-consider your career path. Or in other words, don’t be granting this role to ANYONE you don’t completely trust to take care of your database. If I’m just assigned a new database to manage, the first thing I might want to look at is just WHO has been assigned the DBA role. SQL Developer makes this easy to ascertain, just click on the ‘User Grantees’ panel. Who has the keys to your car? Making Changes to Roles and Users If you mouse-right-click on a user in the Tree, you can do individual tasks like grant a sys priv or expire an account. But, you can also use the ‘Edit User’ dialog to do a lot of work in one pass. As you click through options in these dialogs, it will build the ‘ALTER USER’ script in the SQL panel, which can then be executed or copied to the worksheet or to your .SQL file to be ran at your discretion. A Few Clicks vs a Lot of Typing These dialogs won’t make you a DBA, but if you’re pressed for time and you’re already in SQL Developer, they can sure help you make up for lost time in just a few clicks!

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• How do I fix my resolution after Directx install through Steam?

  - by Justin

  I'm a bit long-winded so see bottom for quick version and specs. Friendly Hello: Hello all on these askUbuntu pages, I just recently built my own computer and decided to switch to Ubuntu for the extra coolness. I've been learning a lot through all this, and mostly been trying to figure out issues on my own (read: Google searches). However, I couldn't seem to find others with this problem so I've come here for help. Detailed Recount: So I just used WINE and WINETRICKS to install Steam. All went well and it worked. Then I went to trying a game out. I remembered that Orcs Must Die! worked from http://www.steamgamesonlinux.com/ so I tried that out. After selecting to download it, that's when the problem occurred. The screen suddenly zoomed in!!! I think it's the resolution right? Half the screen is cut off and I can't see parts of the right side of windows. My theory is that this is due to Direct X being installed through Steam, as Steam automatically installed it as I chose to download the game. It didn't even ask me to install Direct X or not ): It all happened so fast. This all being said, the game works fine! It looks a little strange, as if the resolution was off, but it plays just fine. What I did so far: Restarted my computer. Didn't work -_- Researched Steam installing DirectX on Ubuntu then messing up resolution and couldn't really find anything. Researched uninstalling DirectX from Ubuntu but only found uninstalling DirectX after having been installed with Wine, not through Steam. Got mad and ate my feelings. Tried "xrandr -s 0" but it didn't do anything. Ran xrandr alone and terminal showed this: Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 640 x 480, maximum 16384 x 16384 DVI-I-0 connected 640x480+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 640x480 59.9*+ 320x240 120.1 DVI-I-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DP-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DVI-D-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) About now I was mad so I played Odin's Sphere then took a nap. Back to it! I entered the following: xrandr --output DVI-I-0 --mode 1024x768 But I was met with this message: xrandr: cannot find mode 1024x768 I get the same messages for 800x600, 1400x1050, and seemingly any other combination of numbers. I then tried Going into System Settings then Displays, then playing around in there. My Resolution is set to 640x480 and there are no other options for me to choose from. Rotation has Normal, Clockwise, Counter Clockwise, and 180 Degrees. It's set to Normal and I haven't messed with that. Launcher Placement has Unknown and All Displays as its two options. It's set to Unknown, but moving it to All Displays doesn't seem to do anything. Finally, when I click Detect Displays, nothing seems to happen. Quick Version: Linux noob. Steam installed with Wine and Winetricks. Steam downloaded and installed game + DirectX. Resolution messed up now (I think; pretty sure), can't fix it, very annoying, no idea what's going on, halp! Specs: Ubuntu Version 12.04 Wine Version 1.4.1 Have not changed any settings in Wine Using Winetricks Graphics Card: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4361#sp Drivers: Proprietary (Installing those were a LOT of fun) Also let it be known that I have a DVI to VGA cord running from my Graphics card to my monitor. If any more information is needed I am ready to report. Thank You: Thanks a lot for your help and all the work you do to support noob ubuntuers like me (:

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• SharePoint OCR image files indexing

  Introduction This article describes how to setup indexing of the image files (including TIFF, PDF, JPEG, BMP...) using OCR technology. The indexing described below utilizes Microsoft IFilter technology and as such is not specific to SharePoint, but can be used with any product that uses Microsoft indexing: Microsoft Search, Desktop search, SQL Server search, and through the plug-ins with Google desktop search. I however use it with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003. For those other products, the registration may need to be slightly different. Background  One of the projects I was working on required a storage of old documents scanned into PDF files. Then there was a separate team of people responsible for providing a tags for a search engine so those image documents could be found. The whole process was clumsy, labor intensive, and error prone. That was what started me on my exploration path. OCR The first search I fired was for the Open Source OCR products. Pretty quickly, I narrowed it down to TESSERACT (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/). Tesseract is an orphaned brain child of HP that worked on it from 1985 to 1995. Then it was moved to the Open Source, and now if I understand it correctly, Google is working on it. With credentials like that, it's no wonder that Tesseract scores one of the highest marks on OCR recognition and accuracy. After downloading and struggling just a bit, I got Tesseract to work. The struggling part was that the home page claims that its base input format is a TIFF file. May be my TIFFs were bad, but I was able to get it to work only for BMP files. Image files conversion So now that I have an OCR that can convert BMP files into text, how do I get text out of the image PDF files? One more search, and I settled down on ImageMagic (http://www.imagemagick.org/). This is another wonderful Open Source utility that can convert any file into image. It did work out of the box, converting any TIFF files into bitmaps, but to get PDF files converted, it requires a GhostScript (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe). Dealing with text PDFs With that utility installed, I was cooking - I can convert any file (in particular PDF and TIFF) into bitmap, and then I can extract the text out of the bitmap. The only consideration was to somehow treat PDF files containing text differently - after all, OCR is very computation intensive and somewhat error prone even with perfect image quality and resolution. So another quick search, and I have a PDFTOTEXT (ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip) - thank God for Open Source! With these guys, I can pull text out of PDF in an eye blink. However, I would get nothing for pure image PDFs, but I already have a solution for that! Batch process It took another 15 minutes to setup a batch script to automate the process: Check the file extension If file is a PDF file try to extract text out of it if there is more than certain amount of text in the file - done! if there is no text, convert first page into bitmap run OCR on the bitmap For any other file type, convert file into bitmap Run OCR on the bitmap Once you unzip the attached project, check out the bin\OCR.BAT file. It will create a temporary file in the directory where your source file is with the same name + the '.txt' extension.Continue span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• Rendering Linear Gradients using the HTML5 Canvas

  - by dwahlin

  Related HTML5 Canvas Posts: Getting Started with the HTML5 Canvas Rendering Text with the HTML5 Canvas Creating a Line Chart using the HTML5 Canvas New Pluralsight Course: HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals Gradients are everywhere. They’re used to enhance toolbars or buttons and help add additional flare to a web page when used appropriately. In the past we’ve always had to rely on images to render gradients which works well, but isn’t necessarily the most efficient (although 1 pixel wide images do work well). CSS3 provides a great way to render gradients in modern browsers (see http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor for a nice online gradient generator tool) but it’s not the only option. If you’re working with charts, games, multimedia or other HTML5 Canvas applications you can also use gradients and render them on the client-side without relying on images. In this post I’ll introduce how to use linear gradients and discuss the different functions that can be used to create them.   Creating Linear Gradients Linear gradients can be created using the 2D context’s createLinearGradient function. The function takes the starting x,y coordinates and ending x,y coordinates of the gradient:   createLinearGradient(x1, y1, x2, y2);   By changing the start and end coordinates you can control the direction that the gradient renders. For example, adding the following coordinates causes the gradient to render from left to right since the y value stays at 0 for both points while the x value changes from 0 to 200. var lgrad = ctx.createLinearGradient(0, 0, 200, 0); Here’s an example of how changing the coordinates affects the gradient direction:   Once a linear gradient object has been created you can set color stops using the addColorStop() function. It takes the location where the color should appear in the gradient with 0 being the beginning and 1 being at the end (0.5 would be in the middle) as well as the color to display in the gradient. lgrad.addColorStop(0, 'white'); lgrad.addColorStop(1, 'gray');   An example of combining createLinearGradient() with addColorStop() is shown next:   Using createLinearGradient() var canvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas'); var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d'); var lgrad = ctx.createLinearGradient(0, 0, 200, 0); lgrad.addColorStop(0, 'white'); lgrad.addColorStop(1, 'gray'); ctx.fillStyle = lgrad; ctx.fillRect(0, 0, 200, 200); ctx.strokeRect(0, 0, 200, 200); This code renders a white to gray gradient as shown next: A live example of using createLinearGradient() is shown next. Click the Result tab to see the code in action.   In the next post on the HTML5 Canvas I’ll take a look at radial gradients and how they can be used. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about the HTML5 Canvas and how it can be used in your Web or Windows 8 applications, check out my HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals course from Pluralsight. It has over 4 1/2 hours of canvas goodness packed in it.

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• How SQL Server 2014 impacts Red Gate’s SQL Compare

  - by Michelle Taylor

  SQL Compare 10.7 successfully connects to SQL Server 2014, but it doesn’t yet cover the SQL Server 2014 features which would require us to make major changes to SQL Compare to support. In this post I’m going to talk about the SQL Server 2014 features we’ve already begun supporting, and which ones we’re working on for the next release of SQL Compare (v11). From SQL Compare’s perspective, the new memory-optimized table functionality (some might know it as ‘Hekaton’) has been the most important change. It can’t be described as its own object type, but the new functionality is split across two existing object types (three if you count indexes), as it also comes with native stored procedures and inline indexes. Along with connectivity support, the SQL Compare team has already implemented the first part of the puzzle – inline specification of indexes. These are essential for memory-optimized tables because it’s not possible to alter the memory optimized table’s structure, and so indexes can’t be added after the fact without dropping the table. Books Online  shows this in more detail in the table_index and column_index clauses of http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174979(v=sql.120).aspx. SQL Compare 10.7 currently supports reading the new inline index specification from script folders and source control repositories, and will write out inline indexes where it’s necessary to do so (i.e. in UDDTs or when attempting to write projects compatible with the SSDT database project format). However, memory-optimized tables themselves are not yet supported in 10.7. The team is actively working on making them available in the v11 release with full support later in the year, and in a beta version before that. Fortunately, SQL Compare already has some ways of handling tables that have to be dropped and created rather than altered, which are being adapted to handle this new kind of table. Because it’s one of the largest new database engine features, there’s an equally large Books Online section on memory-optimized tables, but for us the most important parts of the documentation are the normal table features that are changed or unsupported and the new syntax found in the T-SQL reference pages. We are treating SQL Compare’s support of Natively Compiled Stored Procedures as a separate unit of work, which will be available in a subsequent beta and also feed into the v11 release. This new type of stored procedure is designed to work with memory-optimized tables to maintain the performance improvements gained by them – but you can still also access memory-optimized tables from normal stored procedures and ad-hoc queries. To us, they’re essentially a limited-syntax stored procedure with a few extra options in the create statement, embodied in the updated CREATE PROCEDURE documentation and with the detailed limitations. They should be easier to handle than memory-optimized tables simply because the handling of stored procedures is less sensitive to dropping the object than the handling of tables. However, both share an incompatibility with DDL triggers and Event Notifications which mean we’ll need to temporarily disable these during the specific deployment operations that involve them – don’t worry, we’ll supply a warning if this is the case so that you can check your auditing arrangements can handle the situation. There are also a handful of other improvements in SQL Server 2014 which affect SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare that are not connected to memory optimized tables. The largest of these are the improvements to columnstore indexes, with the capability to create clustered columnstore indexes and update columnstore tables through them – for more detail, take a look at the new syntax reference. There’s also a new index option for better compression of columnstores (COLUMNSTORE_ARCHIVE) and a new statistics option for incremental per-partition statistics, plus the 90 compatibility level is being retired. We’re planning to finish up these small clean-up features last, and be ready to release SQL Compare 11 with full SQL 2014 support early in Q3 this year. For a more thorough overview of what’s new in SQL Server 2014, Books Online’s What’s New section is a good place to start (although almost all the changes in this version are in the Database Engine).

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• Dude, what’s up with POP Forums vNext?

  - by Jeff

  Yeah, it has been awhile. I posted v9.2 back in January, about five months ago. That’s a real change from the release pace I had there for awhile. Let me explain what’s going on. First off, in the interim, I re-launched CoasterBuzz, which required a lot of my attention for about two of those months. That’s a good thing though, because that site is just about the best test bed I could ask for. The other thing is that I committed to make the next version use ASP.NET MVC 4, which is now at the RC stage. I didn’t think much about when they’d hit their RTW point, but RC is good enough for me. To that end, there is enough change in the next version that I recently decided to make it a major version upgrade, and finish up the loose ends and science projects to make it whole. Here’s what’s in store… Mobile views: I sat on this or a long time. Originally, I was going to use jQuery Mobile, and waited and waited for a new release, but in the end, decided against using it. Sometimes buttons would unexplainably not work, I felt like I was fighting it at times, and the CSS just felt too heavy. I rolled my own mobile sugar at a fraction of the size, and I think you’ll find it easy to modify. And it’s Metro-y, of course! Re-do of background services: A number of things run in the background, and I did quite a bit of “reimagining” of that code. It’s the weirdness of running services in a Web site context, because so many folks can’t run a bona fide service on their host’s box. The biggest change here is that these service no longer start up by default. You’ll need to call a new method from global.asax called PopForumsActivation.StartServices(). This is also a precursor to running the app in a Web farm (new data layer and caching is the second part of that). I learned about this the hard way when I had three apps using the forum library code but only one was actually the forum. The services were all running three times as often with race conditions and hits on the same data. That was particularly bad for e-mail. CSS clean up: It’s still not ideal, but it’s getting better. That’s one of those things that comes with integrating to a real site… you discover all of the dumb things you did. The mobile CSS is particularly easier to live with. Bug fixes: There are a whole lot of them. Most were minor, but it’s feeling pretty solid now. So that’s where I am. I’m going to call it v10.0, and I’m going to really put forth some effort toward finishing the mobile experience and getting through the remaining bugs. The roadmap beyond that will likely not be feature oriented, but rather work on some other things, like making it run in Azure, perhaps using SQL CE, a better install experience, etc. As usual, I’ll post the latest here. Stay tuned!

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• Best Practices for Handing over Legacy Code

  - by PersonalNexus

  In a couple of months a colleague will be moving on to a new project and I will be inheriting one of his projects. To prepare, I have already ordered Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code. But this books as well as most questions on legacy code I found so far are concerned with the case of inheriting code as-is. But in this case I actually have access to the original developer and we do have some time for an orderly hand-over. Some background on the piece of code I will be inheriting: It's functioning: There are no known bugs, but as performance requirements keep going up, some optimizations will become necessary in the not too distant future. Undocumented: There is pretty much zero documentation at the method and class level. What the code is supposed to do at a higher level, though, is well-understood, because I have been writing against its API (as a black-box) for years. Only higher-level integration tests: There are only integration tests testing proper interaction with other components via the API (again, black-box). Very low-level, optimized for speed: Because this code is central to an entire system of applications, a lot of it has been optimized several times over the years and is extremely low-level (one part has its own memory manager for certain structs/records). Concurrent and lock-free: While I am very familiar with concurrent and lock-free programming and have actually contributed a few pieces to this code, this adds another layer of complexity. Large codebase: This particular project is more than ten thousand lines of code, so there is no way I will be able to have everything explained to me. Written in Delphi: I'm just going to put this out there, although I don't believe the language to be germane to the question, as I believe this type of problem to be language-agnostic. I was wondering how the time until his departure would best be spent. Here are a couple of ideas: Get everything to build on my machine: Even though everything should be checked into source code control, who hasn't forgotten to check in a file once in a while, so this should probably be the first order of business. More tests: While I would like more class-level unit tests so that when I will be making changes, any bugs I introduce can be caught early on, the code as it is now is not testable (huge classes, long methods, too many mutual dependencies). What to document: I think for starters it would be best to focus documentation on those areas in the code that would otherwise be difficult to understand e.g. because of their low-level/highly optimized nature. I am afraid there are a couple of things in there that might look ugly and in need of refactoring/rewriting, but are actually optimizations that have been out in there for a good reason that I might miss (cf. Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I) How to document: I think some class diagrams of the architecture and sequence diagrams of critical functions accompanied by some prose would be best. Who to document: I was wondering what would be better, to have him write the documentation or have him explain it to me, so I can write the documentation. I am afraid, that things that are obvious to him but not me would otherwise not be covered properly. Refactoring using pair-programming: This might not be possible to do due to time constraints, but maybe I could refactor some of his code to make it more maintainable while he was still around to provide input on why things are the way they are. Please comment on and add to this. Since there isn't enough time to do all of this, I am particularly interested in how you would prioritize.

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• Four New Java Champions

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Four luminaries in the Java community have been selected as new Java Champions. The are Agnes Crepet, Lars Vogel, Yara Senger and Martijn Verburg. They were selected for their technical knowledge, leadership, inspiration, and tireless work for the community. Here is how they rock the Java world: Agnes Crepet Agnes Crepet (France) is a passionate technologist with over 11 years of software engineering experience, especially in the Java technologies, as a Developer, Architect, Consultant and Trainer. She has been using Java since 1999, implementing multiple kinds of applications (from 20 days to 10000 men days) for different business fields (banking, retail, and pharmacy). Currently she is a Java EE Architect for a French pharmaceutical company, the homeopathy world leader. She is also the co-founder, with other passionate Java developers, of a software company named Ninja Squad, dedicated to Software Craftsmanship. Agnes is the leader of two Java User Groups (JUG), the Lyon JUG Duchess France and the founder of the Mix-IT Conferenceand theCast-IT Podcast, two projects about Java and Agile Development. She speaks at Java and JUG conferences around the world and regularly writes articles about the Java Ecosystem for the French print Developer magazine Programmez! and for the Duchess Blog. Follow Agnes @agnes_crepet. Lars Vogel Lars Vogel (Germany) is the founder and CEO of the vogella GmbH and works as Java, Eclipse and Android consultant, trainer and book author. He is a regular speaker at international conferences, such as EclipseCon, Devoxx, Droidcon and O'Reilly's Android Open. With more than one million visitors per month, his website vogella.com is one of the central sources for Java, Eclipse and Android programming information. Lars is committer in the Eclipse project and received in 2010 the "Eclipse Top Contributor Award" and 2012 the "Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award." Follow Lars on Twitter @vogella. Yara Senger Yara Senger (Brazil) has been a tireless Java activist in Brazil for many years. She is President of SouJava and she is an alternate representative of the group on the JCP Executive Committee. Yara has led SouJava in many initiatives, from technical events to social activities. She is co-founder and director of GlobalCode, which trains developers throughout Brazil.  Last year, she was recipient of the Duke Choice's Award, for the JHome embedded environment.  Yara is also an active speaker, giving presentations in many countries, including JavaOne SF, JavaOne Latin Ameria, JavaOne India, JFokus, and JUGs throughout Brazil. Yara is editor of InfoQ Brasil and also frequently posts at http://blog.globalcode.com.br/search/label/Yara. Follow Yara @YaraSenger. Martijn Verburg Martijn Verburg (UK) is the CTO of jClarity (a Java/JVM performance cloud tooling start-up) and has over 12 years experience as a Java/JVM technology professional and OSS mentor in a variety of organisations from start-ups to large enterprises. He is the co-leader of the London Java Community (~2800 developers) and leads the global effort for the Java User Group "Adopt a JSR" and "Adopt OpenJDK" programmes. These programmes encourage day to day Java developer involvement with OpenJDK, Java standards (JSRs), an important relationship for keeping the Java ecosystem relevant to the 9 million Java developers out there today. As a leading expert on technical team optimisation, his talks and presentations are in high demand by major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon) where you'll often find him challenging the industry status quo via his alter ego "The Diabolical Developer." You can read more in the OTN ariticle "Challenging the Diabolical Developer: A Conversation with JavaOne Rock Star Martijn Verburg." Follow Martijn @karianna. The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. Congratulations to these new Java Champions!

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• The New Social Developer Community: a Q&A

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our last blog, we introduced the opportunities that lie ahead for social developers as social applications reach across every aspect and function of the enterprise. Leading the upcoming JavaOne Social Developer Program October 2 at the San Francisco Hilton is Roland Smart, VP of Social Marketing at Oracle. I got to ask Roland a few of the questions an existing or budding social developer might want to know as social extends beyond interacting with friends and marketing and into the enterprise. Why is it smart for developers to specialize as social developers? What opportunities lie in the immediate future that’s making this a critical, in-demand position? Social has changed the way we interact with brands and with each other across the web. As we acclimate to a new social paradigm we also look to extend its benefits into new areas of our lives. The workplace is a logical next step, and we're starting to see social interactions more and more in this context. But unlocking the value of social interactions requires technical expertise and knowledge of developing social apps that tap into the social graph. Developers focused on integrating social experiences into enterprise applications must be familiar with popular social APIs and must understand how to build enterprise social graphs of their own. These developers are part of an emerging community of social developers and are key to socially enabling the enterprise. Facebook rebranded their Preferred Developer Consultant Group (PDC) and the Preferred Marketing Developers (PMD) to underscore the fact developers are required inside marketing organizations to unlock the full potential of their platform. While this trend is starting on the marketing side with marketing developers, this is just an extension of the social developer concept that will ultimately drive social across the enterprise. What are some of the various ways social will be making its way into every area of enterprise organizations? How will it be utilized and what kinds of applications are going to be needed to facilitate and maximize these changes? Check out Oracle’s vision for the social-enabled enterprise. It’s a high-level overview of how social will impact across the enterprise. For example: HR can leverage social in recruiting and retentionSales can leverage social as a prospecting toolMarketing can use social to gain market insightCustomer support can use social to leverage community support to improve customer satisfaction while reducing service costOperations can leverage social improve systems That’s only the beginning. Once sleeves get rolled up and social developers and innovators get to work, still more social functions will no doubt emerge. What makes Java one of, if not the most viable platform on which to build these new enterprise social applications? Java is certainly one of the best platforms on which to build social experiences because there’s such a large existing community of Java developers. This means you can affordably recruit talent, and it's possible to effectively solicit advice from the community through various means, including our new Social Developer Community. Beyond that, there are already some great proof points Java is the best platform for creating social experiences at scale. Consider LinkedIn and Twitter. Tell us more about the benefits of collaboration and more about what the Oracle Social Developer Community is. What opportunities does that offer up and what are some of the ways developers can actively participate in and benefit from that community? Much has been written about the overall benefits of collaborating with other developers. Those include an opportunity to introduce yourself to the community of social developers, foster a reputation, establish an expertise, contribute to the advancement of the space, get feedback, experiment with the latest concepts, and gain inspiration. In short, collaboration is a tool that must be applied properly within a framework to get the most value out of it. The OSDC is a place where social developers can congregate to discuss the opportunities/challenges of building social integrations into their applications. What “needs” will this community have? We don't know yet. But we wanted to create a forum where we can engage and understand what social developers are thinking about, excited about, struggling with, etc. The OSDL can then step in if we can help remove barriers and add value in a serious and committed way so Oracle can help drive practice development.

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• upgraded "Compiz' and "Unity", now no Unity 3D on screen

  - by user18432

  Today when I logged in to my Ubuntu 12.04, the update manager told me of some upgrades. Compiz and Unity were in those upgrades. After I installed the upgrades, I can no longer get the Unity panel on the left side of screen or the systray at the top of screen. I now have to run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity 2D. My laptop is a HP Pavilion dv9000 with Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 video. I tried to run "unity --reset" but it says there are serious issues with compiz. I have cut & pasted the read out from the terminal below. [09:35:02] xxxxxxx@L01U1204:~$ unity --reset unity-panel-service: no process found Checking if settings need to be migrated ...no Checking if internal files need to be migrated ...no Backend : gconf Integration : true Profile : unity Adding plugins Initializing core options...done compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x2e00004 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x580005a compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x3600006 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x3200255 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x1600002 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x1400002 Initializing composite options...done Initializing opengl options...done Initializing decor options...done Initializing vpswitch options...done Initializing snap options...done Initializing mousepoll options...done Initializing resize options...done Initializing place options...done Initializing move options...done Initializing wall options...done Initializing grid options...done I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/home/brwright/.compiz/session/10afaca1703486b216133648409481824100000130110002" Initializing session options...done Initializing gnomecompat options...done Initializing animation options...done Initializing fade options...done Initializing unitymtgrabhandles options...done Initializing workarounds options...done Initializing scale options...done compiz (expo) - Warn: failed to bind image to texture Initializing expo options...done Initializing ezoom options...done compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin '/usr/lib/compiz/libunityshell.so' : /usr/lib/compiz/libunityshell.so: undefined symbol: _ZNK5unity4dash10Controller6windowEv compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'unityshell' compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000090! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000093! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000096! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000099! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x700009c! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x700009f! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. Initializing annotate options...done Initializing blur options...done Initializing clone options...done Initializing colorfilter options...done Initializing commands options...done Initializing cube options...done Initializing imgjpeg options...done Initializing kdecompat options...done Initializing mag options...done Initializing neg options...done Initializing obs options...done Initializing opacify options...done Initializing put options...done Initializing resizeinfo options...done Initializing ring options...done Initializing rotate options...done Initializing scaleaddon options...done Initializing screenshot options...done Initializing shift options...done Initializing staticswitcher options...done Initializing switcher options...done Initializing thumbnail options...done Initializing unityshell options...done Initializing water options...done Initializing winrules options...done Initializing wobbly options...done Setting Update "main_menu_key" Setting Update "run_key" Starting gtk-window-decorator As you can see the terminal never comes back to the CI prompt. I must do a control C to get to the CI prompt, but then the OS is frozen. I have to reboot and run Unity 2D in able to do anything on my laptop. I hope I have explained this enough and provided some useful info. I am at a loss to understand what the problem is, or what exactly what is causing the problem. Is it Unity or Compiz? Can anyone help?

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• Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 3)

  - by Sadequl Hussain

  Continuing from Part 2 of the Database Migration Checklist series: Step 10: Full-text catalogs and full-text indexing This is one area of SQL Server where people do not seem to take notice unless something goes wrong. Full-text functionality is a specialised area in database application development and is not usually implemented in your everyday OLTP systems. Nevertheless, if you are migrating a database that uses full-text indexing on one or more tables, you need to be aware a few points. First of all, SQL Server 2005 now allows full-text catalog files to be restored or attached along with the rest of the database. However, after migration, if you are unable to look at the properties of any full-text catalogs, you are probably better off dropping and recreating it. You may also get the following error messages along the way: Msg 9954, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 The Full-Text Service (msftesql) is disabled. The system administrator must enable this service. This basically means full text service is not running (disabled or stopped) in the destination instance. You will need to start it from the Configuration Manager. Similarly, if you get the following message, you will also need to drop and recreate the catalog and populate it. Msg 7624, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Full-text catalog ‘catalog_name‘ is in an unusable state. Drop and re-create this full-text catalog. A full population of full-text indexes can be a time and resource intensive operation. Obviously you will want to schedule it for low usage hours if the database is restored in an existing production server. Also, bear in mind that any scheduled job that existed in the source server for populating the full text catalog (e.g. nightly process for incremental update) will need to be re-created in the destination. Step 11: Database collation considerations Another sticky area to consider during a migration is the collation setting. Ideally you would want to restore or attach the database in a SQL Server instance with the same collation. Although not used commonly, SQL Server allows you to change a database’s collation by using the ALTER DATABASE command: ALTER DATABASE database_name COLLATE collation_name You should not be using this command for no reason as it can get really dangerous.  When you change the database collation, it does not change the collation of the existing user table columns.  However the columns of every new table, every new UDT and subsequently created variables or parameters in code will use the new setting. The collation of every char, nchar, varchar, nvarchar, text or ntext field of the system tables will also be changed. Stored procedure and function parameters will be changed to the new collation and finally, every character-based system data type and user defined data types will also be affected. And the change may not be successful either if there are dependent objects involved. You may get one or multiple messages like the following: Cannot ALTER ‘object_name‘ because it is being referenced by object ‘dependent_object_name‘. That is why it is important to test and check for collation related issues. Collation also affects queries that use comparisons of character-based data.  If errors arise due to two sides of a comparison being in different collation orders, the COLLATE keyword can be used to cast one side to the same collation as the other. Continues…

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• Instant Rename and Rename Refactoring

  - by Petr

  During the last weeks I have got  a few questions about rename refactoring and some users also complain to me that the refactoring in NetBeans 6.x was much faster. So I would like to explain the situation. For some people, who don't know, Instant Rename action and Rename Refactoring  can look like one action. But it's not true, even if  both actions use the same shortcut (CTRL + R). NetBeans 6.x contained only Instant Rename action (speaking about PHP support), which we can mark as very simple rename refactoring through one file. From NetBeans 7.0 the Instant Rename action works only in "non public" context. It means that this action is used for fast renaming variables that has local context like inside a method, or for renaming private methods and fields that can not be used outside of the scope, where they are declared. From user point of view these two action can be simply recognized. When is after CTRL+R called Instant Rename action, then the identifier is surrounded with rectangle and you can rename it directly in the file. It's fast and simple, also the usages of this identifier are renamed in the same time as you write. The picture below shows Instant Rename action for $message identifier, that is visible only in the print_test method and due this after CTRL+R is called Instant Rename. In NetBeans 7.0, there was added Rename Refactoring that is called for public identifiers. It means for identifiers that could be used in other files. If you press CTRL+R shortcut when the caret is inside $hello identifier from the picture above, NetBeans recognizes that $hello is declared / used in a global context and calls the Rename Refactoring that brings a dialog to change the name of the identifier. From this dialog you have to preview suggested changes, through pressing Preview button and then execute the refactoring through Do Refactoring button. Yes, it's more complicated from user point of view than Instant Rename, but in Rename Refactoring NetBeans can change more files at once. It should be  the developer responsibility to decide whether the suggested changes are right and the refactoring can be executed or in some files original name should be kept. Someone can argue that he doesn't use $hello variable in any other file so Instant Rename could be used in such case. Yes it's true, but in such case NetBeans has to know all usages of all identifiers and keep this informations up to date during editing a file. I'm sure that this is not possible due to the performance problems, mainly for big projects. So the usages are computed after pressing the Preview button. And why is the Refactor button always disabled in the Rename dialog and user has to always go through the preview phase? NetBeans has API and SPI for implementing refactoring actions and this dialog is a part of this infrastructure. If you rename an identifier for example in Java, the Refactor buttons is enabled, but Java is strongly type language and you can be almost in 99% sure that the IDE will suggest the right results. In PHP as a dynamic language, we can not be sure, what NetBeans finds is only a "guess". This is why NetBeans pushes developers to preview the changes for PHP rename. I hope that I have explain it clearly. I'm open to any discussion. What I have described above is situation in NetBeans 7.0, 7.0.1 and probably it will be also in NetBeans 7.1, because there is no plan to change it. Please write your opinion here.

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• Using progress dialog in Visual Studio extensions

  - by Utkarsh Shigihalli

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/onlyutkarsh/archive/2014/05/23/using-progress-dialog-in-visual-studio-extensions.aspxAs a Visual Studio extension developer you are required to keep the aesthetics of Visual Studio in tact when you integrate your extension with Visual Studio. Your extension looks odd when you try to use windows controls and dialogs in your extensions. Visual Studio SDK exposes many interfaces so that your extension looks as integrated with Visual Studio as possible. When your extension is performing a long running task, you have many options to notify the progress to the user. One such option is through Visual Studio status bar. I have previously blogged about displaying progress through Visual Studio status bar. In this blog post I am going to highlight another way using IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface. One thing to note is, as the IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface name suggests it is a dialog hence user cannot perform any action when the dialog is being shown. So Visual Studio seems responsive to user, even when a task is being performed. Visual Studio itself makes use of this interface heavily. One example is when you are loading a solution (.sln) with lot of projects Visual Studio displays dialog implemented by this interface (screenshot below). So the first step is to get the instance of IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface using IServiceProvider interface. var dialogFactory = _serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsThreadedWaitDialogFactory)) as IVsThreadedWaitDialogFactory; IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 dialog = null; if (dialogFactory != null) { dialogFactory.CreateInstance(out dialog); } So if your have the package initialized properly out object dialog will be not null and would contain the instance of IVsThreadedWaitDialog2 interface. Once the instance is got, you call the different methods to manage the dialog. I will cover 3 methods StartWaitDialog, EndWaitDialog and HasCanceled in this blog post. You show the progress dialog as below. if (dialog != null && dialog.StartWaitDialog( "Threaded Wait Dialog", "VS is Busy", "Progress text", null, "Waiting status bar text", 0, false, true) == VSConstants.S_OK) { Thread.Sleep(4000); } As you can see from the method syntax it is very similar to standard windows message box. If you pass true to the 7th parameter to StartWaitDialog method, you will also see a cancel button allowing user to cancel the running task. You can react when user cancels the task as below. bool isCancelled; dialog.HasCanceled(out isCancelled); if (isCancelled) { MessageBox.Show("Cancelled"); } Finally, you can close the dialog when you complete the task running as below. int usercancel; dialog.EndWaitDialog(out usercancel); To help you quickly experience the above code, I have created a sample. It is available for download from GitHub. The sample creates a tool window with two buttons to demo the above explained scenarios. The tool window can be accessed by clicking View –> Other Windows -> ProgressDialogDemo Window

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• ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source

  - by ScottGu

  Microsoft has made the source code of ASP.NET MVC available under an open source license since the first V1 release. We’ve also integrated a number of great open source technologies into the product, and now ship jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, jQuery Validation, Modernizr.js, NuGet, Knockout.js and JSON.NET as part of it. I’m very excited to announce today that we will also release the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor) under an open source license (Apache 2.0), and that we will increase the development transparency of all three projects by hosting their code repositories on CodePlex (using the new Git support announced last week). Doing so will enable a more open development model where everyone in the community will be able to engage and provide feedback on code checkins, bug-fixes, new feature development, and build and test the products on a daily basis using the most up-to-date version of the source code and tests. We will also for the first time allow developers outside of Microsoft to submit patches and code contributions that the Microsoft development team will review for potential inclusion in the products. We announced a similar open development approach with the Windows Azure SDK last December, and have found it to be a great way to build an even tighter feedback loop with developers – and ultimately deliver even better products as a result. Very importantly - ASP.NET MVC, Web API and Razor will continue to be fully supported Microsoft products that ship both standalone as well as part of Visual Studio (the same as they do today). They will also continue to be staffed by the same Microsoft developers that build them today (in fact, we have more Microsoft developers working on the ASP.NET team now than ever before). Our goal with today’s announcement is to increase the feedback loop on the products even more, and allow us to deliver even better products.  We are really excited about the improvements this will bring. Learn More You can now browse, sync and build the source tree of ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor on the http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com web-site.  The Git repository on the site is the live RC milestone development tree that the team has been working on the last several weeks, and the tree contains both the runtime sources + tests, and is buildable and testable by anyone.  Because the binaries produced are bin-deployable, this allows you to compile your own builds and try product updates out as soon as they are checked-in. You can also now contribute directly to the development of the products by reviewing and sending feedback on code checkins, submitting bugs and helping us verify fixes as they are checked in, suggesting and giving feedback on new features as they are implemented, as well as by submitting code fixes or code contributions of your own. Note that all code submissions will be rigorously reviewed and tested by the ASP.NET MVC Team, and only those that meet an extremely high bar for both quality and design/roadmap appropriateness will be merged into the source. Summary All of us on the team are really excited about today’s announcement – it has been something we’ve been working toward for many years.  The tighter feedback loop is going to enable us to build even better products, and take ASP.NET to the next level in terms of innovation and customer focus. Thanks, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu

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• Functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

  - by Giorgio

  This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming is getting a lot of attention. I have only used OOP languages for my work (C++ and Java) but I am trying to learn some FP in my free time because I find it very interesting. So, I started learning Haskell three years ago and Scala last summer. I plan to learn some SML and Caml as well, and to brush up my (little) knowledge of Scheme. Well, a lot of plans (too ambitious?) but I hope I will find the time to learn at least the basics of FP during the next few years. What is important for me is how functional programming works and how / whether I can use it for some real projects. I have already developed small tools in Haskell. In spite of my strong interest for FP, I find it difficult to understand why functional programming constructs are being added to languages like C#, Java, C++, and so on. As a developer interested in FP, I find it more natural to use, say, Scala or Haskell, instead of waiting for the next FP feature to be added to my favourite non-FP language. In other words, why would I want to have only some FP in my originally non-FP language instead of looking for a language that has a better support for FP? For example, why should I be interested to have lambdas in Java if I can switch to Scala where I have much more FP concepts and access all the Java libraries anyway? Similarly: why do some FP in C# instead of using F# (to my knowledge, C# and F# can work together)? Java was designed to be OO. Fine. I can do OOP in Java (and I would like to keep using Java in that way). Scala was designed to support OOP + FP. Fine: I can use a mix of OOP and FP in Scala. Haskell was designed for FP: I can do FP in Haskell. If I need to tune the performance of a particular module, I can interface Haskell with some external routines in C. But why would I want to do OOP with just some basic FP in Java? So, my main point is: why are non-functional programming languages being extended with some functional concept? Shouldn't it be more comfortable (interesting, exciting, productive) to program in a language that has been designed from the very beginning to be functional or multi-paradigm? Don't different programming paradigms integrate better in a language that was designed for it than in a language in which one paradigm was only added later? The first explanation I could think of is that, since FP is a new concept (it isn't new at all, but it is new for many developers), it needs to be introduced gradually. However, I remember my switch from imperative to OOP: when I started to program in C++ (coming from Pascal and C) I really had to rethink the way in which I was coding, and to do it pretty fast. It was not gradual. So, this does not seem to be a good explanation to me. Also, I asked myself if my impression is just plainly wrong due to lack of knowledge. E.g., do C# and C++11 support FP as extensively as, say, Scala or Caml do? In this case, my question would be simply non-existent. Or can it be that many non-FP programmers are not really interested in using functional programming, but they find it practically convenient to adopt certain FP-idioms in their non-FP language? IMPORTANT NOTE Just in case (because I have seen several language wars on this site): I mentioned the languages I know better, this question is in no way meant to start comparisons between different programming languages to decide which is better / worse. Also, I am not interested in a comparison of OOP versus FP (pros and cons). The point I am interested in is to understand why FP is being introduced one bit at a time into existing languages that were not designed for it even though there exist languages that were / are specifically designed to support FP.

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