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• “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on GDSE and also on the regular Stackoverflow site, and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? (* With the exception of Flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with Flash, but I'm worried that Flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.) For simple & short games the Newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "OK, I'm going to download and play that"?

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• Skewed: a rotating camera in a simple CPU-based voxel raycaster/raytracer

  - by voxelizr

  TL;DR -- in my first simple software voxel raycaster, I cannot get camera rotations to work, seemingly correct matrices notwithstanding. The result is skewed: like a flat rendering, correctly rotated, however distorted and without depth. (While axis-aligned ie. unrotated, depth and parallax are as expected.) I'm trying to write a simple voxel raycaster as a learning exercise. This is purely CPU based for now until I figure out how things work exactly -- fow now, OpenGL is just (ab)used to blit the generated bitmap to the screen as often as possible. Now I have gotten to the point where a perspective-projection camera can move through the world and I can render (mostly, minus some artifacts that need investigation) perspective-correct 3-dimensional views of the "world", which is basically empty but contains a voxel cube of the Stanford Bunny. So I have a camera that I can move up and down, strafe left and right and "walk forward/backward" -- all axis-aligned so far, no camera rotations. Herein lies my problem. Screenshot #1: correct depth when the camera is still strictly axis-aligned, ie. un-rotated. Now I have for a few days been trying to get rotation to work. The basic logic and theory behind matrices and 3D rotations, in theory, is very clear to me. Yet I have only ever achieved a "2.5 rendering" when the camera rotates... fish-eyey, bit like in Google Streetview: even though I have a volumetric world representation, it seems --no matter what I try-- like I would first create a rendering from the "front view", then rotate that flat rendering according to camera rotation. Needless to say, I'm by now aware that rotating rays is not particularly necessary and error-prone. Still, in my most recent setup, with the most simplified raycast ray-position-and-direction algorithm possible, my rotation still produces the same fish-eyey flat-render-rotated style looks: Screenshot #2: camera "rotated to the right by 39 degrees" -- note how the blue-shaded left-hand side of the cube from screen #2 is not visible in this rotation, yet by now "it really should"! Now of course I'm aware of this: in a simple axis-aligned-no-rotation-setup like I had in the beginning, the ray simply traverses in small steps the positive z-direction, diverging to the left or right and top or bottom only depending on pixel position and projection matrix. As I "rotate the camera to the right or left" -- ie I rotate it around the Y-axis -- those very steps should be simply transformed by the proper rotation matrix, right? So for forward-traversal the Z-step gets a bit smaller the more the cam rotates, offset by an "increase" in the X-step. Yet for the pixel-position-based horizontal+vertical-divergence, increasing fractions of the x-step need to be "added" to the z-step. Somehow, none of my many matrices that I experimented with, nor my experiments with matrix-less hardcoded verbose sin/cos calculations really get this part right. Here's my basic per-ray pre-traversal algorithm -- syntax in Go, but take it as pseudocode: fx and fy: pixel positions x and y rayPos: vec3 for the ray starting position in world-space (calculated as below) rayDir: vec3 for the xyz-steps to be added to rayPos in each step during ray traversal rayStep: a temporary vec3 camPos: vec3 for the camera position in world space camRad: vec3 for camera rotation in radians pmat: typical perspective projection matrix The algorithm / pseudocode: // 1: rayPos is for now "this pixel, as a vector on the view plane in 3d, at The Origin" rayPos.X, rayPos.Y, rayPos.Z = ((fx / width) - 0.5), ((fy / height) - 0.5), 0 // 2: rotate around Y axis depending on cam rotation. No prob since view plane still at Origin 0,0,0 rayPos.MultMat(num.NewDmat4RotationY(camRad.Y)) // 3: a temp vec3. planeDist is -0.15 or some such -- fov-based dist of view plane from eye and also the non-normalized, "in axis-aligned world" traversal step size "forward into the screen" rayStep.X, rayStep.Y, rayStep.Z = 0, 0, planeDist // 4: rotate this too -- 0,zstep should become some meaningful xzstep,xzstep rayStep.MultMat(num.NewDmat4RotationY(CamRad.Y)) // set up direction vector from still-origin-based-ray-position-off-rotated-view-plane plus rotated-zstep-vector rayDir.X, rayDir.Y, rayDir.Z = -rayPos.X - me.rayStep.X, -rayPos.Y, rayPos.Z + rayStep.Z // perspective projection rayDir.Normalize() rayDir.MultMat(pmat) // before traversal, the ray starting position has to be transformed from origin-relative to campos-relative rayPos.Add(camPos) I'm skipping the traversal and sampling parts -- as per screens #1 through #3, those are "basically mostly correct" (though not pretty) -- when axis-aligned / unrotated.

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• AppKata - Enter the next level of programming exercises

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Doing CodeKatas is all the rage lately. That´s great since widely accepted exercises are important to further the art. They provide a means of communication across platforms and allow to compare results which is part of any deliberate practice. But CodeKatas suffer from their size. They are intentionally small, so they can be done again and again. Repetition helps to build habit and to dig deeper. Over time ever new nuances of the problem or one´s approach become visible. On the other hand, though, their small size limits the methods, techniques, technologies that can be applied. To improve your TDD skills doing CodeKatas might be enough. But what about other skills? Developing on a software in a team, designing larger pieces of software, iteratively releasing software… all this and more is kinda hard to train using the tiny CodeKata problems. That´s why I´d like to present here another kind of kata I call Application Kata (or just AppKata). AppKatas are larger programming problems. They require the development of “whole” applications, i.e. not just one class or method, but bunches of classes accessible through a user interface. Also AppKata problems always are split into iterations. To get the most out of them, just look at the requirements of one iteration at a time. This way you´re closer to reality where requirements evolve in unexpected ways. So if you´re looking for more of a challenge for your software development skills, check out these AppKatas – or invent your own. AppKatas are platform independent like CodeKatas. Use whatever programming language and IDE you like. Also use whatever approach to software development you like. Just be sensitive to how easy it is to evolve your code across iterations. Reflect on what went well and what not. Compare your solutions with others. Or – for even more challenge – go for the “Coding Carousel” (see below). CSV Viewer An application to view CSV files. Sounds easy, but watch out! Requirements sometimes drastically change if the customer is happy with what you delivered. Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Iteration 4 Iteration 5 (to come) Questionnaire If you like GUI programming, this AppKata might be for you. It´s about an app to let people fill out questionnaires. Also this problem might be interestin for you, if you´re into DDD. Iteration 1 Iteration 2 (to come) Iteration 3 (to come) Iteration 4 (to come) Tic Tac Toe For developers who like game programming. Although Tic Tac Toe is a trivial game, this AppKata poses some interesting infrastructure challenges. The GUI, however, stays simple; leave any 3D ambitions at home ;-) Iteration 1 Iteration 2 (to come) Iteration 3 (to come) Iteration 4 (to come) Iteration 5 (to come) Coding Carousel There are many ways you can do AppKatas. Work on them alone or in a team, pitch several devs against each other in an AppKata contest – or go around in a Coding Carousel. For the Coding Carousel you need at least 3 dev teams (regardless of size). All teams work on the same iteration at the same time. But here´s the trick: After each iteration the teams swap their code. Whatever they did for iteration n will be the basis for changes another team has to apply in iteration n+1. The code is going around the teams like in a carousel. I promise you, that´s gonna be fun! :-)

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• Why are my Unity procedural animations jerky?

  - by Phoenix Perry

  I'm working in Unity and getting some crazy weird motion behavior. I have a plane and I'm moving it. It's ever so slightly getting about 1 pixel bigger and smaller. It looks like the it's kind of getting squeezed sideways by a pixel. I'm moving a plane by cos and sin so it will spin on the x and z axes. If the planes are moving at Time.time, everything is fine. However, if I put in slower speed multiplier, I get an amazingly weird jerk in my animation. I get it with or without the lerp. How do I fix it? I want it to move very slowly. Is there some sort of invisible grid in unity? Some sort of minimum motion per frame? I put a visual sample of the behavior here. Here's the relevant code: public void spin() { for (int i = 0; i < numPlanes; i++ ) { GameObject g = planes[i] as GameObject; //alt method //currentRotation += speed * Time.deltaTime * 100; //rotation.eulerAngles = new Vector3(0, currentRotation, 0); //g.transform.position = rotation * rotationRadius; //sine method g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.x = g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().radiusX * (Mathf.Cos((Time.time*speed) + g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().startAngle)); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.z = g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().radius * Mathf.Sin((Time.time*speed) + g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().startAngle); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.y = g.GetComponent<Transform>().position.y; ////offset g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.z += 20; g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp.x = Mathf.Lerp(g.transform.position.x,g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.x, .5f); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp.z = Mathf.Lerp(g.transform.position.z, g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().pos.z, .5f); g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp.y = g.GetComponent<Transform>().position.y; g.transform.position = g.GetComponent<PlaneSetup>().posLerp; } Invoke("spin",0.0f); } The full code is on github. There is literally nothing else going on. I've turned off all other game objects so it's only the 40 planes with a texture2D shader. I removed it from Invoke and tried it in Update -- still happens. With a set frame rate or not, the same problem occurs. Tested it in Fixed Update. Same issue. The script on the individual plane doesn't even have an update function in it. The data on it could functionally live in a struct. I'm getting between 90 and 123 fps. Going to investigate and test further. I put this in an invoke function to see if I could get around it just occurring in update. There are no physics on these shapes. It's a straight procedural animation. Limited it to 1 plane - still happens. Thoughts? Removed the shader - still happening.

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• Ubuntu server spontaneous reboot

  - by user1941407

  I have got two ubuntu 12.04 servers(xeon e3). Sometimes(several days) each server spontaneously reboots. HDDs and other hardware are ok. Which logfile can help find a reason of the problem? UPDATED. hardware: xeon e3 processor, intel server motherboard, 32gb ddr3 ecc, mdadm mirror hdd raid for system, mdadm ssd raid for database(postgres). Both servers have similar (not identical) components. Smart is OK. It seems that the problem is in the software. Python process and database are running on this servers. Syslog (time of reboot): Aug 23 13:42:23 xeon hddtemp[1411]: /dev/sdc: WDC WD15NPVT-00Z2TT0: 34 C Aug 23 13:42:23 xeon hddtemp[1411]: /dev/sdd: WDC WD15NPVT-00Z2TT0: 34 C Aug 23 13:43:24 xeon hddtemp[1411]: /dev/sdc: WDC WD15NPVT-00Z2TT0: 34 C Aug 23 13:43:24 xeon hddtemp[1411]: /dev/sdd: WDC WD15NPVT-00Z2TT0: 34 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Chip: acpitz-virtual-0 Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Adapter: Virtual device Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: temp1: 27.8 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: temp2: 29.8 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Chip: coretemp-isa-0000 Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Adapter: ISA adapter Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Physical id 0: 37.0 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Core 0: 37.0 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Core 1: 37.0 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Core 2: 37.0 C Aug 23 13:44:14 xeon sensord: Core 3: 37.0 C Aug 23 13:44:24 xeon hddtemp[1411]: /dev/sdc: WDC WD15NPVT-00Z2TT0: 34 C Aug 23 13:44:24 xeon hddtemp[1411]: /dev/sdd: WDC WD15NPVT-00Z2TT0: 34 C Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.6" x-pid="582" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103 Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101 Aug 23 13:47:00 xeon rsyslogd-2039: Could not open output pipe '/dev/xconsole' [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ] Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Linux version 3.11.0-26-generic (buildd@komainu) (gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) ) #45~precise1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 04:02:35 UTC 2014 (Ubuntu 3.11.0-26.45~precise1-generic 3.11.10.12) Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.11.0-26-generic root=UUID=0daa7f53-6c74-47d2-873e-ebd339cd39b0 ro splash quiet vt.handoff=7 Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] KERNEL supported cpus: Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Intel GenuineIntel Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] AMD AuthenticAMD Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] Centaur CentaurHauls Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] e820: BIOS-provided physical RAM map: Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000000000-0x000000000009bbff] usable Aug 23 13:47:01 xeon kernel: [ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x000000000009bc00-0x000000000009ffff] reserved Dmseg - nothing strange.

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• Oracle Cloud Hiring Event at Oracle in Redwood on November 9th

  - by user769227

  Wow, 24 hours to go until Cloud Hire 2012 at Oracle! Friday is going to be a great day for many looking to make a life and career changing move. In case you haven’t heard, Oracle is hosting Cloud Hire 2012 this Friday, November 9, at the Oracle Conference Center on our World Wide Headquarters campus in Redwood Shores. This is a one-of-a-kind event to be sure and we are still registering online! We are aggressively expanding our Cloud Development and Product Management organizations to meet to ever-growing demand for Oracle Cloud. And, from this event alone, we are hoping to hire 25+ Developers, Inbound and Outbound Product Managers, Technical Leaders and QA Engineers across several Oracle Cloud groups, including: · Data and Insight Services: Big Data as a Service/Business Directory · Cloud Infrastructure · Application Marketplace · Cloud Portal · Product Management and Marketing: Outbound/Inbound · Testing/Quality Assurance · Cloud Social Platform: Analytics, Media, Big Data, Text Analytics, High Performance Search, · Cloud Social Platform - Social Relationship Management: Mobile Development/Social Network Integrations Why attend this event? Just Google Larry Ellison’s 2012 OpenWorld keynote address and you will learn why! Oracle Cloud is growing every day and we are scaling, adding new products and revolutionizing and improving all areas of the Oracle Cloud. There is no company that can come close to the comprehensive product lineup, services, capabilities and global reach and delivery of Oracle’s Cloud. This why it is a great time to work for Oracle: where consistent, stable financial growth rules and high impact technological advances are occurring every day. If you are serious about managing an upward, expansive path in your career, while staying on the leading edge and making big career impacts, you should join Oracle. Whether you want to design and develop or manage Social, Infrastructure or Applications in the Cloud, you can do it all at Oracle. Whether you’re a Technical Leader, Developer, Architect or Product Manager/Strategist, we are hiring now! Come check us out on Friday, November 9 in-person and see why Oracle Cloud is the place to take your career! RSVP here: and Learn more about the hiring teams in attendance here. Here are just some of the big things happening on Friday, November 9: · 830-3pm: Registration/Refreshments, Oracle Conference Center, 350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA (free parking) · 9am – 3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos include: Social Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Monitoring, Insight / View, KPI Bundles, Business Directory, Virtualization, Messaging, Provisioning, Cloud Portal · 10:30am – Speaker: Gopalan Arun, Vice President, Oracle Cloud Development Bio: Arun has been with Oracle for 18 years+. He is a testament to the stability and career growth that you can achieve working for Oracle. Arun began as a Developer and ascended through several product organizations into key leadership roles. Over his 18 years at Oracle, he has built and shipped many Database and Middleware products. Arun is one of the founding members of the Oracle Cloud and currently leads the development of many of the core infrastructure and developer-facing services of the Oracle Cloud. Topic: Oracle Cloud for the Developer · 1pm – Speaker: Naresh Revanuru, Lead Architect, Oracle Cloud Bio: Naresh is currently leading Java, Storage and Compute services for Oracle Cloud. Naresh also helps drive decisions for broad based Cloud topics that affect multiple services. http://www.linkedin.com/in/nareshrevanuru Topic: Oracle Cloud Architectural Overview and Challenges to Solve · 1pm-3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos

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• Revisioning the CeBIT 2011

  - by hechtsuppe

  Hey guys, I am living in the CeBIT's hometown, the beautiful city Hanover. So I am visiting this exhibition since 2002 and I've seen a lot of changes during all this time. But this time, it was the most boring fair I've ever seen. Lets start with the first halls: "The same procedure as every year"- directly behind the entrance are the exhibitioners from far east (China, Taiwan...). In the past, they've shown a lot of nice toys. But this time, they got very serious, the only great gimmick was the motorcycle suitcase for the iPad, I watched the presentation until I reminded myself that I am not owning an iPad and these cases weren't suitable for my BMW motorcycle. So I started looking for the business stuff (I was there for business). I walked deeper in the exhibition area: During the way to the business halls, I came across a hall where I heard a big bass- the gamer's hall I think so I made a quick getaway from there. I saw a lot of teenagers with gaming bags on thier shoulders and I was really confused. I thought 'Damn it is tuesday 11:00 am, the trade fair is opened for public on saturday, why they are here and not at school?'. So the german schools seem to be too easy for students. At the time I was a pupil I visited the CeBIT on saturday! At the business halls: I visited IBM's booth but there were only guys looking like penguins and I weared a white chemise. So nobody was interested in talking to me. At the coffeebar I met a very nice guy from Bangladesh I think he was round about 25, but he told me that he was the first time in germany and he thought that germans are still nazis. I laughed at him and went to DELL. I was really really really interested in client solutions from DELL because I want to get away from our current client manufacturer. At the DELL booth I became recognized and a really nice guy told me where to use which client products. But there were too many people for trying the notebooks so the DELL guy asked for my business card. But I am still waiting for information, dear 'DELL dude'. I went to the Microsoft booth for informing myself about new IT trends. There were nothig new, only a few presentations about the 'new' Windows Live, Windows Phone 7 and 'the allmighty cloud'. But there was a very small presentation corner with the title 'geeks corner'. A guy inside the 'geeks corner' started Visual Studio 2010, I was really agog for the presentation. But then he started talking about Windows Phone 7 and how to program. He began with drag'n drop a textbox and a button on the form. He wrote really basic code and explained the functionality of a textbox- then I stood up and left the room. At the end: Before leaving the fairground, I've visited a few small booths and the big anti-virus program companies. But there was nothing new, I was really disappointed  this year. I've seen only ten exhibition babes and the rest of the week I stood ~3 hours in traffic jams. But I really love the flair in the whole town during this exhibition. The people in the city railways, which are really confused and the people in the pubs. Cheers Vince

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• Technology vs. Antiquated Methods

  - by AreYouSerious

  So Here I am talking with my Program lead, about technology, and how while my father is the VP of a major company, he still doesn't have a blackberry, or a smart phone. and I think it's funny. Most people would say it's a generational thing. That because he's older, he dosen't accept technology, and that's why. I have trouble swallowing that because this is the same man, who bought a satellite radio for his car, and made sure that the printer for the house was networked so that his and my mom's laptop could print wirelessly from the living room through their wireless network. I think it has to do with more with necessity, and partially with finical responsibility. My father is very financially conciencious. Think about it yourself. you pay for internet at your home. You have internet access at your office. But if you get a smart phone you're going to pay almost the same amount just for that access. A lot of people take it as just another fixed cost... I'm one of those. I don't even think about it, as I check my facebook from the bus, train, or even while sitting in traffic... The convience of having connection everywhere outweigh the financial responsible person screaming at in the back of my mind. However This conversation lead us to another venue of discussion.... what happens when the power dies. if you left your charger at home, or you phone or navi just stops working... are you going to be able to continue on as you did when it was working... let take the navi as an example... if your navi stops working, how many of you know how to use a map, and navigate? can you even find where you are on a map using the cross streets that your stopped at? This is a skill that unfortunatelly is overlooked these days in the child rearing process. Most people don't see the value, while some others can't do it themselves, so how can they teach their offspring? Take another example.... what if your phone gets lost... or stolen, or you drive over it? do you have the numbers in their memorized? are they recorded somewhere? I know that if it weren't for google sync I wouldn't have them backed up... not sufficiently. And what good does that do if you're in timbuckto and your phone dies, think you can get on the internet to look up those numbers? Don't get me wrong. I'm the first to see the value in technology, and am willing to pay the price to not have to wait for prices to come down. I will pay extra to have that newest thing right now. but let me tell you what.... I know that should I ever procreate it will be a requirement for my offspring (children) to learn how to do something manually before I'll let them use technology. Food for thought?? Let everyone else know what you think.... just sayin'

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• 256 Worker Role 3D Rendering Demo is now a Lab on my Azure Course

  - by Alan Smith

  Ever since I came up with the crazy idea of creating an Azure application that would spin up 256 worker roles (please vote if you like it ) to render a 3D animation created using the Kinect depth camera I have been trying to think of something useful to do with it. I have also been busy working on developing training materials for a Windows Azure course that I will be delivering through a training partner in Stockholm, and for customers wanting to learn Windows Azure. I hit on the idea of combining the render demo and a course lab and creating a lab where the students would create and deploy their own mini render farms, which would participate in a single render job, consisting of 2,000 frames. The architecture of the solution is shown below. As students would be creating and deploying their own applications, I thought it would be fun to introduce some competitiveness into the lab. In the 256 worker role demo I capture the rendering statistics for each role, so it was fairly simple to include the students name in these statistics. This allowed the process monitor application to capture the number of frames each student had rendered and display a high-score table. When I demoed the application I deployed one instance that started rendering a frame every few minutes, and the challenge for the students was to deploy and scale their applications, and then overtake my single role instance by the end of the lab time. I had the process monitor running on the projector during the lab so the class could see the progress of their deployments, and how they were performing against my implementation and their classmates. When I tested the lab for the first time in Oslo last week it was a great success, the students were keen to be the first to build and deploy their solution and then watch the frames appear. As the students mostly had MSDN suspicions they were able to scale to the full 20 worker role instances and before long we had over 100 worker roles working on the animation. There were, however, a few issues who the couple of issues caused by the competitive nature of the lab. The first student to scale the application to 20 instances would render the most frames and win; there was no way for others to catch up. Also, as they were competing against each other, there was no incentive to help others on the course get their application up and running. I have now re-written the lab to divide the student into teams that will compete to render the most frames. This means that if one developer on the team can deploy and scale quickly, the other team still has a chance to catch up. It also means that if a student finishes quickly and puts their team in the lead they will have an incentive to help the other developers on their team get up and running. As I was using “Sharks with Lasers” for a lot of my demos, and reserved the sharkswithfreakinlasers namespaces for some of the Azure services (well somebody had to do it), the students came up with some creative alternatives, like “Camels with Cannons” and “Honey Badgers with Homing Missiles”. That gave me the idea for the teams having to choose a creative name involving animals and weapons. The team rendering architecture diagram is shown below.   Render Challenge Rules In order to ensure fair play a number of rules are imposed on the lab. ·         The class will be divided into teams, each team choses a name. ·         The team name must consist of a ferocious animal combined with a hazardous weapon. ·         Teams can allocate as many worker roles as they can muster to the render job. ·         Frame processing statistics and rendered frames will be vigilantly monitored; any cheating, tampering, and other foul play will result in penalties. The screenshot below shows an example of the team render farm in action, Badgers with Bombs have taken a lead over Camels with Cannons, and both are  leaving the Sharks with Lasers standing. If you are interested in attending a scheduled delivery of my Windows Azure or Windows Azure Service bus courses, or would like on-site training, more details are here.

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• Language Club

  - by Ben Griswold

  We started a language club at work this week.  Thus far, we have a collective interest in a number of languages: Python, Ruby, F#, Erlang, Objective-C, Scala, Clojure, Haskell and Go. There are more but these 9 received the most votes. During the first few meetings we are going to determine which language we should tackle first. To help make our selection, each member will provide a quick overview of their favored language by answering the following set of questions: Why are you interested in learning “your” language(s). (There’s lots of work, I’m an MS shill, It’s hip and  fun, etc) What type of language is it?  (OO, dynamic, functional, procedural, declarative, etc) What types of problems is your language best suited to solve?  (Algorithms over big data, rapid application development, modeling, merely academic, etc) Can you provide examples of where/how it is being used?  If it isn’t being used, why not?  (Erlang was invented at Ericsson to provide an extremely fault tolerant, concurrent system.) Quick history – Who created/sponsored the language?  When was it created?  Is it currently active? Does the language have hardware support (an attempt was made at one point to create processor instruction sets specific to Prolog), or can it run as an interpreted language inside another language (like Ruby in the JVM)? Are there facilities for programs written in this language to communicate with other languages?  How does this affect its utility? Does the language have a IDE tool support?  (Think Eclipse or Visual Studio) How well is the language supported in terms of books, community and documentation? What’s the number one things which differentiates the language from others?  (i.e. Why is it cool?) How is the language applicability to us as consultants?  What would the impact be of using the language in terms of cost, maintainability, personnel costs, etc.? What’s the number one things which differentiates the language from others?  (i.e. Why is it cool?) This should provide an decent introduction into nearly a dozen languages and give us enough context to decide which single language deserves our undivided attention for the weeks to come.  Stay tuned for the winner…

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• Would using a self-signed SSL certificate be appropriate in this scenario?

  - by Kevin Y

  Now I realize this topic has been discussed in a few questions before (specifically this one), but I'm still a little confused about the implications of using a self-signed certificate, and how I would be affected by doing so in this case. After reading various sources, I'm still a little confused about the exact details of using one. The biggest problem with a self-signed certificate, is a man-in-the-middle attack. Even if you are 100% sure that you are on the correct website and you completely trust the site (your email server for example), you could have someone intercept the connection and present you with their own self-signed certificate. You would think that you are using a secure connection with your email server but you are really using a secure connection to an attacker's email server. – SSL Shopper So somebody could switch out my self-signed certificate with their own, and I wouldn't be able to detect it? The way this site phrases it, it makes it sound worse to install a self-signed certificate than to leave your site without a certificate at all. Self-signed certificates cannot (by nature) be revoked, which may allow an attacker who has already gained access to monitor and inject data into a connection to spoof an identity if a private key has been compromised. CAs on the other hand have the ability to revoke a compromised certificate if alerted, which prevents its further use. - Wikipedia Does this mean that the only way someone could switch out their own certificate for mine is for them to find out the private key? I suppose this is more secure, but I'm still slightly confused about what exactly results from using a self-signed certificate. Is the only issue that obnoxious security warning that pops up in your browser when directed to the site, or is there more to it? Now in my case, I want to add the an SSL certificate to a minuscule Wordpress blog I run that I don't expect anyone else will read anytime soon; I mainly started it to get into the habit of blogging, and to learn more about the process of administrating a site (ex. what to do in situations like this one). Whenever I go to the login page and there's an HTTP:// instead of HTTPS://, I cringe a little. Submitting my password feels like I'm shouting my password out loud with hundreds of people listening. I don't plan on adding any other authors to the site, so I am the only person who would ever need to login. This isn't a site I'm trying to get page views from, or one that handles e-commerce or any sensitive info like that, simply my username and password to login with. One of the concerns (that I've gathered so far) of a self-signed certificate is that non-technical users might be scared by the security warning, but this would not be an issue in my case. TL;DR: If scaring visitors away isn't a concern (which it isn't in my case), is it acceptable to use a self-signed certificate for the purpose of encrypting my Wordpress blog's password, or are there added security issues I should be aware of? Essentially, I'm wondering whether adding a self-signed certificate will be safer than leaving my login page the way it is now, or if it adds the potential for more security breaches than leaving it sans-SSL.

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• Do your filesystems have un-owned files ?

  - by darrenm

  As part of our work for integrated compliance reporting in Solaris we plan to provide a check for determining if the system has "un-owned files", ie those which are owned by a uid that does not exist in our configured nameservice.  Tests such as this already exist in the Solaris CIS Benchmark (9.24 Find Un-owned Files and Directories) and other security benchmarks. The obvious method of doing this would be using find(1) with the -nouser flag.  However that requires we bring into memory the metadata for every single file and directory in every local file system we have mounted.  That is probaby not an acceptable thing to do on a production system that has a large amount of storage and it is potentially going to take a long time. Just as I went to bed last night an idea for a much faster way of listing file systems that have un-owned files came to me. I've now implemented it and I'm happy to report it works very well and peforms many orders of magnatude better than using find(1) ever will.   ZFS (since pool version 15) has per user space accounting and quotas.  We can report very quickly and without actually reading any files at all how much space any given user id is using on a ZFS filesystem.  Using that information we can implement a check to very quickly list which filesystems contain un-owned files. First a few caveats because the output data won't be exactly the same as what you get with find but it answers the same basic question.  This only works for ZFS and it will only tell you which filesystems have files owned by unknown users not the actual files.  If you really want to know what the files are (ie to give them an owner) you still have to run find(1).  However it has the huge advantage that it doesn't use find(1) so it won't be dragging the metadata for every single file and directory on the system into memory. It also has the advantage that it can check filesystems that are not mounted currently (which find(1) can't do). It ran in about 4 seconds on a system with 300 ZFS datasets from 2 pools totalling about 3.2T of allocated space, and that includes the uid lookups and output. #!/bin/sh for fs in $(zfs list -H -o name -t filesystem -r rpool) ; do unknowns="" for uid in $(zfs userspace -Hipn -o name,used $fs | cut -f1); do if [ -z "$(getent passwd $uid)" ]; then unknowns="$unknowns$uid " fi done if [ ! -z "$unknowns" ]; then mountpoint=$(zfs list -H -o mountpoint $fs) mounted=$(zfs list -H -o mounted $fs) echo "ZFS File system $fs mounted ($mounted) on $mountpoint \c" echo "has files owned by unknown user ids: $unknowns"; fi done Sample output: ZFS File system rpool/ROOT/solaris-30/var mounted (no) on /var has files owned by unknown user ids: 6435 33667 101 ZFS File system rpool/ROOT/solaris-32/var mounted (yes) on /var has files owned by unknown user ids: 6435 33667ZFS File system builds/bob mounted (yes) on /builds/bob has files owned by unknown user ids: 101 Note that the above might not actually appear exactly like that in any future Solaris product or feature, it is provided just as an example of what you can do with ZFS user space accounting to answer questions like the above.

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• Who Makes a Good Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In general, the best product owners are those that care passionately about the customer of the product.  Note that I didn’t say about the product itself.  Actually, people that only care about the product, generally do not make good product owners.  Products only matter in relationship to their customers.  If a product doesn’t provide value to the customer, then the product has no value, no matter what a person might think of the product, and no matter what cool technologies exist inside of the product. A good product owner is also a good negotiator.  They recognize that many different priorities exist inside of a corporation, but that there can be only one list that developers work from.  A good product owner recognizes that its their job to help others around them prioritize (perhaps with a Product Council), but also understand that they alone have the final say about priorities and are willing to make the tough decisions required.  Deciding the priority between two perfectly valid stories is very difficult, especially when the stories are from two different departments! A good product owner is deeply interested in helping the team be successful.  They don’t seek to control the team, but instead seek to understand what the team can do and then work with the team to get the best product possible for the Customer.  A good product owner is never denigrating to team members, ever.  They recognize that such behavior would damage the trust that needs to be present between team members and product owners and will avoid it at all costs. In general, technical people (i.e. former or current developers) make poor product owners.  In their minds, they can’t separate implementation details from user functionality, so their stories end up sounding like implementation details.  For example, “The user enters their username on the password screen” is something that a technical product owner would write.  The proper wording for that story is “A user supplies the system with their credentials.”  Because technical people think different from the rest of the population, they are generally not a good fit. A good product owner is also a good writer.  Writing good stories demands good writing.  The art of persuasion, descriptiveness and just general good grammar are all required.  A good Product Owner must also be well spoken, since most of what will be conveyed will be conveyed with the spoken word, not just written word. A good product owner is a “People Person.”  They like talking to people and are very patient.  They don’t mind having questions repeated or fielding many questions, because they want to make sure that the ideas they’re conveying are properly understood so the customer gets the best product possible.  They are happy to answer any questions a team member may have and invite feedback and criticism of designs and stories, since they want a good product.  They really have little ego that gets in the way of building a great product. All of these qualities can be hard to find, but if you look close enough, you’ll find the right person in your organization.  Product owners can be found anywhere, not just in upper management.  Some of the best product owners are those that are very close to the customer.  In fact, check your customer support staff.  I’d bet that several great product owners are lurking there. Final note about what makes a good product owner.  You’re probably NOT going to find a good product owner in a manager, especially if they consider themselves a “Manager.”  Product owners don’t manage anything but the backlog, so be especially careful if the person you’re selecting for Product Owner is a manager. Up Next, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• Knowledge Management Feedback

  - by Robert Schweighardt

  Did you know that you can provide feedback on Knowledge Management (KM) articles? It's nice to read a technical article that is well-written, the grammar and spelling are correct, the information is up to date, concise, to the point, easy to understand and it flows from one paragraph to another.  And though we always strive for a well-written article, it doesn't always come out that way. Knowledge Management articles are written by Oracle Support Engineers and we welcome your feedback.  Providing feedback helps to improve Oracle's Knowledge Base.  If you're reading a KM article and you have a comment, please let us know about it.  Maybe it's just to fix a spelling or grammatical error.  Maybe there's a broken link that needs to be fixed.  Maybe it's a suggestion to provide additional information.  Maybe the article contains incorrect information.  Maybe some information in the article is outdated.  Maybe something is not clear in the article.  Whatever it is, we want to hear about it.  We value your input! When you provide feedback it goes directly to the owner of the article.  The owner carefully reviews the comment and decides whether or not to implement it.  Most comments are implemented and we strive to implement them within a week!  For those comments that are not implemented, there is normally a good reason.  It may not be feasible to implement the suggestion or the suggestion may not be correct.  We don't take the decision lightly! So how do you provide feedback? Providing feedback on a KM article depends on whether you're a customer or an Oracle Employee. Customer 1. In the upper right hand corner of the article, click on the little +/- Rate this document icon: Note: The grayed out Comments (0) link will only show a number when there are open comments that are still being evaluated. 2. In the Article Rating window, complete as many of the following optional fields as you like and then click the Send Rating button: Rate the article as Excellent, Good or Poor Specify whether the article helped you or not Specify the ease of finding the article Provide whatever comments you have Employee The interface for Oracle Employees is a little bit different, there are more options. 1. The +/- Rate this document icon is also available to employees and is identical to what the customers have.  Please see Customer section above. 2. The Show document comments link shows all comments that have ever been submitted for the article 3. Employees have an additional way to submit a comment.  Click on the little + Add Comment icon: 4. Fill out the Add Comment fields and click the Add Comment button: We look forward to your feedback!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 29, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 29, 2011Popular Releasespatterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 2.2.0.1: In this version: Custom Icons - now you can change the icons of the bookmarks. By default, whenever an image is added, the icon is automatically changed to a thumbnail of the picture. This can be turned off in the settings (Options... > Settings) Ability to remove items from the 'Recent' category Bugfixes - 'Choose' button in 'Edit Bookmark' now works Another bug fix: another problem in the 'Edit Bookmark' windowMedia Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.Image Converter: Image Converter 0.3: New Features: - English and German support Technical Improvements: - Microsoft All Rules using Code Analysis Planned Features for future release: 1. Unit testing 2. Command line interface 3. Automatic UpdatesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...DotNetNuke® Events: 05.02.01: This release fixes any know bugs from any previous version. Events 05.02.01 will work for any DNN version 5.5.0 and up. Full details on the changes can be found at http://dnnevents.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESAdded validation around category cookie RSS feed was missing an explicit close of the file when writing. Fixed. Added extra security into detail view .ICS Files did not include correct line folding. Fixed Cha...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.33: Add JSParser.ParseExpression method to parse JavaScript expressions rather than source-elements. Add -strict switch (CodeSettings.StrictMode) to force input code to ECMA5 Strict-mode (extra error-checking, "use strict" at top). Fixed bug when MinifyCode setting was set to false but RemoveUnneededCode was left it's default value of true.Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Fixed: Issue with partial thrust Cl...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)NDepend TFS 2010 integration: version 0.5.0 beta 1: Only the activity and the VS plugin are avalaible right now. They basically work. Data types that are logged into tfs reports are subject to change. This is no big deal since data is not yet sent into the warehouse.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...DotNetNuke® FAQ: 05.00.00: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 05.00.00 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. It is the first version which is rewritten in C#. The scope of this update is to fix all known issues and improve user interface. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESManage Categories button text was not localized Edit/Add FAQ Entry: button text was not localized ENHANCEMENTSAdded an option to select the control for category display: Listbox with checkboxes (flat category ...SiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.921.340): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconNew ProjectsAsynk: Asynk is a framework/application that allows existing applications to easily be extended with an offloaded asynchronous worker layer. Asynk is developed using C#.Blob Tower Defense: 3D tower defense game for Windows Phone 7. School project for Brno University of Technology, computer graphics class.Booz: Booz is... An extended version of the boo shell (booish2 to be precise). Offers additional commands like cd, md, ls etc. I hope this shell can be used to take the position of/surpass the native windows shell in the near future.CIMS: a sanction infomation system for sencience and technology of hustCrystalDot - Icon Collection / Pack (LGPL): .Net / Mono freundliche Varainte der Crystal-Icons von Everaldo Icon collection / pack for .NET and Mono designed by Everaldo - KDE style http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/dotetes: dotetes adalah teka teki silang tool dikembangkan dengan bahasa c#Emoe': This Project is a Windows Phone 7.1 application.Equation Inversion: Visual Studion 2008 Add-in for equation inversions.Exploring VMR Features on WEC7: This is the sample application helps you to do alpha blending the bitmap on camera streaming in Windows Embedded Compact 7 using Directshow video Renderer (VMR). It is a VS2008 based smart device project developed on C++. I have explained the sample application in the following blog link. http://www.e-consystems.com/blog/windowsce/?p=759 EzValidation: Custom validation extensions for ASP.NET MVC 3. Includes server and client side model based validation attributes for: -- Equal To -- Not Equal To -- Greater Than -- Greater Than or Equal To -- Less Than -- Less Than or Equal To Supports validating against: -- Another Model Field -- A Specific Value -- Current Date/Yesterday/Tomorrow (for Dates and Strings) Download & Install via NuGet "package-install ezvalidation"Flu.net: Flu.net is a tool that helps you creating your own fluent syntax for .NET Framework applications in a declarative fashion. It is aimed for infrastructures and other open-source projects use.For Chess Endgames: King vs. King Opposition Calculator: You must input the locations of 2 kings on a chessboard, and whose turn it is to move. The calculator will display which king has the opposition, and how it can be used or maintained.GameTrakXNA: This project aims to create a simple library to use the unique GameTrak controller within XNA and Flash.Google Speech Recognition Example: Google Speech Recognition contains a working example of application that uses google speech recognition API. App contains all necessary dlls to record, decode and send your voice request to google service and recieve a text representation of what you've said. It's developed in C#Interval Mandelbrot Explorer: Explore the Mandelbrot set using interval arithmetic.ISD training tasks: ISD training examples and tasksiTunesControlBar: The iTunesControlBar helps user control their iTunes Application while it is minimized. iTunesControlBar resides at the top of the screen, invisible when not used, and allows playback and volume control, library searches and media information without the need to bring up iTunes.iTurtle: A bunch of Powerscripts to automate server management in AD environment.M26WC - Mono 2.6 Wizard Control: Wizard which runs under Mono2.6 A fork of: http://aerowizard.codeplex.com/Microsoft Help Viewer 2: Help Viewer 2 is the help runtime for both Visual Studio 11 help and Windows 8 help. The code in this project will help you use and understand the HV2 runtime API.MONTRASEC: Monitoring Trafficking in human beings and Sexual Exploitation of Children: benchmarking for member state and EU reporting, turning the SIAMSECT templates into a user-friendly interface and reporting tool. MTF.NET Runtime: Managed Task Framework .NET Runtime The MTF.NET runtime software and resulting assemblies are required to run applications built using the Managed Task Framework.NET Professional (Visual Studio 2010 extension) software design editor. The MTF.NET team are committed to continuously improving the core MTF.NET runtime and ensuring it is always available free and fully transparent. Pandoras Box: A greenfield inversion of control project utilising the power and flexibility of expressions and preferring convention over configuration.Pass the Puzzle: Pass the Puzzle is a frantic word-guessing party game. The game displays a few letters, and the players must come up with words containing those letters. But beware: if the timer goes off, you lose! It is based on the folk party game Pass the Parcel and is written in C#.PerCiGal: Percigal is a project for the development of applications for managing your personal media library. It consists in - a windows application to use at home to catalog movies, TV series, cast and books, with the support of the Internet for information retrieval; - a web interface for viewing and cataloging everywhere your media; - an application for smartphones. Project Flying Carpet: Este jogo é um projeto para a cadeira Projeto de Jogos: Motores Jogos do curso de Jogos Digitais da Unisinos.proxy browser: sed leo Latin's Butterfly....Python Multiple Dispatch: Multiple dispatch (AKA multimethods) for Python 3 via a metaclass and type annotations.reDune: ?????????? ???? ? ????? «????????? ? ???????? ???????». ???????? ?? Dune2000 ?? Westwood ? Electronic Arts.Rereadable: Keep page from internet for read it latter.ServStop: ServStop is a .NET application that makes it easy to stop several system services at once. Now you don't have to change startup types or stop them one at a time. It has a simple list-based interface with the ability to save and load lists of user services to stop. Written in C#.SharePoint 2010 Audience Membership Workflow Activity (Full Trust): A simple SharePoint 2010 workflow activity / workflow condition to check whether the user initiating the workflow is a member of a specified audience. Farm-level .wsp solution, written in C#. Once installed, the workflow activity can be used in SharePoint Designer 2010 declarative workflows.SQL Server® to Firebird DB converter: Converts Microsoft SQL Server® database into Firebird database including entire structure and datastegitest: test projectSystem.Threading.Joins: The Joins project provides asynchronous concurrency semantics based on join calculus and modeled after the Microsoft Research C? (C Omega) project.TestAndroidGame: try dev a TestAndroidGametetribricks: block game Topographic Explorer: A project to import, convert, explore, manipulate, and save topographical maps. Looking to use C# and WPF.Trading: Under construction!!!Trombone: Trombone makes it easier for Windows Mobile Professional users to automate status reply through SMS. It's developed in Visual C# 2008.Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group: Repository for source code for the Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group's web site. The Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group is using the Community Kit for SharePoint. This project will house any modifications that are specific to our user group.World of Tanks RU tiny stats collection utilty.: Tiny utility to load players stats for World of Tanks RU server. Results saved to comma separated file.WS-Discovery Proxy: Attempt at creating general purpose WS-Discovery Proxy.Yamaha Tu?n Tr?c: This application is used to manage information for Yamaha Tu?n Tr?c

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• Inappropriate Updates?

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent Simple-talk article by Kathi Kellenberger dissected the fastest SQL solution, submitted by Peter Larsson as part of Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge, to the classic "running total" problem. In its analysis of the code, the article re-ignited a heated debate regarding the techniques that should, and should not, be deemed acceptable in your search for fast SQL code. Peter's code for running total calculation uses a variation of a somewhat contentious technique, sometimes referred to as a "quirky update": SET @Subscribers = Subscribers = @Subscribers + PeopleJoined - PeopleLeft This form of the UPDATE statement, @variable = column = expression, is documented and it allows you to set a variable to the value returned by the expression. Microsoft does not guarantee the order in which rows are updated in this technique because, in relational theory, a table doesn’t have a natural order to its rows and the UPDATE statement has no means of specifying the order. Traditionally, in cases where a specific order is requires, such as for running aggregate calculations, programmers who used the technique have relied on the fact that the UPDATE statement, without the WHERE clause, is executed in the order imposed by the clustered index, or in heap order, if there isn’t one. Peter wasn’t satisfied with this, and so used the ingenious device of assuring the order of the UPDATE by the use of an "ordered CTE", based on an underlying temporary staging table (a heap). However, in either case, the ordering is still not guaranteed and, in addition, would be broken under conditions of parallelism, or partitioning. Many argue, with validity, that this reliance on a given order where none can ever be guaranteed is an abuse of basic relational principles, and so is a bad practice; perhaps even irresponsible. More importantly, Microsoft doesn't wish to support the technique and offers no guarantee that it will always work. If you put it into production and it breaks in a later version, you can't file a bug. As such, many believe that the technique should never be tolerated in a production system, under any circumstances. Is this attitude justified? After all, both forms of the technique, using a clustered index to guarantee the order or using an ordered CTE, have been tested rigorously and are proven to be robust; although not guaranteed by Microsoft, the ordering is reliable, provided none of the conditions that are known to break it are violated. In Peter's particular case, the technique is being applied to a temporary table, where the developer has full control of the data ordering, and indexing, and knows that the table will never be subject to parallelism or partitioning. It might be argued that, in such circumstances, the technique is not really "quirky" at all and to ban it from your systems would server no real purpose other than to deprive yourself of a reliable technique that has uses that extend well beyond the running total calculations. Of course, it is doubly important that such a technique, including its unsupported status and the assumptions that underpin its success, is fully and clearly documented, preferably even when posting it online in a competition or forum post. Ultimately, however, this technique has been available to programmers throughout the time Sybase and SQL Server has existed, and so cannot be lightly cast aside, even if one sympathises with Microsoft for the awkwardness of maintaining an archaic way of doing updates. After all, a Table hint could easily be devised that, if specified in the WITH (<Table_Hint_Limited>) clause, could be used to request the database engine to do the update in the conventional order. Then perhaps everyone would be satisfied. Cheers, Tony.

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• Low level programming - what's in it for me?

  - by back2dos

  For years I have considered digging into what I consider "low level" languages. For me this means C and assembly. However I had no time for this yet, nor has it EVER been neccessary. Now because I don't see any neccessity arising, I feel like I should either just schedule some point in time when I will study the subject or drop the plan forever. My Position For the past 4 years I have focused on "web technologies", which may change, and I am an application developer, which is unlikely to change. In application development, I think usability is the most important thing. You write applications to be "consumed" by users. The more usable those applications are, the more value you have produced. In order to achieve good usability, I believe the following things are viable Good design: Well-thought-out features accessible through a well-thought-out user interface. Correctness: The best design isn't worth anything, if not implemented correctly. Flexibility: An application A should constantly evolve, so that its users need not switch to a different application B, that has new features, that A could implement. Applications addressing the same problem should not differ in features but in philosophy. Performance: Performance contributes to a good user experience. An application is ideally always responsive and performs its tasks reasonably fast (based on their frequency). The value of performance optimization beyond the point where it is noticeable by the user is questionable. I think low level programming is not going to help me with that, except for performance. But writing a whole app in a low level language for the sake of performance is premature optimization to me. My Question What could low level programming teach me, what other languages wouldn't teach me? Am I missing something, or is it just a skill, that is of very little use for application development? Please understand, that I am not questioning the value of C and assembly. It's just that in my everyday life, I am quite happy that all the intricacies of that world are abstracted away and managed for me (mostly by layers written in C/C++ and assembly themselves). I just don't see any concepts, that could be new to me, only details I would have to stuff my head with. So what's in it for me? My Conclusion Thanks to everyone for their answers. I must say, nobody really surprised me, but at least now I am quite sure I will drop this area of interest until any need for it arises. To my understanding, writing assembly these days for processors as they are in use in today's CPUs is not only unneccesarily complicated, but risks to result in poorer runtime performance than a C counterpart. Optimizing by hand is nearly impossible due to OOE, while you do not get all kinds of optimizations a compiler can do automatically. Also, the code is either portable, because it uses a small subset of available commands, or it is optimized, but then it probably works on one architecture only. Writing C is not nearly as neccessary anymore, as it was in the past. If I were to write an application in C, I would just as much use tested and established libraries and frameworks, that would spare me implementing string copy routines, sorting algorithms and other kind of stuff serving as exercise at university. My own code would execute faster at the cost of type safety. I am neither keen on reeinventing the wheel in the course of normal app development, nor trying to debug by looking at core dumps :D I am currently experimenting with languages and interpreters, so if there is anything I would like to publish, I suppose I'd port a working concept to C, although C++ might just as well do the trick. Again, thanks to everyone for your answers and your insight.

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• Blender DirectX exporter to Panda3D

  - by jakebird451

  I have been experimenting with Panda3D lately. I have a character made in Blender with various bones and currently with one animation that I wish to export to a *.x format for Panda3D. My current attempt was to export the model was to first export with bones [Armatures] by checking the "Export Armatures" button in the export menu (file name: char.x). Thanks to the *.x file format, I read the file and it seems to have the same bone structure format as the model (with parenting and matrix positional data). The second export was selecting Animations - Full Animation to provide just the animation (file name: char_idle.x). The models exported just fine. I am not sure about the animation yet, but the file seems to be just fine. This is my code for loading the model into python & Panda3D: self.model = Actor("char.x",{"char_idle.x"}) When I run the program the command line provides a couple of errors, the main errors of interest are: :Actor(warning): char.x is not a character! and ... File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\actor\Actor.py", line 284, in __init__ if (type(anims[anims.keys()[0]])==type({})): AttributeError: 'set' object has no attribute 'keys' The first error is the most interesting to me. The model works if I leave the animation dictionary blank. With no animations loaded the character appears in its un-animated T position, however the actor warning still shows up. The character should include the various bones when I exported the model right? I am not that experienced with blender, I'm just a programmer. So if the problem lies in blender please try to keep that in mind when posting a reply. I'll try my best to keep up. I also tried to print out the bone structure without any animations loaded and it provides a similar error with the line print self.model.listJoints(): File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\actor\Actor.py", line 410, in listJoints Actor.notify.error("no part named: %s" % (partName)) File "C:\Panda3D-1.8.0\direct\directnotify\Notifier.py", line 132, in error raise exception(errorString) StandardError: no part named: modelRoot I really hope it is a simple exporting fix.

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• Windows Phone 8, possible tablets and what the latest update might mean

  - by Roger Hart

  Microsoft have just announced an update to Windows Phone 8. As one of the five, maybe six people who actually bought a WP8 handset I found this interesting. Then I read the blog post about it, and rushed off to write somewhat less than a thousand words about a single picture. The blog post announces an extra column of tiles on the start screen, and support for higher resolutions. If we ignore all the usual flummery about how this will make your life better, that (and the rotation lock) sounds a little like stage setting for tablets. Looking at the preview screenshot, I started to wonder. What it’s called Phablet_5F00_StartScreenProductivity_5F00_01_5F00_072A1240.jpg Pretty conclusive. If you can brand something a “phablet” and sleep at night you’re made of sterner stuff than I am, but that’s beside the point. It’s explicit in the post that Microsoft are expecting a broader range of form factors for WP8, but they stop short of quite calling out tablet size. The extra columns and resolution definitely back that up, so why stop at a 6 inch “phablet”? Sadly, the string of numbers there don’t really look like a Lumia model number – that would be a bit tendentious even for a speculative blog post about a single screenshot. “Productivity” is interesting too. I get into this a bit more below, but this is a pretty clear pitch for a business device. What it looks like Something that would look quite decent on a 7 inch screen, but something a bit too vertical to go toe-to-toe with the Surface. Certainly, it would look a lot better on a large-factor phone than any of the current models. Those tiles are going to get cramped and a bit ugly if the handsets aren’t getting bigger. What’s on it You have a bunch of missed calls, you rarely text, use a stocks app, and your budget spreadsheet and meeting notes are a thumb-reach away. Outlook is your main form of email. You care enough about LinkedIn to not only install its app but give it a huge live tile. There’s no beating about the bush here, the implicit persona is a corporate exec. With Nokia in the bag and Blackberry pushing daisies, that may not be a stupid play. There’s almost certainly a niche there if they can parlay their corporate credentials into filling it before BYOD (which functionally means an iPhone) reaches the late adopters. The really quite slick WP8 Office implementation ought to help here. This is the face they’ve chosen to present, the cultural milieu they’re normalizing for Windows Phone. It’s an iPhone for Serious Business Grown-ups. Could work, I guess. Does it mean anything? Is the latest WP8 update a sign that we can expect to see tablets running Windows Phone rather than WinRT? Well, WinRT tablets haven’t exactly taken off but I’m not quite going to make a leap like that just from a file name and a column of icons. I feel pretty safe, however, conjecturing that Microsoft would like to squeeze a WP8 “phablet” into the palm of every exec who’s ever grumbled about their Blackberry, and this release might get them a bit closer. If it works well incrementing up to larger devices, then that could be a fair hedge against WinRt crashing and burning any harder in the marketplace.

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• The Value of SOA Specialization - Fujitsu

  - by Jürgen Kress

  Thanks for the nice ink The Value of Specialization In my last post  I talked about Fujitsu's achievement in obtaining SOA and other specializations, but I have heard murmurings from other partners about what just is the value? I think Oracle have to do more to advertise the benefits to customers, we need to see customers asking for specialization for it to really work, but Oracle have made great promises about only recommending those partners who are specialized. For us there was another benefit. Oracle was sponsoring the 3rd Annual SOA Symposium in Berlin and invited us as their first specialized partner to take part. There is a great blog about the symposium on the SOA community blog site. This is real commitment from Oracle and we have other marketing opportunities being worked on with Jürgen. This does generate leads so my message to other Oracle Partners is, you need to do this, it is worthwhile.   Fujitsu - First SOA Specialized Partner Globally Just before Oracle Open World I found out that Fujitsu had achieved the first SOA Specialization globally. I think most partners know what the requirements are for Specialization and that in itself is challenging but the bureaucracy around the actual submission is an exercise in tenacity. I won’t go into that now; I have had my dig at Oracle this month, but enough to say the process could be improved. As a platinum partner we needed 5 specializations and we decided to go for SOA first. The reasoning behind this is that our Oracle Practice is known for being applications centric. We have always had an excellent technical capability but no one ever talked about that, it was just part and parcel of an implementation. However today we have just as many bids that are technology lead as there is applications lead, so it seemed a good plan to work on the areas we were not known for. We appointed a capability lead to be responsible for putting the team through the training and testing and Rosemary (Kell) was excellent, she ensured that everyone was on track and that it wasn’t just getting put into the ‘to do list’. In Fujitsu everyone in the Oracle Practice has an objective to achieve the competency tests in their area, so achieving the 2 pre sales, 2 sales and 1 support was no problem at all. We actually had 22 with the support capability proficiency.  The implementation specialist exams are much harder, more like OCP in the database area. We had help from the Oracle SOA Community; Jürgen Kress who runs this in EMEA is really motivational. At the time we started SOA was a beta exam which means you do not get the results immediately but again we put forward more than we needed. Manjit Chopra, Sukhraj Sahota, Emely Patra, Ian Scorrer and Sunny Sidhu all took the exam and eventually got the results they wanted they had passed. Congratulations. Here is Jurgen expalining why specialization is important. After the tests came the submissions where you need to include deals and experience, this was my bit, and persuading Oracle we really deserved the specialization. Finally we got the news we had been awarded the specialization, and a few days later that we were first globally. I am very proud. However there is no rest for the wicked and we plodded on to make the 5 specializations needed for Platinum and now we are working on the new Diamond status and I think SOA will be one of our 5 ‘super specializations’. This is a global Fujitsu initiative and I work closely with my colleague in Germany Jessika Weiss. It was nice to be able to have a press release about this and a comment from Judson Althoff  head of Oracle Alliances. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA,SOA Community,OPN,Oracle,Fujitsu,Debra Lilley,Jürgen Kress,Specialization,SOA Specialization

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• When is your interview?

  - by Rob Farley

  Sometimes it’s tough to evaluate someone – to figure out if you think they’d be worth hiring. These days, since starting LobsterPot Solutions, I have my share of interviews, on both sides of the desk. Sometimes I’m checking out potential staff members; sometimes I’m persuading someone else to get us on board for a project. Regardless of who is on which side of the desk, we’re both checking each other out. The world is not how it was some years ago. I’m pretty sure that every time I walk into a room for an interview, I’ve searched for them online, and they’ve searched for me. I suspect they usually have the easier time finding me, although there are obviously other Rob Farleys in the world. They may have even checked out some of my presentations from conferences, read my blog posts, maybe even heard me tell jokes or sing. I know some people need me to explain who I am, but for the most part, I think they’ve done plenty of research long before I’ve walked in the room. I remember when this was different (as it could be for you still). I remember a time when I dealt with recruitment agents, looking for work. I remember sitting in rooms having been giving a test designed to find out if I knew my stuff or not, and then being pulled into interviews with managers who had to find out if I could communicate effectively. I’d need to explain who I was, what kind of person I was, what my value-system involved, and so on. I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at. (Oh, and in case you hadn’t realised, it’s a T-SQL Tuesday post, this month about interviews.) At TechEd Australia some years ago (either 2009 or 2010 – I forget which), I remember hearing a comment made during the ‘locknote’, the closing session. The presenter described a conversation he’d heard between two girls, discussing a guy that one of them had just started dating. The other girl expressed horror at the fact that her friend had met this guy in person, rather than through an online dating agency. The presenter pointed out that people realise that there’s a certain level of safety provided through the checks that those sites do. I’m not sure I completely trust this, but I’m sure it’s true for people’s technical profiles. If I interview someone, I hope they have a profile. I hope I can look at what they already know. I hope I can get samples of their work, and see how they communicate. I hope I can get a feel for their sense of humour. I hope I already know exactly what kind of person they are – their value system, their beliefs, their passions. Even their grammar. I can work out if the person is a good risk or not from who they are online. If they don’t have an online presence, then I don’t have this information, and the risk is higher. So if you’re interviewing with me, your interview started long before the conversation. I hope it started before I’d ever heard of you. I know the interview in which I’m being assessed started before I even knew there was a product called SQL Server. It’s reflected in what I write. It’s in the way I present. I have spent my life becoming me – so let’s talk! @rob_farley

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• Do we still have a case against the goto statement? [closed]

  - by FredOverflow

  Possible Duplicate: Is it ever worthwhile using goto? In a recent article, Andrew Koenig writes: When asked why goto statements are harmful, most programmers will say something like "because they make programs hard to understand." Press harder, and you may well hear something like "I don't really know, but that's what I was taught." For that reason, I'd like to summarize Dijkstra's arguments. He then shows two program fragments, one without a goto and and one with a goto: if (n < 0) n = 0; Assuming that n is a variable of a built-in numeric type, we know that after this code, n is nonnegative. Suppose we rewrite this fragment: if (n >= 0) goto nonneg; n = 0; nonneg: ; In theory, this rewrite should have the same effect as the original. However, rewriting has changed something important: It has opened the possibility of transferring control to nonneg from anywhere else in the program. I emphasized the part that I don't agree with. Modern languages like C++ do not allow goto to transfer control arbitrarily. Here are two examples: You cannot jump to a label that is defined in a different function. You cannot jump over a variable initialization. Now consider composing your code of tiny functions that adhere to the single responsibility principle: int clamp_to_zero(int n) { if (n >= 0) goto n_is_not_negative: n = 0; n_is_not_negative: return n; } The classic argument against the goto statement is that control could have transferred from anywhere inside your program to the label n_is_not_negative, but this simply is not (and was never) true in C++. If you try it, you will get a compiler error, because labels are scoped. The rest of the program doesn't even see the name n_is_not_negative, so it's just not possible to jump there. This is a static guarantee! Now, I'm not saying that this version is better then the one without the goto, but to make the latter as expressive as the first one, we would at least have to insert a comment, or even better yet, an assertion: int clamp_to_zero(int n) { if (n < 0) n = 0; // n is not negative at this point assert(n >= 0); return n; } Note that you basically get the assertion for free in the goto version, because the condition n >= 0 is already written in line 1, and n = 0; satisfies the condition trivially. But that's just a random observation. It seems to me that "don't use gotos!" is one of those dogmas like "don't use multiple returns!" that stem from a time where the real problem were functions of hundreds or even thousand of lines of code. So, do we still have a case against the goto statement, other than that it is not particularly useful? I haven't written a goto in at least a decade, but it's not like I was running away in terror whenever I encountered one. 1 Ideally, I would like to see a strong and valid argument against gotos that still holds when you adhere to established programming principles for clean code like the SRP. "You can jump anywhere" is not (and has never been) a valid argument in C++, and somehow I don't like teaching stuff that is not true. 1: Also, I have never been able to resurrect even a single velociraptor, no matter how many gotos I tried :(

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• SQL SERVER – Performance Tuning Resolution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by MidnightDBAs. Taking resolutions is such an interesting subject. I think just like records, these are broken way more often. I find this is the funniest thing as we all take resolutions every year but not every year, we can manage to keep them. Well, does it mean we should not take resolutions? In fact I support resolutions. Every year, I take a resolution that I will strive reduce my body weight and I usually manage to keep eating healthy till the end of January. When February begins, I begin to loose focus from my goal and as March starts, the “As usual” eating habits begin. Looking at the positive side, what would happen if every year I do not eat healthy in January, I think that might cause terrible consequences to my health in the long run. So keeping resolutions is a good practise and following them to the extent one can is commendable. Let us come back to the world of SQL Server. What is my resolution for year 2011 for SQL Server? There are many, I am going to list three of very important resolutions that I have taken this new year over here. To understand SQL Server Performance Tuning at a deeper Level I think I am already half way through. I have been being very much busy during any given month doing hands-on performance tuning for at least 12 days on an average. That means, I am doing this activity for almost doing 2 weeks a month. I believe that I have a good understanding of the subject. Note that the word that I have used is “good,” and not “best.” There are often cases when I am stumped, and I have no clue of what to do next. Then, I usually go for my “trial and error” method - whichever method works, I make sure to keep a note on my blog. My goal is that I should never ever go for the trial and error method again to achieve the same solution. I should know the solution right away when I see the problem. I do understand that Performance Tuning can be a strange animal at times and one cannot guess the right step every time. However, aiming a high goal never hurts and I am going to learn more and more in this focused area. Going further from Basic BI understanding I do fairly decent with BI concepts. I know the nbasics of SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, PowerPivot and SharePoint (and few other things MDS, StreamInsight, etc). However, I still consider myself as a beginner. I do not have hands-on experience like many other BI Gurus around. I think I want to take my learning further in this direction. I do not want to be a BI expert as the first step but the goal is to move ahead from basic level towards an advanced level. I am going to start presenting in User Group Sessions and other places on this subject. When I have to prepare new subject for presentations, I think I force myself to learn more. I am committed to learn a bit more in this direction. Learning new features SQL Server 2011 Denali This is new thing from “Microsoft” for all the SQL Geeks. I am eagerly waiting for final product later this year and I am planning to learn it well. I think if I follow my above two goals, I think this goal will be automatically covered. I am eager and excited for this new offering from Microsoft. I guess, these are my resolutions; may be next year about the same time, I must revisit this post and see how much successful I am in following my goal. On a lighter note, I am particularly fan of following cartoon strip (Courtesy: Calvin and Hobbes). I think when we cannot resolve our resolutions, we tend to act like Calvin. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Tech Ed/BI Conference 2010: A Recovering Industry in a Recovering City

  - by andrewbrust

  I tried writing a post for this blog last night, while at the this year’s Microsoft Tech Ed and Business Intelligence conferences, in New Orleans. But I literally fell asleep while writing it.  That’s probably a sign that my readers might have done the same while reading it. Why the writer’s block? This was a very good show for me, but I think I was having trouble figuring out exactly why.  Now that I’m on the flight home, I’m starting to piece it together. One reason, for sure, was that I’ve spent years in both the developer and the BI worlds, and a show that combined the two was really enjoyable for me.  Typically, the subject matter, the attendees, the Microsoft execs and managers, and even the social circles have been separate.  This year’s Tech Ed facilitated a fusion of each of these previously segregated groups.  That was good for me as a speaker; for example, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on PowerPivot (Microsoft’s new self-service BI offering) which was well-attended, and by a large number of non-BI pros.  The fusion was good for me as an attendee too, as Microsoft BI, in the form of a new Pivot Viewer control, made it into the Day 1 keynote, demoed by Microsoft’s key BI champion, Amir Netz.  And it was good for me socially, as I was able to meet with peers in both camps, and at one location. Speaking of meeting with industry colleagues, I did a lot of that at this show.  Probably for the first time ever, I carefully scheduled and conducted a series of meetings with friends and business acquaintances in the developer tools, data visualization, utilities, publishing and training areas of the Microsoft ecosystem.  Beside the time efficiencies in conducting so many meetings, I discovered another benefit. I got a real handle on the tech industry’s economic health. The news here is good.  First of all, 2010 has been a great year for just about everyone I spoke to.  The mood is positive, energy is high, and people are working really hard.  This is, of course, refreshing to see, and it’s a huge relief.  Add to that the fact that this year’s Tech Ed was about 2.5 times larger in headcount than last year’s (based on numbers from unofficial, but reliable, sources), and the economic prognosis seems excellent.  But there’s more to it than that. Here’s the thing: everyone I talked to seems to be working, and succeeding, at changing their business models to adapt to changes in the industry.  Whether it’s the Internet’s impact on publishing and training, the increased importance of the developer audience in South Asia, the shift of affordable developer and business talent to unfamiliar locales abroad, or even lapses in Microsoft’s performance in the market, partner companies aren’t just rolling with the punches; they’re welcoming the changes and working them to their advantage.  No one seemed downtrodden, or even fatigued.  Even for businesses who have seen core revenue streams become commoditized, everyone seems to be changing their market strategy and winning.  Even Microsoft, of whom I have been critical recently, showed signs of successful hard work and playbook change, in the maturing of their cloud strategy, their commitment to it and their excitement around it.  And the embedded, managed, self-service BI strategy that Microsoft has been touting looks like it’s already being embraced by customers, even though PowerPivot, and other new Microsoft BI products, were released only recently. The collective optimism I have witnessed, and that I have felt, tells me good things about this industry and the economy.  The stock market had huge mood swings during my stay, and that may yet subdue the industry recovery I have seen this week.  Nonetheless, I am convinced that a strong foundation of hard work, innovative thinking and, if I may,  true renaissance is underlying this industry’s success. That kind of strength will generate a strong recovery, I am certain, whether now or once we’re past another round of choppy weather in the broader economy.  The fundamentals are good.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #025 &ndash; CHECK Constraint Tricks

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Allen White (blog | twitter), marathoner, SQL Server MVP and presenter, and all-around awesome author is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on sharing SQL Server Tips and Tricks.  And for those of you who have attended my Revenge: The SQL presentation, you know that I have 1 or 2 of them.  You'll also know that I don't recommend using anything I talk about in a production system, and will continue that advice here…although you might be sorely tempted.  Suffice it to say I'm not using these examples myself, but I think they're worth sharing anyway. Some of you have seen or read about SQL Server constraints and have applied them to your table designs…unless you're a vendor ;)…and may even use CHECK constraints to limit numeric values, or length of strings, allowable characters and such.  CHECK constraints can, however, do more than that, and can even provide enhanced security and other restrictions. One tip or trick that I didn't cover very well in the presentation is using constraints to do unusual things; specifically, limiting or preventing inserts into tables.  The idea was to use a CHECK constraint in a way that didn't depend on the actual data: -- create a table that cannot accept data CREATE TABLE dbo.JustTryIt(a BIT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, CONSTRAINT chk_no_insert CHECK (GETDATE()=GETDATE()+1)) INSERT dbo.JustTryIt VALUES(1)   I'll let you run that yourself, but I'm sure you'll see that this is a pretty stupid table to have, since the CHECK condition will always be false, and therefore will prevent any data from ever being inserted.  I can't remember why I used this example but it was for some vague and esoteric purpose that applies to about, maybe, zero people.  I come up with a lot of examples like that. However, if you realize that these CHECKs are not limited to column references, and if you explore the SQL Server function list, you could come up with a few that might be useful.  I'll let the names describe what they do instead of explaining them all: CREATE TABLE NoSA(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_sa CHECK (SUSER_SNAME()<>'sa')) CREATE TABLE NoSysAdmin(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_sysadmin CHECK (IS_SRVROLEMEMBER('sysadmin')=0)) CREATE TABLE NoAdHoc(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_AdHoc CHECK (OBJECT_NAME(@@PROCID) IS NOT NULL)) CREATE TABLE NoAdHoc2(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_AdHoc2 CHECK (@@NESTLEVEL>0)) CREATE TABLE NoCursors(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_No_Cursors CHECK (@@CURSOR_ROWS=0)) CREATE TABLE ANSI_PADDING_ON(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_ANSI_PADDING_ON CHECK (@@OPTIONS & 16=16)) CREATE TABLE TimeOfDay(a int not null, CONSTRAINT CHK_TimeOfDay CHECK (DATEPART(hour,GETDATE()) BETWEEN 0 AND 1)) GO -- log in as sa or a sysadmin server role member, and try this: INSERT NoSA VALUES(1) INSERT NoSysAdmin VALUES(1) -- note the difference when using sa vs. non-sa -- then try it again with a non-sysadmin login -- see if this works: INSERT NoAdHoc VALUES(1) INSERT NoAdHoc2 VALUES(1) GO -- then try this: CREATE PROCEDURE NotAdHoc @val1 int, @val2 int AS SET NOCOUNT ON; INSERT NoAdHoc VALUES(@val1) INSERT NoAdHoc2 VALUES(@val2) GO EXEC NotAdHoc 2,2 -- which values got inserted? SELECT * FROM NoAdHoc SELECT * FROM NoAdHoc2   -- and this one just makes me happy :) INSERT NoCursors VALUES(1) DECLARE curs CURSOR FOR SELECT 1 OPEN curs INSERT NoCursors VALUES(2) CLOSE curs DEALLOCATE curs INSERT NoCursors VALUES(3) SELECT * FROM NoCursors   I'll leave the ANSI_PADDING_ON and TimeOfDay tables for you to test on your own, I think you get the idea.  (Also take a look at the NoCursors example, notice anything interesting?)  The real eye-opener, for me anyway, is the ability to limit bad coding practices like cursors, ad-hoc SQL, and sa use/abuse by using declarative SQL objects.  I'm sure you can see how and why this would come up when discussing Revenge: The SQL.;) And the best part IMHO is that these work on pretty much any version of SQL Server, without needing Policy Based Management, DDL/login triggers, or similar tools to enforce best practices. All seriousness aside, I highly recommend that you spend some time letting your mind go wild with the possibilities and see how far you can take things.  There are no rules! (Hmmmm, what can I do with rules?) #TSQL2sDay

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