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• links for 2010-06-03

  - by Bob Rhubart

  @rluttikhuizen: Fault handling in Oracle SOA Suite 11g "When it comes to technical faults," says  Oracle ACE Ronald van Luttikhuizen, "you probably do not want to design error handling in the process itself." (tags: soa oracleace oracle otn) Adrian Campbell: Enterprise Architecture and Zombies EA blogger Adrian Campbell invokes Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, Black Adder, and "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" in this interpretation of Gartner's 10 EA pitfalls. (tags: entarch zombies gartner) Nathalie Roman: Oracle Forms -- alive and kicking Oracle ACE Director Nathalie Roman offers details on a recent Oracle Forms Modernization seminar.  (tags: oracle otn oracleace fusionmiddleware soa) Trond-Arne Undheim: Is Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda? Trond-Arne Undheim shares some insight into the upcoming OpenForum Europe Summit 2010, to be held in Brussels. (tags: oracle otn entarch architect) Chris Raby: Oracle Financial Analytics Presentations and Photos Chris Raby shares details on Rittman Mead's series of seminars that combine the company's in-depth technical knowledge with a greater focus on the business perspective.  (tags: entarch bi architect oracle otn) June Oracle Technology Network NEW Member Benefits - books books and more books!!! Details on how OTN members can get discounts on books from APress, CRC, Pearson, and Packt Publishing.  (tags: oracle otn community books discounts) Manoj Neelapu: Oracle Service Bus + SOA in same server Manoj Neelapu's  tutorial covers on how to do create a domain in which SOA and Oracle Service Bus run in a single JVM . (tags: oracle otn soa architect)

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• EclipseCon 2011

  - by Marcus Hirt

  I sadly could not make it to EclipseCon last year. It was sad for so many reasons, not the least being that Sweden during that part of the year is cold and dark. ;) This year, however, I will be contributing two talks: ---> HotRockit – What to Expect from Oracle’s Converged JVM Oracle is converging the HotSpot and JRockit JVMs to produce a "best of breed JVM". Internally the project is sometimes referred to as the HotRockit project. There is already a large influx of ideas and solutions provided by the JRockit JVM into the Open JDK. Examples of improvements include: Better monitoring and profiling Improved performance Better ergonomics This talk will discuss what to expect from the converged JVM over the next two years, and how this will benefit the Eclipse community. Production-time Problem Solving in Eclipse This session will look at some common problems and pitfalls in Java applications. The focus will be on non-invasive profiling and diagnostics of running production systems. Problems tackled will be: Excessive GC Finding hotspots and optimizing them Optimizing the choice of data structures Synchronization problems Finding out where exceptions are thrown Finding memory leaks All problems will be demonstrated and solved running both the bad-behaving applications and the tools to analyze them from within the Eclipse Java IDE. <--- I hope to meet you there!

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• Java - System design with distributed Queues and Locks

  - by sunny

  Looking for inputs to evaluate a design for a system (java) which would have a distributed queue serving several (but not too many) nodes. These nodes would process objects present in the distributed queue and on occasion require a distributed lock across the cluster on an arbitrary (distributed) data structures. These (distributed) data structures could potentially lie in a distributed cache. Eliminating Terracotta (DSO),Hazelcast and Akka what could be alternative choices. Currently considering zookeeper as a distributed locking mechanism. Since the recommendation of a znode is not to exceed the 1M size , the understanding is that zookeeper should not be used a distributed queue. And also from Netflix curator tech note 4. So should a distributed cache, say like memcached, or redis be used to emulate a distributed queue ? i.e. The distributed queue will be stored in the caches and will be locked cluster-wide via zookeeper. Are there potential pitfalls with this high-level approach. The objects don't need to be taken off the queue. The object will pass through a lifecycle which will determine its removal from the queue. There would be about 10k+ objects in a queue at a given time changing states and any node could service one stage of the object's lifecycle. (Although not strictly necessary .. i.e. one node could serve the entire lifecycle if that is more efficient.) Any suggestions/alternatives ? sidenote: new to zookeeper ; redis etc.

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• ASP.NET developers turning to Visual WebGui for rich management system

  - by Webgui

  When The Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) decided they needed a web application to allow easy access to the expenses management system they initially went to ASP.NET web forms combined with CSS. The outcome, however, was not satisfying enough as it appeared bland and lacked in richness. So in order to enrich the UI and give the web application some glitz, Visual WebGui was selected. Visual WebGui provided the needed richness and the familiar Windows look and feel also made the transition for the desktop users very easy. The richer GUI of Visual WebGui compared to ASP.NET conveyed some initial concerns about performance. But the Visual WebGui performance turned out to be a surprising advantage as the website maintained good response times. Working with Visual WebGui required a paradigm shift for the development process as some of the usual methods of coding with ASP.NET did not apply. However, the transition was fairly easy due to the simplicity and intuitiveness of Visual WebGui as well as the good support and documentation. “The shift into a different development paradigm was eased by the Visual WebGui web forums which are very active thanks to a large, involved community. There are also several video and web pages dedicated to answering the most commonly asked questions and pitfalls" Dave Bhatia, Systems Engineer who added "A couple of issues such as deploying on IIS7 seemed to be show stoppers at first, however the solution was readily available in a white paper on the Gizmox website.” The full story is found on the Visual WebGui website: http://www.visualwebgui.com/Gizmox/Resources/CaseStudies/tabid/358/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/964/The-Center-for-Organ-Recovery-Education-gets-a-web-based-expenses-management-system.aspx

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• Designing javascript chart library

  - by coolscitist

  I started coding a chart library on top of d3js: My chart library. I read Javascript API reusability and Towards reusable charts. However, I am NOT really following the suggestions because I am not really convinced about them. This is how my library can be used to create a bubble chart: var chart = new XYBubbleChart(); chart.data = [{"xValue":200,"yValue":300},{"xValue":400,"yValue":200},{"xValue":100,"yValue":310}]; //set data chart.dataKey.x = "xValue"; chart.dataKey.y = "yValue"; chart.elementId = "#chart"; chart.createChart(); Here are my questions: It does not use chaining. Is it a big issue? Every property and function is exposed publicly. (Example: width, height are exposed in Chart.js). OOP is all about abstraction and hiding, but I don't really see the point right now. I think exposing everything gives flexibility to change property and functionality inside subclasses and objects without writing a lot of code. What could be pitfalls of such exposure? I have implemented functions like: zooming, "showing info boxes when data point is clicked" as "abilities". (example: XYZoomingAbility.js). Basically, such "abilities" accept "chart" object, play around with public variables of "chart" to add functionality. What this allows me to do is to add an ability by writing: activateZoomAbility(chartObject); My goal is to separate "visualization" from "interactivity". I want "interactivity" like: zooming to be plugged into the chart rather than built inside the chart. Like, I don't want my bubble chart to know anything about "zooming". However, I do want zoomable bubble chart. What is the best way to do this? How to test and what to test? I have written mixed tests: jasmine and actual html files so that I can test manually on browser.

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• Per-vertex animation with VBOs: VBO per character or VBO per animation?

  - by charstar

  Goal To leverage the richness of well vetted animation tools such as Blender to do the heavy lifting for a small but rich set of animations. I am aware of additive pose blending like that from Naughty Dog and similar techniques but I would prefer to expend a little RAM/VRAM to avoid implementing a thesis-ready pose solver. I would also like to avoid implementing a key-frame + interpolation curve solver (reinventing Blender vertex groups and IPOs), if possible. Scenario Meshes are animated using either skeletons (skinned animation) or some form of morph targets (i.e. per-vertex key frames). However, in either case, the animations are known in full at load-time, that is, there is no physics, IK solving, or any other form of in-game pose solving. The number of character actions (animations) will be limited but rich (hand-animated). There may be multiple characters using a each mesh and its animations simultaneously in-game (they will likely be at different frames of the same animation at the same time). Assume color and texture coordinate buffers are static. Current Considerations Much like a non-shader-powered pose solver, create a VBO for each character and copy vertex and normal data to each VBO on each frame (VBO in STREAMING). Create one VBO for each animation where each frame (interleaved vertex and normal data) is concatenated onto the VBO. Then each character simply has a buffer pointer offset based on its current animation frame (e.g. pointer offset = (numVertices+numNormals)*frameNumber). (VBO in STATIC) Known Trade-Offs In 1 above: Each VBO would be small but there would be many VBOs and therefore lots of buffer binding and vertex copying each frame. Both client and pipeline intensive. In 2 above: There would be few VBOs therefore insignificant buffer binding and no vertex data getting jammed down the pipe each frame, but each VBO would be quite large. Are there any pitfalls to number 2 (aside from finite memory)? I've found a lot of information on what you can do, but no real best practices. Are there other considerations or methods that I am missing?

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• Porting Ruby/NCruses Rogue-Like to .NET and FlatRedBall

  - by ashes999

  I created an awesome rogue-like game in Ruby. For the GUI, I used NCurses. Since I'm using FlatRedBall as my engine of choice for Silverlight game development, I want to port this game over. What is the best way to efficiently doing this, and what are the pitfalls I should expect? For example, Ruby is object-oriented, like C#, and I should be able to just convert (rewrite) classes one by one. However, I will run into issues like: NCurses API. I need to possibly create my own notions of a "Window", or else rewrite GUI code. It's one class, but it's BIG. Mix-Ins. These are essentially aspect-oriented development. There are a couple of solutions in .NET, like dynamic classes. What else? Also, I should mention that I want to create a C# application out of this. As much as possible, I'll dump reusable and helper code, algorithms, etc. into separate projects and generate reusable DLLs.

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• Are there any actual case studies on rewrites of software success/failure rates?

  - by James Drinkard

  I've seen multiple posts about rewrites of applications being bad, peoples experiences about it here on Programmers, and an article I've ready by Joel Splosky on the subject, but no hard evidence of case studies. Other than the two examples Joel gave and some other posts here, what do you do with a bad codebase and how do you decide what to do with it based on real studies? For the case in point, there are two clients I know of that both have old legacy code. They keep limping along with it because as one of them found out, a rewrite was a disaster, it was expensive and didn't really work to improve the code much. That customer has some very complicated business logic as the rewriters quickly found out. In both cases, these are mission critical applications that brings in a lot of revenue for the company. The one that attempted the rewrite felt that they would hit a brick wall at some point if the legacy software didn't get upgraded at some point in the future. To me, that kind of risk warrants research and analysis to ensure a successful path. My question is have there been actual case studies that have investigated this? I wouldn't want to attempt a major rewrite without knowing some best practices, pitfalls, and successes based on actual studies. Aftermath: okay, I was wrong, I did find one article: Rewrite or Reuse. They did a study on a Cobol app that was converted to Java.

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• Insurance Outlook: Just Right of Center

  - by Chuck Johnston Admin

  On Tuesday June 21st, PwC lead a session at the International Insurance Society meeting in Toronto focused on the opportunity in insurance.  The scenarios focusing on globalization, regulation and new areas of insurance opportunity were well defined and thought provoking, but the most interesting part of the session was the audience participation. PwC used a favorite strategic planning tool of mine, scenario planning, to highlight the important financial, political, social and technological dimensions that impact the insurance industry. Using wireless polling keypads, the audience was able to participate in scoring a range of possibilities across each dimension using a 1 to 5 ranking; 1 being generally negative or highly pessimistic scenarios and 5 being very positive or more confident scenarios. The results were then displayed on a screen with a line or "center" in the middle. "Left of center" was defined as being highly cautious and conservative, while "right of center" was defined as a more optimistic outlook for the industry's future. This session was attended by insurance carriers' senior leadership, leading insurance academics, senior regulators, and the occasional insurance technology executive. In general, the average answer fell just right of center, i.e. a little more positive or optimistic than center. Three years ago, after the 2008 financial crisis, I suspect the answers would have skewed more sharply to the left of center. This sense that things are generally getting better for insurers and that there is the potential for positive change pervaded the conference. There is still caution and concern around economic factors, regulation (especially the potential pitfalls of regulatory convergence with banking) and talent management, but in general, the industry outlook is more positive than it's been in several years. Chuck Johnston is vice president of industry strategy, Oracle Insurance. 

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• Are there any "best practices" on cross-device development?

  - by vstrien

  Developing for smartphones in the way the industry is currently doing is relatively new. Of course, there has been enterprise-level mobile development for several decades. The platforms have changed, however. Think of: from stylus-input to touch-input (different screen res, different control layout etc.) new ways of handling multi-tasking on mobile platforms (e.g. WP7's "tombstoning") The way these platforms work aren't totally new (iPhone has been around for quite awhile now for example), but at the moment when developing a functionally equal application for both desktop and smartphone it comes down to developing two applications from ground up. Especially with the birth of Windows Phone with the .NET-platform on board and using Silverlight as UI-language, it's becoming appealing to promote the re-use of (parts of the UI). Still, it's fairly obvious that the needs of an application on a smartphone (or tablet) are very different compared to the needs of a desktop application. An (almost) one-on-one conversion will therefore be impossible. My question: are there "best practices", pitfalls etc. documented about developing "cross-device" applications (for example, developing an app for both the desktop and the smartphone/tablet)? I've been looking at weblogs, scientific papers and more for a week or so, but what I've found so far is only about "migratory interfaces".

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• What is a currently a good game stack for simple Javascript 2D multiplatform game?

  - by JacobusR

  I'm looking for advice from someone can help me avoid common pitfalls in developing light weight, quick-to-market games. Yeah, I've heard of Google ;-), but a trip down Google lane does not beat solid experience from someone who has been down this path. I'm looking for advice from someone who works alone, or in a small team, and has developed some 2D games for mobile. My game ideas don't require intensive graphics, just simple arcade style glyphs and collision detection. My experience is mostly with Scala, Java and web technologies (Javascript, CSS, SVG, HTML, etc). My question is: Is there a nice stack that someone can suggest that will be a good fit for my skillset? I'm considering Javascript for simple 2D shooter games with simple multiplayer games being supported with a Scala server-side written on Spray. Is this silly? Should I rather look into things such as Unity 3D, and use it in 2D mode? For the actual game engine, something like the Sparrow Framework would be great, but it needs to be multiplatform.

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• Graduated transition from Green - Yellow - Red

  - by GoldBishop

  I have am having algorithm mental block in designing a way to transition from Green to Red, as smoothly as possible with a, potentially, unknown length of time to transition. For testing purposes, i will be using 300 as my model timespan but the methodology algorithm design needs to be flexible enough to account for larger or even smaller timespans. Figured using RGB would probably be the best to transition with, but open to other color creation types, assuming its native to .Net (VB/C#). Currently i have: t = 300 x = t/2 z = 0 low = Green (0, 255, 0) mid = Yellow (255, 255, 0) high = Red (255, 0, 0) Lastly, sort of an optional piece, is to account for the possibility of the low, mid, and high color's to be flexible as well. I assume that there would need to be a check to make sure that someone isnt putting in low = (255,0,0), mid=(254,0,0), and high=(253,0,0). Outside of this anomaly, which i will handle myself based on the best approach to evaluate a color. Question: What would be the best approach to do the transition from low to mid and then from mid to high? What would be some potential pitfalls of implementing this type of design, if any?

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• HTG Explains: The Best and Worst Ways to Send a Resume

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  With so many people looking for jobs, the slightest edge in your resume presentation has potential to make or break your chances. But not all filetypes or methods are created equal—read on to see the potential pitfalls your resume faces. In this article, we’ll explore what can go wrong in a resume submission, what can be done to counteract it, and also go into why a prospective employer might ignore your resume based on your method of sending a resume. Finally, we’ll cover the best filetypes and methods that can help get you that new job you’ve been looking for. What Sets Your Resume Apart? Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines The Citroen GT – An Awesome Video Game Car Brought to Life [Video] Four Awesome TRON Legacy Themes for Chrome and Iron Anger is Illogical – Old School Style Instructional Video [Star Trek Mashup] Get the Old Microsoft Paint UI Back in Windows 7 Relax and Sleep Is a Soothing Sleep Timer Google Rolls Out Two-Factor Authentication

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• One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?

  - by Arkaaito

  At my company (3-yr-old web industry startup), we have frequent problems with the product team saying "aaaah this is a crisis patch it now!" (doesn't everybody?) This has an impact on the productivity (and morale) of engineering staff, self included. Management has spent some time thinking about how to reduce the frequency of these same-day requests and has come up with the solution that we are going to have a release every week. (Previously we'd been doing one every two weeks, which usually slipped by a couple of days or so.) There are 13 developers and 6 local / 9 offshore testers; the theory is that only 4 developers (and all testers) will work on even-numbered releases, unless a piece of work comes up that really requires some specific expertise from one of the other devs. Each cycle will contain two days of dev work and two days of QA work (plus 1 day of scoping / triage / ...). My questions are: (a) Does anyone have experience with this length of release cycle? (b) Has anyone heard of this length of release cycle even being attempted? (c) If (a) or (b), how on Earth do you make it work? (Any pitfalls to avoid, etc., are also appreciated.) (d) How can we minimize the damage if this effort fails?

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• How to maintain symlinks in linux file manager?

  - by MountainX

  I want to use symlinks extensively. However, if I move the target file, the symlink becomes broken (unlike on Windows). That's not acceptable to me, so I either need a solution or I won't be able to use symlinks the way I wish to. Is there a solution that will work with Dolphin file manager? A command line solution is described on commandlinefu. In summary, it is something like one of these: lmv(){for a in ${@:1:$(expr $#-1)};do [ -e "$a" -a -e "${@:$#:1}" ] && mv "$a";"${@:$#:1}" && ln -s "${@:$#:1}"/"$(basename "$a")";"$(dirname "$a")";done} lmv(){for a in ${@:1:$(expr $#-1)};do [ -e "$a" -a -e "${@:$#}" ] && mv "$a";"${@:$#}" && ln -s "${@:$#}"/"$(basename "$a")";"$(dirname "$a")";done} But about half the time I'm using a file manager (Dolphin), so I need a complete solution to this problem. Is a solution available for a GUI file manager? EDIT: The context of this question is that I'm searching for an alternative to hardlinks. I previously asked this question about the pitfalls of hardlinks.

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• Chrome Mobile Monthly: Responsive vs Separate Sites

  Chrome Mobile Monthly: Responsive vs Separate Sites Join us on Wednesday October 31st at 9am PT for our Monthly Mobile Web Hangout! This month +Brad Frost will be joining us to talk about responsive design versus separate mobile sites. And in keeping with the season, it's a special Presidential Smackdown Edition. The US presidential race is in full swing, and the candidates are intensely debating the country's hot-button issues. The web design world is entrenched in our own debate about how to address the mobile web: should we create a separate mobile site or create a responsive experience instead? It just so happens that the two US presidential candidates have chosen different mobile web strategies for their official websites. In the red corner is Republican candidate Mitt Romney's dedicated mobile site, while in the blue corner is incumbent president Barack Obama's responsive website. Which will prevail? Sit back, crack open a cold one, and watch the battle unfold as Brad dissect the candidates' sites to uncover best practices and common mobile web pitfalls. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 00:00 More in Science & Technology

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• Does an inexperienced programmer need an IDE?

  - by Torben Gundtofte-Bruun

  Reading this other question makes me wonder if I (as an absolute beginner PHP programmer) should stick with WAMP and Notepad++ or to switch to some IDE like Eclipse. It's understandable that skilled developers will benefit from a big shiny IDE. But why should an absolute beginner use an IDE? Do the benefits outweigh the extra challenge of learning the IDE on top of learning to develop? Update for clarification: My goal is to get some basic programming experience. By choosing PHP and WAMP (and FogBugz and Kiln) I hope to avoid having to navigate the tricky / messy OS specifics and compiling etc. and just focus on basic functionality like an online user registration form. I've got lots of theoretical understanding from university a decade ago but no practical experience. I want to remedy that with a hobby project that would be similar to a real-world sellable web app. There are so many questions to ask. So many pitfalls I probably have to blunder into. This question is just one piece (my first!) of that puzzle.

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• Augmenting functionality of subclasses without code duplication in C++

  - by Rob W

  I have to add common functionality to some classes that share the same superclass, preferably without bloating the superclass. The simplified inheritance chain looks like this: Element -> HTMLElement -> HTMLAnchorElement Element -> SVGElement -> SVGAlement The default doSomething() method on Element is no-op by default, but there are some subclasses that need an actual implementation that requires some extra overridden methods and instance members. I cannot put a full implementation of doSomething() in Element because 1) it is only relevant for some of the subclasses, 2) its implementation has a performance impact and 3) it depends on a method that could be overridden by a class in the inheritance chain between the superclass and a subclass, e.g. SVGElement in my example. Especially because of the third point, I wanted to solve the problem using a template class, as follows (it is a kind of decorator for classes): struct Element { virtual void doSomething() {} }; // T should be an instance of Element template<class T> struct AugmentedElement : public T { // doSomething is expensive and uses T virtual void doSomething() override {} // Used by doSomething virtual bool shouldDoSomething() = 0; }; class SVGElement : public Element { /* ... */ }; class SVGAElement : public AugmentedElement<SVGElement> { // some non-trivial check bool shouldDoSomething() { /* ... */ return true; } }; // Similarly for HTMLAElement and others I looked around (in the existing (huge) codebase and on the internet), but didn't find any similar code snippets, let alone an evaluation of the effectiveness and pitfalls of this approach. Is my design the right way to go, or is there a better way to add common functionality to some subclasses of a given superclass?

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• Per-vertex animation with VBOs: Stream each frame or use index offset per frame?

  - by charstar

  Scenario Meshes are animated using either skeletons (skinned animation) or some form of morph targets (i.e. per-vertex key frames). However, in either case, the animations are known in full at load-time, that is, there is no physics, IK solving, or any other form of in-game pose solving. The number of character actions (animations) will be limited but rich (hand-animated). There may be multiple characters using a each mesh and its animations simultaneously in-game (they will be at different poses/keyframes at the same time). Assume color and texture coordinate buffers are static. Goal To leverage the richness of well vetted animation tools such as Blender to do the heavy lifting for a small but rich set of animations. I am aware of additive pose blending like that from Naughty Dog and similar techniques but I would prefer to expend a little RAM/VRAM to avoid implementing a thesis-ready pose solver. I would also like to avoid implementing a key-frame + interpolation curve solver (reinventing Blender vertex groups and IPOs). Current Considerations Much like a non-shader-powered pose solver, create a VBO for each character and copy vertex and normal data to each VBO on each frame (VBO in STREAMING). Create one VBO for each animation where each frame (interleaved vertex and normal data) is concatenated onto the VBO. Then each character simply has a buffer pointer offset based on its current animation frame (e.g. pointer offset = (numVertices+numNormals)*frameNumber). (VBO in STATIC) Known Trade-Offs In 1 above: Each VBO would be small but there would be many VBOs and therefore lots of buffer binding and vertex copying each frame. Both client and pipeline intensive. In 2 above: There would be few VBOs therefore insignificant buffer binding and no vertex data getting jammed down the pipe each frame, but each VBO would be quite large. Are there any pitfalls to number 2 (aside from finite memory)? Are there other methods that I am missing?

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• Ensure Payroll Success with PeopleSoft Year-End Training for U.S. and Canada

  - by Breanne Cooley

  Year-end payroll processing and reporting is a requirement for your business. If you're responsible for completing these processes in either Canada or the United States using the PeopleSoft Payroll application, and if you're new to PeopleSoft Payroll or to performing these processes, consider enrolling in Oracle University's expert training. Our PeopleSoft Payroll specialists will guide you through the necessary steps to ensure you can smoothly and successfully perform your job. Training is specific to the country for which you are performing the processing and reporting. Training lasts one day and is delivered in our Live Virtual Class Format, which helps you avoid travel during this busy season. Here's the training we recommend: PeopleSoft Year-End Payroll - U.S. This course teaches you how to complete U.S. year-end processing and reporting using PeopleSoft Payroll for North America, step-by-step. Update tax reporting setup tables and update employees' income and tax records. Load each employee's year-end data into a single year-end record for processing and reporting.  Identify reports needed to reconcile the year-end data. Correct tax balances and other data as necessary. Generate final print and online W-2 forms and prepare the electronic file for the Social Security Administration.  Enter corrected W-2 information and print a W-2c form. Report periodic retirement distributions and related tax withholding amounts on form 1099-R.   Please Note: this course is intended for organizations using PeopleSoft release 8.81 or higher. PeopleSoft Year-End Payroll – Canada This course covers the steps necessary to perform Canadian year-end processing using Oracle's PeopleSoft Payroll for North America. Explore adjustments, balances, year-end slip processing, common pitfalls and errors and balancing reports.  Produce accurate year-end reporting results such as T4, T4A, RL-1 and RL-2.  Please Note: this course is intended for organizations using PeopleSoft release 8.81 or higher. See you in class! -Oracle University Marketing Team 

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• What are some general guidelines for setting up an iOS project I will want to personally publish but sell in the future?

  - by RLH

  I have an idea for a personal iOS project that I would like to write and release to the iOS store. I'm the type of developer who enjoys developing and publishing. I want to write quality software and take care of my customers. Assuming that I wrote an application that had reasonable success, there is a fair chance that I would want to sell the ownership rights of the app to another party and I'd use the proceeds to develop my next personal project which, in turn, I'd probably want to sell in the future. With that said, what are some general guidelines for creating, making and publishing an iOS project that I will eventually want to transfer to another company/developer? I know this is a bit of a broad question, but I request that the given advice be a general list of tips, suggestions and pitfalls to avoid. If any particular bullet point on your list needs more explanation, I'll either search for the answer or post a new question specific to that requirement. Thank you! Note Regarding this Question I am posting this question on Programmers.SO because I think that this is an issue of software architecting, seeking advice for setting a new application project and publishing a project to the Apple iOS store-- all within the requirements for questions on this site.

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• Should I modify an entity with many parameters or with the entity itself?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  We have a SOA-based system. The service methods are like: UpdateEntity(Entity entity) For small entities, it's all fine. However, when entities get bigger and bigger, to update one property we should follow this pattern in UI: Get parameters from UI (user) Create an instance of the Entity, using those parameters Get the entity from service Write code to fill the unchanged properties Give the result entity to the service Another option that I've experienced in previous experiences is to create semantic update methods for each update scenario. In other words instead of having one global all-encompasing update method, we had many ad-hoc parametric methods. For example, for the User entity, instead of having UpdateUser (User user) method, we had these methods: ChangeUserPassword(int userId, string newPassword) AddEmailToUserAccount(int userId, string email) ChangeProfilePicture(int userId, Image image) ... Now, I don't know which method is truly better, and for each approach, we encounter problems. I mean, I'm going to design the infrastructure for a new system, and I don't have enough reasons to pick any of these approaches. I couldn't find good resources on the Internet, because of the lack of keywords I could provide. What approach is better? What pitfalls each has? What benefits can we get from each one?

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• Maintaining Two Separate Software Versions From the Same Codebase in Version Control

  - by Joseph

  Let's say that I am writing two different versions of the same software/program/app/script and storing them under version control. The first version is a free "Basic" version, while the second is a paid "Premium" version that takes the codebase of the free version and expands upon it with a few extra value-added features. Any new patches, fixes, or features need to find their way into both versions. I am currently considering using master and develop branches for the main codebase (free version) along side master-premium and develop-premium branches for the paid version. When a change is made to the free version and merged to the master branch (after thorough testing on develop of course), it gets copied over to the develop-premium branch via the cherry-pick command for more testing and then merged into master-premium. Is this the best workflow to handle this situation? Are there any potential problems, caveats, or pitfalls to be aware of? Is there a better branching strategy than what I have already come up with? Your feedback is highly appreciated! P.S. This is for a PHP script stored in Git, but the answers should apply to any language or VCS.

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• VMware Kernel Module Updater hangs on Ubuntu 13.04

  VMware Player has a nice auto-detection of kernel changes, and requests the user to compile the required modules in order to load them. This happens from time to time after a regular update of your system. Usually, the dialog of VMware Kernel Module Updater pops up, asks for root access authentication, and completes the compilation. VMware Player or Workstation checks if modules for the active kernel are available. In theory this is supposed to work flawlessly but in reality there are pitfalls occassionally. With the recent upgrade to Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail and the latest kernel 3.8.0-21 the actual VMware Kernel Module Updater simply disappeared and the application wouldn't start as expected. When you launch VMware Player as super user (root) the dialog would stall like so: VMware Kernel Module Updater stalls while stopping the services Prior to version 5.x of VMware Player or version 7.x of VMware Workstation you would run a command like: $ sudo vmware-config.pl to resolve the module version conflict but this doesn't work anyway. Solution Instead, you have to execute the following line in a terminal or console window: $ sudo vmware-modconfig --console --install-all Those switches are (as of writing this article) not documented in the output of the --help switch. But VMware already documented this procedure in their knowledge base: VMware Workstation stops functioning after updating the kernel on a Linux host (1002411). Update As of today I had the first kernel upgrade to version 3.8.0-22 in Ubuntu 13.04. Don't even try it without vmware-modconfig...

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