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• Hardware recommendations / parts list for a modern, quiet ZFS NAS box - 2011-Feb edition [closed]

  - by dandv

  I want to build some really reliable storage for my data, and it seems that ZFS is the only filesystem at the moment that does live checksumming. That rules out DroboPro, so I'm looking to building a quiet ZFS NAS that would start with 4 2TB or larger hard drives. I'd like this system to be very reliable and relatively future-proof for 2-3 years, so I'm willing to invest some $$$ and buy higher end components. I did see questions here and on other forums about low-cost servers, but I'm not looking for those. I'd be super happy to go for an off-the-shelf solution, but I haven't found one that's quiet. I started doing the research (summarized on my wiki), but I realized that it just gets too complicated for what I know as a software dude, and I'm entering the analysis paralysis area. At this point, I'm basically looking for a parts list for a configuration that will work (and is modern), and I know there are folks around here who are way more competent than me. I've built computers and am comfortable assembling one and messing with *nix; I can follow guides; I just want to end the decision process for the hardware and software configuration. What I've researched so far (not that these are very modern components): Case: I think I've settled on the Antec Twelve Hundred case because it cools well, is quiet, and simply has 12 bays that allow elastic mounting. The SilverStone Raven is its counter-candidate, but I find its construction quite odd. For the PSU, I'm torn between Antec CP-850 and Nexus RX-8500, but I did this research more than a year ago. The Nexus has a very uniform power profile, and I'd rather not have the Antec spin up and down based on load. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often my file server will draw more than 400W under use. For the hard drives, I've read that WD Black drives are actually WD RE3 with a software setting changed. I'd also like to buy different drive types, not just 4 WDs. Recommendations? Right now I have a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K300. For the motherboard, CPU and RAM I have no idea, other than the RAM must be ECC. I already asked a question here about ECC RAM, but I was misguided and was looking for a motherboard that would support USB 3.0 as well. I've learned to go with eSATA, or worry about USB later. Then there's the (liquid) cooling, Wi-Fi card, and FreeBSD vs. OpenSolaris Express. Lastly, I'm wondering if I can make this PC into a media server by adding a Blu-ray drive and a good sound card. But support for Blu-Ray is spotty on Linux, and I don't know if Windows 7 on VirtualBox would get sufficient hardware access to output HDMI or SPDIFF signals. (Running OpenSolaris virtualized is not an option because of the reliability risk.) Then there are HDCP concerns. Suggestions on that would be appreciated as well, but I don't want us to get sidetracked. A specific shopping list on the core components would be great, so I can start ordering, and in the meantime educate myself with regards to the other issues. Finally, I think this could become a great FAQ for those technically inclined to build their own ZFS server, but confused by the dizzying array of options out there, and I promise to compile the results and share my experience building and benchmarking the server.

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• Choice of an OS for a home ZFS NAS

  - by OlafM

  I am preparing a home NAS with an old Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 4 GB ECC RAM, Asus M2V MX motherboard, and a single 3 TB WDC Green (another one as mirror may be installed in the future). It's the cheapest solution I found that includes ECC memory and the higher energy consumption is offset by the lower (zero) cost of acquisition. The system will be used for: music storage and stream to other desktop computers; storage of the scanned dia slides (3-4k slides, 180 MB TIFF each one plus reduced quality JPEG version); stream of these photos to a local iPad 2 (maybe Plex App? not yet sure); (one additional) remote backup via rsync/ssh or ZFS send/receive. It will be controlled via remote ssh, maybe VNC, no monitor attached. Absolute requirement is a reliable ZFS solution, plus the ability to easily install packets/software/virtual machines and to update remotely (I will be the admin and I don't live near the NAS). I have mainly three options: NAS4free/FreeNAS OpenIndiana Solaris Express 11 (yeah yeah I know the license requirements, I will write a perl script on it to count it as development machine). Problems: NAS4free/FreeNAS (I tested only NAS4free) required embedded installation for remote upgrading, but full install for easy addition of software packets. Since I need at least AirVideo Server (linux/win) and Plex App (win/linux) to stream the photos and some videos to iPad (they both require virtualbox), but I cannot be there to install updates, NAS4free/FreeNAS are excluded. http://www.nas4free.org/general_information.html explains the issue: embedded can be remotely updated, full cannot. Solaris has also another advantage: Crashplan client supports Solaris and I'm already using it for other backups. I would like to leave the option open, even if I will be doing backups probably through zfs send/receive. NexentaStor was left out because zfs send/receive are not included in the free version. The question is now Solaris 11 Express over OpenIndiana. To ease the management, I will be using http://www.napp-it.org Which one would you suggest and why? I found lots of informations and it's difficult for me to decide. I think (from the napp-it manual) that Solaris has some additional options for SMB shares, but are they really needed at home? I think I won't even use ACLs, since normal unix-style permissions are enough. OpenIndiana has maybe more frequent updates (Solaris offers only security updates between releases), but again, do I need them? I don't think so. Moreover, this is a NAS that has to work and nothing else, I cannot risk having problems that require me to access the server. Isn't OpenIndiana a bit more... cutting edge (in the Solaris world)? I'm just asking, no need to focus on this for the answer :-) I would limit myself to these two options (SE11.1/OI) also because I will be making a NAS for me in the future (where high performances with Mac shares are also required) and Solaris has kernel support for AFP. I will use this server to gather experience as well. After this long question, thanks in advance! If you need additional info, let me know and I will update this post. UPDATES Given the first answers, I will strongly suggest the person paying the hardware to insert a second HD. Better 2x2TB than 1x3TB (3 TB is oversized anyway). I was trying to keep the initial costs down to spread them over a longer period, but better having something good from the beginning.

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• What NAS setup for syncing over the internet?

  - by Jamse

  I have family living a few hours away and have a lot of files that I would like to share - especially lots of folders of digital photos, but also documents etc. - partially so they can see them, partially so I can have access when I visit them and partially for backup / redundancy purposes. My current hard drives on my main machine are getting pretty full anyway, and I have a MythTV box where my music is currently stored, so I was thinking of getting a NAS anyway. And at the other end my family have a few computers, so they would probably benefit from a NAS too. My general idea (though I'm willing to shift on this if there are any bright ideas about other ways of achieving my objectives) is to get a matching pair of NASs and have them sync over the internet. (To cut down on bandwidth use I would get them in sync locally to start with.) Having read around as best I can it seems that syncing over the internet is generally only a feature on quite high end units. However, I have seen that QNAP seem to feature this on their TS-110 and TS-210 units, which might work (they call it "remote replication"). They seem pretty reasonably priced for what they are, but of course with buying 2 of them and then adding the drives (say 1TB or 2TB each) I'd be looking at about £400 total. So, I'm looking for recommendations really. I don't want to spend more than the QNAPs would cost me, but any other ideas would be most appreciated. I am comfortable with technology and tinkering around, but I don't have as much time for that as I would like, so I guess I would favour solutions that require less tinkering rather than more (even though that's less fun!). Any thoughts would be welcome, as would any comments from people who have used the QNAP boxes for this. Thanks in advance. Some specifications: Two-way syncing. Changes made at either end should be synced to the other. There shouldn't be one unit that is effectively a read-only mirror of the other. Not real time. The syncing doesn't need to be real time - if it updated, say, daily overnight that would be fine. Set and forget. I would prefer minimal user interaction once set up - it would be great if syncs were scheduled and automatic. OS independence. I am running Windows XP plus an Ubuntu-based MythTV box. At the other end there are Windows 7 and Windows XP machines, plus a networked TV set top box which I think can play files off the network. Machine independence. I would favour a system that is self-contained, i.e. not reliant on any particular PC being switched on. If the system had enough else going for it I could perhaps work around it at this end, where I only have one PC that's used as such, but it would be harder at the other where there are at least two PCs that might be accessing the files. Notifications. I guess things like getting an email notification if the syncing fell over for any reason would be useful, though it's not a deal breaker.

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• How does the Cloud compare to Colocation? And development too

  - by David

  Currently I/we run a SaaS web application where each subscriber has their own physical instance of the application in addition to their own database. The setup has each web application instance deployed on two different IIS boxes both for load-balancing and redundancy (the machines have their Windows Update install times 12 hours apart, for example). Databases are mirrored on two different SQL Server 2012 machines with AlwaysOn for uptime. I don't make use of SQL Server clustering (as it doesn't provide storage-level failover: we don't have a shared storage box). Because it's a Windows setup it means there are two Domain Controllers (we cheat: they're both Mac Minis, 17W each, which keeps our colo power costs low). Finally there's also an Exchange server (Mailbox, Hub Transport and Client Access). One of the SQL Servers also doubles-up as an Exchange Hub Transport. Running costs are about $700 a month for our quarter-rack colocation (which includes power and peering/transfer), then there's about $150 a month for SPLA licensing, so $850 a month in total. Then there's the hard-to-quantify cost of administration, but I reckon I spend a couple of hours a week checking-in on the servers: reviewing event logs, etc. I keep getting bombarded by ads and manufactured news stories about how great "the cloud" is. Back in 2008 when the cloud was taking off I was reading up about the proper "cloud" services like Google AppEngine, where you write in Python against Google's API and that's how they scale your application across servers and also use their database provider for scaling storage. Simple enough to understand. Then came along Amazon, and I understand how Amazon Storage works, but I'm not sure how Amazon Compute works: web application pages don't take much CPU time to compute, how do you even quantify usage anyway? Finally, RackSpace gets in the act and now I'm really confused. RackSpace advertise "Cloud" SQL Server 2012 available for about "$0.70 per hour", going by how they advertise it I thought the "hour" meant the sum of CPU time, IO blocking time, maybe time spent transferring data, so for a low-intensity application that works out pretty cheap then? Nope. I went on to a Sales Chat window and spoke to one of their advisors. They told me the $0.70/hour was actually for every hour the SQL Server is running... but who wants a SQL Server for only a few hours? You're going to need it available 24 hours a day for months on end. $0.70 * 24 * 31 works out at $520 a month, which is rediculously expensive for SQL Server. An SPLA license for SQL Server is only $50 a month or so. That $520 a month does not include "fanatical support", and you also need to stack on top the costs of the host Windows server instance too. From what I can tell, Rackspace's "Cloud" products seem like like an cynical rebranding of an overpriced VPS service, but priced by the hour. I have the same confusion about Windows Azure which uses similar terms to describe the products available, but I think that's because Azure offers both traditional shared webhosting in addition to their own APIs you can target for scalable applications.

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• Team Foundation Server Setup/Access

  - by Angel Brighteyes

  What I need: A TFS 2010 Setup that allows 2 application developers to access the TFS from remote locations. How it is setup: Server 2008 Standard 2g Ram 300g HD space SharePoint Server 2007, using SQL Server 2005 SQL Server 2008 Standard Team Foundation Server 2010 IIS 7 Sharepoint Bindings: TFS.DynAccount.Me:80; TFS:80 TFS Bindings: TFS.DynAccount.Me:8080; TFS:8080 Using DynDNS service to account for the dynamic ip address being used, this is a requirement for the moment until I can get a better isp package. Access using Local Accounts Server is not setup on a domain, or as a domain. Consequently I did not setup AD services. Problem: When logged into TFS using my credentials TFS\AdminUser through the DynDNS account TFS.DynAccount.Me I recieve the 'Red X of Death' on the Documents and Reports folder. When logged into the TFS through the local peer to peer network using the same credentials TFS\AdminUser I do not receive the 'Red X of Death' problem. Further Troubleshooting: When users 'Right Click' the 'TeamProject1' Click 'Show Project Portal' it tries to take them to http://TFS:8080 instead of http://TFS.DynAccount.Me:8080, which doing further research I am assuming that it is because team foundation server was setup with a local name of TFS instead of 'TFS.DynAccount.Me' as specified here in Visual Studio Magazines: The Red X of Death. Users can Access the Team Portal for SharePoint via http://TFS.DynAccount.Me/TeamCollection/TeamProject so it is not like we are dead in the water or anything. However, as most employees/staff are prone to do, they have expressed a great distaste for having to do it this way and just be patient until the current project is finished since we are under a very strict deadline. Is there a way to set this up differently, or change some settings someplace, reinstall it, point a CName record for our domain website to the DynAccount (e.g. TFS.OurDomain.com points to TFS.DynAccount.Me, which consequently does allow access to the http site without issues), or something. I really don't feel like after all the time and effort I have spent into, first the cost, second the bloody install, third learning SharePoint well enough, fourth the hours into days spent on this, fifth more troubleshooting, sixth employee headaches to just let it lay where it is at. I figure in my spare/off time I would keep trying to get this to work. So I really appreciate any help any one can give me. I know this is probably something really stupid simple that I will 'Face Palm' over, but at the moment the stress and frustration just has me beat. Thank you again, this community has always been a great help.

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• Why not .NET-style delegates rather than closures in Java?

  - by h2g2java

  OK, this is going to be my beating a dying horse for the 3rd time. However, this question is different from my earlier two about closures/delegates, which asks about plans for delegates and what are the projected specs and implementation for closures. This question is about - why is the Java community struggling to define 3 different types of closures when we could simply steal the whole concept of delegates lock, stock and barrel from our beloved and friendly neighbour - Microsoft. There are two non-technical conclusions I would be very tempted to jump into: The Java community should hold up its pride, at the cost of needing to go thro convoluted efforts, by not succumbing to borrowing any Microsoft concepts or otherwise vindicate Microsoft's brilliance. Delegates is a Microsoft patented technology. Alright, besides the above two possibilities, Q1. Is there any weakness or inadequacy in msft-styled delegates that the three (or more) forms of closures would be addressing? Q2. I am asking this while shifting between java and c# and it intrigues me that c# delegates does exactly what I needed. Are there features that would be implemented in closures that are not currently available in C# delegates? If so what are they because I cannot see what I need more than what C# delegates has adequately provided me? Q3. I know that one of the concerns about implementing closures/delegates in java is the reduction of orthogonality of the language, where more than one way is exposed to perform a particular task. Is it worth the level convolution and time spent to avoid delegates just to ensure java retains its level of orthogonality? In SQL, we know that it is advisable to break orthogonality by frequently adequately satisfying only the 2nd normal form. Why can't java be subjected to reduction of orthogonality and OO-ness for the sake of simplicity? Q4. The architecture of JVM is technically constrained from implementing .NET-styled delegates. If this reason WERE (subjunctive to emphasize unlikelihood) true, then why can't the three closures proposals be hidden behind a simple delegate keyword or annotation: if we don't like to use @delegate, we could use @method. I cannot see how delegate statement format is more complex than the three closure proposals.

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• How to avoid using duplicate savepoint names in nested transactions in nested stored procs?

  - by Gary McGill

  I have a pattern that I almost always follow, where if I need to wrap up an operation in a transaction, I do this: BEGIN TRANSACTION SAVE TRANSACTION TX -- Stuff IF @error <> 0 ROLLBACK TRANSACTION TX COMMIT TRANSACTION That's served me well enough in the past, but after years of using this pattern (and copy-pasting the above code), I've suddenly discovered a flaw which comes as a complete shock. Quite often, I'll have a stored procedure calling other stored procedures, all of which use this same pattern. What I've discovered (to my cost) is that because I'm using the same savepoint name everywhere, I can get into a situation where my outer transaction is partially committed - precisely the opposite of the atomicity that I'm trying to achieve. I've put together an example that exhibits the problem. This is a single batch (no nested stored procs), and so it looks a little odd in that you probably wouldn't use the same savepoint name twice in the same batch, but my real-world scenario would be too confusing to post. CREATE TABLE Test (test INTEGER NOT NULL) BEGIN TRAN SAVE TRAN TX BEGIN TRAN SAVE TRAN TX INSERT INTO Test(test) VALUES (1) COMMIT TRAN TX BEGIN TRAN SAVE TRAN TX INSERT INTO Test(test) VALUES (2) COMMIT TRAN TX DELETE FROM Test ROLLBACK TRAN TX COMMIT TRAN TX SELECT * FROM Test DROP TABLE Test When I execute this, it lists one record, with value "1". In other words, even though I rolled back my outer transaction, a record was added to the table. What's happening is that the ROLLBACK TRANSACTION TX at the outer level is rolling back as far as the last SAVE TRANSACTION TX at the inner level. Now that I write this all out, I can see the logic behind it: the server is looking back through the log file, treating it as a linear stream of transactions; it doesn't understand the nesting/hierarchy implied by either the nesting of the transactions (or, in my real-world scenario, by the calls to other stored procedures). So, clearly, I need to start using unique savepoint names instead of blindly using "TX" everywhere. But - and this is where I finally get to the point - is there a way to do this in a copy-pastable way so that I can still use the same code everywhere? Can I auto-generate the savepoint name on the fly somehow? Is there a convention or best-practice for doing this sort of thing? It's not exactly hard to come up with a unique name every time you start a transaction (could base it off the SP name, or somesuch), but I do worry that eventually there would be a conflict - and you wouldn't know about it because rather than causing an error it just silently destroys your data... :-(

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• Efficiency of Java "Double Brace Initialization"?

  - by Jim Ferrans

  In Hidden Features of Java the top answer mentions Double Brace Initialization, with a very enticing syntax: Set<String> flavors = new HashSet<String>() {{ add("vanilla"); add("strawberry"); add("chocolate"); add("butter pecan"); }}; This idiom creates an anonymous inner class with just an instance initializer in it, which "can use any [...] methods in the containing scope". Main question: Is this as inefficient as it sounds? Should its use be limited to one-off initializations? (And of course showing off!) Second question: The new HashSet must be the "this" used in the instance initializer ... can anyone shed light on the mechanism? Third question: Is this idiom too obscure to use in production code? Summary: Very, very nice answers, thanks everyone. On question (3), people felt the syntax should be clear (though I'd recommend an occasional comment, especially if your code will pass on to developers who may not be familiar with it). On question (1), The generated code should run quickly. The extra .class files do cause jar file clutter, and slow program startup slightly (thanks to coobird for measuring that). Thilo pointed out that garbage collection can be affected, and the memory cost for the extra loaded classes may be a factor in some cases. Question (2) turned out to be most interesting to me. If I understand the answers, what's happening in DBI is that the anonymous inner class extends the class of the object being constructed by the new operator, and hence has a "this" value referencing the instance being constructed. Very neat. Overall, DBI strikes me as something of an intellectual curiousity. Coobird and others point out you can achieve the same effect with Arrays.asList, varargs methods, Google Collections, and the proposed Java 7 Collection literals. Newer JVM languages like Scala, JRuby, and Groovy also offer concise notations for list construction, and interoperate well with Java. Given that DBI clutters up the classpath, slows down class loading a bit, and makes the code a tad more obscure, I'd probably shy away from it. However, I plan to spring this on a friend who's just gotten his SCJP and loves good natured jousts about Java semantics! ;-) Thanks everyone!

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• Multi-part question about multi-threading, locks and multi-core processors (multi ^ 3)

  - by MusiGenesis

  I have a program with two methods. The first method takes two arrays as parameters, and performs an operation in which values from one array are conditionally written into the other, like so: void Blend(int[] dest, int[] src, int offset) { for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++) { int rdr = dest[i + offset]; dest[i + offset] = src[i] > rdr? src[i] : rdr; } } The second method creates two separate sets of int arrays and iterates through them such that each array of one set is Blended with each array from the other set, like so: void CrossBlend() { int[][] set1 = new int[150][75000]; // we'll pretend this actually compiles int[][] set2 = new int[25][10000]; // we'll pretend this actually compiles for (int i1 = 0; i1 < set1.Length; i1++) { for (int i2 = 0; i2 < set2.Length; i2++) { Blend(set1[i1], set2[i2], 0); // or any offset, doesn't matter } } } First question: Since this apporoach is an obvious candidate for parallelization, is it intrinsically thread-safe? It seems like no, since I can conceive a scenario (unlikely, I think) where one thread's changes are lost because a different threads ~simultaneous operation. If no, would this: void Blend(int[] dest, int[] src, int offset) { lock (dest) { for (int i = 0; i < src.Length; i++) { int rdr = dest[i + offset]; dest[i + offset] = src[i] > rdr? src[i] : rdr; } } } be an effective fix? Second question: If so, what would be the likely performance cost of using locks like this? I assume that with something like this, if a thread attempts to lock a destination array that is currently locked by another thread, the first thread would block until the lock was released instead of continuing to process something. Also, how much time does it actually take to acquire a lock? Nanosecond scale, or worse than that? Would this be a major issue in something like this? Third question: How would I best approach this problem in a multi-threaded way that would take advantage of multi-core processors (and this is based on the potentially wrong assumption that a multi-threaded solution would not speed up this operation on a single core processor)? I'm guessing that I would want to have one thread running per core, but I don't know if that's true.

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• Problems related to showing MessageBox from non-GUI threads

  - by Hans Løken

  I'm working on a heavily data-bound Win.Forms application where I've found some strange behavior. The app has separate I/O threads receiving updates through asynchronous web-requests which it then sends to the main/GUI thread for processing and updating of application-wide data-stores (which in turn may be data-bound to various GUI-elements, etc.). The server at the other end of the web-requests requires periodic requests or the session times out. I've gone through several attempted solutions of dealing with thread-issues etc. and I've observed the following behavior: If I use Control.Invoke for sending updates from I/O-thread(s) to main-thread and this update causes a MessageBox to be shown the main form's message pump stops until the user clicks the ok-button. This also blocks the I/O-thread from continuing eventually leading to timeouts on the server. If I use Control.BeginInvoke for sending updates from I/O-thread(s) to main-thread the main form's message pump does not stop, but if the processing of an update leads to a messagebox being shown, the processing of the rest of that update is halted until the user clicks ok. Since the I/O-threads keep running and the message pump keeps processing messages several BeginInvoke's for updates may be called before the one with the message box is finished. This leads to out-of-sequence updates which is unacceptable. I/O-threads add updates to a blocking queue (very similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/530211/creating-a-blocking-queuet-in-net/530228#530228). GUI-thread uses a Forms.Timer that periodically applies all updates in the blocking queue. This solution solves both the problem of blocking I/O threads and sequentiality of updates i.e. next update will be never be started until previous is finished. However, there is a small performance cost as well as introducing a latency in showing updates that is unacceptable in the long run. I would like update-processing in the main-thread to be event-driven rather than polling. So to my question. How should I do this to: avoid blocking the I/O-threads guarantee that updates are finished in-sequence keep the main message pump running while showing a message box as a result of an update.

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• Which third party website thumbnailing services do you use?

  - by Ben Delarre

  I've got a requirement for showing thumbnails of arbitrary websites. I need to be able to show small thumbnails (120px by 90px), and larger thumbnails of around 480px wide. I'll need to specify the queue and invalid placeholder images and preferably have a pingback when the queued images are processed so I can respond appropriately. I'd also need a simple API I can use either directly embedded in my HTML, or from a simple web request to queue the images. I've been looking at various services ranging from low-fi services, to large scale ones - here's some examples: www.bitpixels.com Uses Google AppEngine, seems like a prototype or a toy. Free! www.websnapr.com Tried using this, made a free account and requested a thumbnail. Waited a few minutes and refreshed a couple of times, and ended up having the account banned. Free is tricky yes, but if I can't try it out successfully I'm disinclined to pay. www.shrinktheweb.com Free account seems to be very quick. Lots of documentation on the site, and even covers local caching of the images to your own server (documentation mostly in PHP). Quality of thumbnails look good, and there appear to be sufficient options for setting thumbnail placeholder images and parameters for altering how the thumbnailing is done. Also supports large 'screenshots' of URLs - very useful for me. Discovered the PRO pricing is an à la carte menu, allowing me to select just the features I want and keep the monthly cost low. Excellent stuff, have decided to use this service. www.thumbalizr.com Good coverage of thumbnail sizes and control options - even allowing specification for browser width when thumbnailing. No ping-back, but I can live without that. Supports local caching of images with PHP API, would prefer .NET, but can port it if necessary. Looks like a fairly professional service but seems fairly expensive for the number of thumbnails you get to generate. apologies for lack of proper linking - spam protection! I'm not entirely convinced by any of them, and since this will be a long term service I'd like some stability and support. I'm willing to pay for the service, but I'd want something that fulfills most if not all of my requirements for that. I should also mention that we're hosted on Windows under IIS, so local solutions involving Xvfb and the like sadly can't be used for this project. So my question is: what services do you use? How have they panned out, are you happy with them?

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• Cases of companies taking IP rights of your own personal projects developed outside company time

  - by GSS

  Hi, I have heard of cases where a developer working for a company is also making his own personal projects in his own time, using his own equipment yet the company he works for tries to claim ownership for the project. I really find this annoying, and bang out of order. It should also be illegal. I am in this position (work for a company and working on my own systems - from small class libraries used to practise what I learn in my exam revision to a large commercial-scale system). While I don't know if the company will try to take ownership, all I know is they say they do not want a conflict of interest. Fair enough, my system is developed in my own time using my own equipment. They also say that work time should be for work only, which it is. Funny thing that as work is so boring, easy and slow that I have plenty of free time, which I wish I could spend on something productive - said system. The problem is, my company does not take hiring technical talent seriously. This is my first job, I am a junior coder (but my status/position doesn't really reflect what I can do), but I am the only developer. Likewise with the guy who controls Windows Server. As the contract does not say anything about taking ownership, I would assume they would. They would try to milk my success (I've made a good impression so I am sure they would). How can this be allowed? Are there any examples of this happening to any fellow Stacker here? It really makes my blood boil. What I find funny is that my company hardly has the expertise and resources to even be able to successfully run a project of my size. What I do at work is an ASP.NET application consisting of five pages, and even then there are flaws in the project. If I told them that they would also have to take responsibility for flaws in the project, then they would think twice! It's exactly because of this I save the best code for myself and at work I write rubbish code full of code smells. The company don't really care about error handling, as long as the business functionality works (ie a scheduled email sends, but there is no error handling). They'd think twice when they see the embarassment and business cost of a YSOD...

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• Volunteer for a potential employer?

  - by EoRaptor013

  I've been looking for work since March, and haven't had much luck. Recently, however, I interviewed with a small company near my home for a C#, .NET, SQL development position. I hit it off very well with the hiring manager during the phone screen, and even more so during the face to face. Unfortunately, I failed the practical test: wiring up a web form, creating a couple of SQL stored procedures, saving new data with validation, and creating a minimal search screen. I knew what I was doing, but I was too slow to meet their standards as all the work needed to be done within an hour. Nevertheless, I really liked the place, the environment, the people who I would have been working with, and the boss. (I gave the company an 11 on Joel's 12 point scale.) So, the obvious next step was to scrape the rust off. I've been trying to create little projects for myself, but I don't know that I've been effective in getting any faster. What with all that goes into creating a project, I'm not heads-down coding as much as I think I need. Now, with all that introduction, here's the question. I have been thinking about calling the hiring manager at that place, and asking him to let me volunteer for three or four weeks, with no strings attached. I think it would benefit me, and wouldn't cost him anything (as long as I didn't slow the existing people down!). At the end of that period, he might, or might not, be inclined to hire me, but even if not, I would have had as much as 160 hours of in the trenches development. Maybe not all shiny, but no more rust, I would think. Does this plan make any sense at all? I certainly don't want to sound desperate (although, I'm not far from being there), and I very much need the tuneup, lube, and change the oil. What's the downside, if any, to me doing this? Do any of you see red flags going up—either from the prerspective of the hiring manager, or from the perspective of a developer?

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• Web P2P video confrence solution

  - by dtroy

  I'm looking for the best possible solution which will allow me to incorporate live video/audio conference between 2 users(only 2 at this point) into a flash gaming platform. The video chat is not just an extra feature, it's the main one. I'm mainly looking at open source implementations or something I'll be able to implement myself, but will consider commercial products if they are exactly what I need. Here are a few things I've looked at, but so far, I didn't find any of them good enough: Flash player 10's P2P capabilities sound promising, but I am aware of the fact that Adobe has not release any information on the RTMFP protocol and that there is no commercial server which supports it at this point. Stream all the video/audio live through a flash server (not p2p), but from my personal experience you don't get a smooth conversation. I think TokBox uses this method Java applets are a possible solution too (to perform p2p), but I don't think it will be a nice and elegant solution to combine them in the game at this point (and requires the user to authorize them). BTW, I couldn't find any useful implementations. So, If you know of any, i'll look into them. Google Gmail Video Chat uses a custom (and proprietary) browser plug-in which does the p2p and streams the video/audio into the flash player. This is a possible solution, but I rather not implement the entire p2p protocol stack + browser plug-in at this stage and concentrate on other aspect of the game itself. I think they are using XMPP based protocol similar to Jingle and they've release a Jingle librarby but without the video confrencing implementation. EDIT: In response to Branden: I am aware of Adobe Stratus. Stratus is a beta, hosted rendezvous service that aids establishing communications between Flash Player endpoints (RTMFP server). This current release of the Stratus is prerelease and is designed for evaluation purposes only. The service is not final. There is no guarantee that the service will continue to exist in the future or any information about the future cost. That's why I don't think it can be used as a commercial solution. At least not yet. I'd appreciate your suggestions and advice. thanks!

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• How do you attract programmers in rural areas?

  - by Reed Copsey

  I run a software development group for a very small, but stable and established company in a small town, somewhat outside of the "big city". Unfortunately, the "programmer" labor pool is much smaller due to the size of the city. There are many positives to working in this area, especially in terms of quality of life (particularly for people interested in outdoor activities), lower cost of living, great schools and neighborhoods, etc. However, I've always had difficulty attracting high-qualtiy, experienced developers. For those of you who hire developers outside of large cities: Where do you advertise to find good developers? Many of the large sites are very focused in certain metropolitan areas, and seem inappropriate places to advertise if you're outside of that main region. How do you attract quality developers to rural (or at least less metropolitan) locations? Do you find that you make more sacrifices in your hiring due to a smaller labor pool? Or do you just wait, and take extra time to attract people? What sacrifices do you expect to make if you are outside of the main developer-rich cities? For all of the developers out there... What would entice you to working in a smaller town? Are there things that would stand out and make you willing to relocate or at least apply to a position that was not nearby? What specific qualities would help you want to move outside of the city? In the past, I've had difficulty with finding good people. Most of the people who've applied and been willing to move out to a more rural location seem like the types that can't keep a quality job elsewhere. I'd like to know what advice people have to attracting quality technical staff. I don't believe its the work itself that's been the problem - The work is both interesting and challenging, and nearly 100% new development. The developers I have seem very happy with their situation - they love the work, the atmosphere, etc. It's more a matter of finding willing, able developers. Edit: More info after the first couple of answers: Right now, some of my best developers telecommute (some work from overseas); however, for this question, I'm trying to figure out how to get people who want to live and work full time locally. I need some people with whom I interact every day.

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• Function-Local Static Const variable Initialization semantics.

  - by Hassan Syed

  The questions are in bold, for those that cannot be bothered reading a question in depth. This is a followup to this question. It is to do with the initialization semantics of static variables in functions. Static variables should be initialized once, and their internal state might be altered later - as I (currently) do in the linked question. However, the code in question does not require the feature to change the state of the variable later. Let me clarrify my position, since I don't require the string object's internal state to change. The code is for a trait class for meta programming, and as such would would benifit from a const char * const ptr -- thus Ideally a local cost static const variable is needed. My educated guess is that in this case the string in question will be optimally placed in memory by the link-loader, and that the code is more secure and maps to the intended semantics. This leads to the semantics of such a variable "The C++ Programming language Third Edition -- Stroustrup" does not have anything (that I could find) to say about this matter. All that is said is that the variable is initialized once when the flow of control of the thread first reaches the code. This leads me to ponder if the following code would be sensible, and if not what are the intended semantics ?. #include <iostream> const char * const GetString(const char * x_in) { static const char * const x = x_in; return x; } int main() { const char * const temp = GetString("yahoo"); std::cout << temp << std::endl; const char * const temp2 = GetString("yahoo2"); std::cout << temp2 << std::endl; } The following compiles on GCC and prints "yahoo" twice. Which is what I want -- However it might not be standards compliant (which is why I post this question). It might be more elegant to have two functions, "SetString" and "String" where the latter forwards to the first. If it is standards compliant does someone know of a templates implementation in boost (or elsewhere) ?

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• What are the types and inner workings of a query optimizer?

  - by Frank Developer

  As I understand it, most query optimizers are cost-based. Some can be influenced by hints like FIRST_ROWS(). Others are tailored for OLAP. Is it possible to know more detailed logic about how Informix IDS and SE's optimizers decide what's the best route for processing a query, other than SET EXPLAIN? Is there any documentation which illustrates the ranking of SELECT statements? I would imagine that "SELECT col FROM table WHERE ROWID = n" ranks 1st. What are the rest of them?.. If I'm not mistaking, Informix's ROWID is a SERIAL(INT) which allows for a max. of 2GB nrows, or maybe it uses INT9 for TB's nrows?.. However, I think Oracle uses HEX values for ROWID. Too bad ROWID can't be oftenly used, since a rows ROWID can change. So maybe ROWID is used by the optimizer as a counter? Perhaps, it could be used for implementing the query progress idea I mentioned in my "Begin viewing query results before query completes" question? For some reason, I feel it wouldn't be that difficult to report a query's progress while being processed, perhaps at the expense of some slight overhead, but it would be nice to know ahead of time: A "Google-like" estimate of how many rows meet a query's criteria, display it's progress every 100, 200, 500 or 1,000 rows, give users the ability to cancel it at anytime and start displaying the qualifying rows as they are being put into the current list, while it continues searching?.. This is just one example, perhaps we could think other neat/useful features, the ingridients are more or less there. Perhaps we could fine-tune each query with more granularity than currently available? OLTP queries tend to be mostly static and pre-defined. The "what-if's" are more OLAP, so let's try to add more control and intelligence to it? So, therefore, being able to more precisely control, not "hint-influence" a query is what's needed and therefore it would be necessary to know how the optimizers logic is programmed. We can then have Dynamic SELECT and other statements for specific situations! Maybe even tell IDS to read blocks of indexes nodes at-a-time instead of one-by-one, etc. etc.

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• Optimize date query for large child tables: GiST or GIN?

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Problem 72 child tables, each having a year index and a station index, are defined as follows: CREATE TABLE climate.measurement_12_013 ( -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: id bigint NOT NULL DEFAULT nextval('climate.measurement_id_seq'::regclass), -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: station_id integer NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: taken date NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: amount numeric(8,2) NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: category_id smallint NOT NULL, -- Inherited from table climate.measurement_12_013: flag character varying(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT ' '::character varying, CONSTRAINT measurement_12_013_category_id_check CHECK (category_id = 7), CONSTRAINT measurement_12_013_taken_check CHECK (date_part('month'::text, taken)::integer = 12) ) INHERITS (climate.measurement) CREATE INDEX measurement_12_013_s_idx ON climate.measurement_12_013 USING btree (station_id); CREATE INDEX measurement_12_013_y_idx ON climate.measurement_12_013 USING btree (date_part('year'::text, taken)); (Foreign key constraints to be added later.) The following query runs abysmally slow due to a full table scan: SELECT count(1) AS measurements, avg(m.amount) AS amount FROM climate.measurement m WHERE m.station_id IN ( SELECT s.id FROM climate.station s, climate.city c WHERE -- For one city ... -- c.id = 5182 AND -- Where stations are within an elevation range ... -- s.elevation BETWEEN 0 AND 3000 AND 6371.009 * SQRT( POW(RADIANS(c.latitude_decimal - s.latitude_decimal), 2) + (COS(RADIANS(c.latitude_decimal + s.latitude_decimal) / 2) * POW(RADIANS(c.longitude_decimal - s.longitude_decimal), 2)) ) <= 50 ) AND -- -- Begin extracting the data from the database. -- -- The data before 1900 is shaky; insufficient after 2009. -- extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) BETWEEN 1900 AND 2009 AND -- Whittled down by category ... -- m.category_id = 1 AND m.taken BETWEEN -- Start date. (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date AND -- End date. Calculated by checking to see if the end date wraps -- into the next year. If it does, then add 1 to the current year. -- (cast(extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) + greatest( -1 * sign( (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-12-31')::date - (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date ), 0 ) AS text)||'-12-31')::date GROUP BY extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) The sluggishness comes from this part of the query: m.taken BETWEEN /* Start date. */ (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date AND /* End date. Calculated by checking to see if the end date wraps into the next year. If it does, then add 1 to the current year. */ (cast(extract( YEAR FROM m.taken ) + greatest( -1 * sign( (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-12-31')::date - (extract( YEAR FROM m.taken )||'-01-01')::date ), 0 ) AS text)||'-12-31')::date The HashAggregate from the plan shows a cost of 10006220141.11, which is, I suspect, on the astronomically huge side. There is a full table scan on the measurement table (itself having neither data nor indexes) being performed. The table aggregates 237 million rows from its child tables. Question What is the proper way to index the dates to avoid full table scans? Options I have considered: GIN GiST Rewrite the WHERE clause Separate year_taken, month_taken, and day_taken columns to the tables What are your thoughts? Thank you!

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• Closure Tables - Is this enough data to display a tree view?

  - by James Pitt

  Here is the table I have created by testing the closure table method. | id | parentId | childId | hops | | | | | 270 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 271 | 7 | 7 | 0 | 272 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 273 | 9 | 9 | 0 | 276 | 10 | 10 | 0 | 281 | 9 | 10 | 1 | 282 | 7 | 9 | 1 | 283 | 7 | 10 | 2 | 285 | 7 | 8 | 1 | 286 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 287 | 6 | 9 | 2 | 288 | 6 | 10 | 3 | 289 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 293 | 6 | 9 | 1 | 294 | 6 | 10 | 2 I am trying to create a simple tree of this using PHP. There does not seem to be enough data to create the table. For example, when I look purely at parentId = 6: -Part 6 -Part 7 - ? - ? -Part 9 - ? - ? We know that parts 8 and 10 exists below Part 7 or 9, but not which. We know that part 10 exists at both 3 and 4 nodes deep but where? If I look at other data in the table it is possible to tell it should be: - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 9 - Part 10 I thought one of the benefits of closure tables was there was no need for recursive queries? Could you help explain what I am doing wrong? EDIT: For clarification, this is a mapping table. There is another table called "parts" which has a column called part_id that correlates to both the parentId and childId columns in the "closure" table. The "id" column in the table above (closure) is just for the purposes of maintaining a primary key. It is not really necessary. The methods I have used to create this closure table is described in the following article: http://dirtsimple.org/2010/11/simplest-way-to-do-tree-based-queries.html EDIT2: It can have two and three hops. I will explain easier by assigning names to the items. Part 6 = Bicycle Part 7 = Gears Part 8 = Chain Part 9 = Bolt Part 10 = Nut Nut is part of Bolt. The Bolt and Nut combo exists directly within Bicycle and within Gears which is part of Bicycle. In relation to what method to use I have looked at Adjacency, Edges, Enum Paths, Closures, DAGS(networks) and the Nested Set Model. I am still trying to work out what is what, but this is an extremely complex component database where there are multiple parents and any modification to a sub-tree must propogate through the other trees. More importantly there will be insertions, deletions and tree views that I wish to avoid recursion during general use, even at the cost of database space and query time during entry.

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• Using empty row as default in a ComboBox with Style "DropDownList"?

  - by Pesche Helfer

  Hi board I am trying to write a method, that takes a ComboBox, a DataTable and a TextBox as arguments. The purpose of it is to filter the members displayed in the ComboBox according to the TextBox.Text. The DataTable contains the entire list of possible entries that will then be filtered. For filtering, I create a DataView of the DataTable, add a RowFilter and then bind this View to the ComboBox as DataSource. To prevent the user from typing into the ComboBox, I choose the DropDownStyle DropDownList. That’s working fine so far, except that the user should also be able to choose nothing / empty line. In fact, this should be the default member to be displayed (to prevent choosing a wrong member by accident, if the user clicks through the dialog too fast). I tried to solve this problem by adding a new Row to the view. While this works for some cases, the main issue here is that any DataTable can be passed to the method. If the DataTable contains columns that cannot be null and don’t contain a default value, I suppose I will raise an error by adding an empty row. A possibility would be to create a view that contains only the column that is defined as DisplayMember, and the one that is defined as ValueMember. Alas, this can’t be done with a view in C#. I would like to avoid creating a true copy of the DataTable at all cost, since who knows how big it will get with time. Do you have any suggestions how to get around this problem? Instead of a view, could I create an object containing two members and assign the DisplayMember and the ValueMember to these members? Would the members be passed as reference (what I hope) or would true copied be created (in which case it would not be a solution)? Thank you very much for your help! Best regards public static void ComboFilter(ComboBox cb, DataTable dtSource, TextBox filterTextBox) { cb.DropDownStyle = ComboBoxStyle.DropDownList; string displayMember = cb.DisplayMember; DataView filterView = new DataView(dtSource); filterView.AddNew(); filterView.RowFilter = displayMember + " LIKE '%" + filterTextBox.Text + "%'"; cb.DataSource = filterView; }

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• shipping and handling fee calculation

  - by Newb

  Here is the question: Many companies normally charge a shipping and handling fee for purchases. Create a Web page that allows a user to enter a purchase price into a text box - include a JavaScript function that calculates shipping and handling. Add functionality to the script that adds a minimum shipping and handling fee of $1.50 for any purchase that is less than or equal to $25.00. For any orders over $25.00, add 10% to the total purchase price for shipping and handling, but do not include the $1.50 minimum shipping and handling fee. After you determine the total cost of the order (purchase plus shipping and handling), display it in an alert dialog box. I am beginner at JavaScript and struggling to get my code to work. It does display an alert box with the value entered by the user but doesn't add anything. Although, I don't know why the formula doesn't work. Please help. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Calculating Shipping & Handling</title> <script type="text/javascript"> /* <![CDATA[ */ var price=[]; var shipping=[]; var total=price+shipping; function calculateShipping(){ if (price <= 25){ shipping = (price + 1.5); } else { shipping = (price * 10 / 100); } window.alert("The purchase price with shipping is " + document.calculate.ent.value); } /* ]]> */ </script> </head> <body> <form name ="calculate" action="" > <p>Enter Purchase Price</p> <input type="text" name="ent" > <input type="button" name="button" value="Submit" onClick="calculateShipping()" /> </form> </body> </html>

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• When to call glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB)?

  - by Steven Lu

  I have a rendering system where I draw to an FBO with a multisampled renderbuffer, then blit it to another FBO with a texture in order to resolve the samples in order to read off the texture to perform post-processing shading while drawing to the backbuffer (FBO index 0). Now I'd like to get some correct sRGB output... The problem is the behavior of the program is rather inconsistent between when I run it on OS X and Windows and this also changes depending on the machine: On Windows with the Intel HD 3000 it will not apply the sRGB nonlinearity but on my other machine with a Nvidia GTX 670 it does. On the Intel HD 3000 in OS X it will also apply it. So this probably means that I'm not setting my GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB enable state at the right points in the program. However I can't seem to find any tutorials that actually tell me when I ought to enable it, they only ever mention that it's dead easy and comes at no performance cost. I am currently not loading in any textures so I haven't had a need to deal with linearizing their colors yet. To force the program to not simply spit back out the linear color values, what I have tried is simply comment out my glDisable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) line, which effectively means this setting is enabled for the entire pipeline, and I actually redundantly force it back on every frame. I don't know if this is correct or not. It certainly does apply a nonlinearization to the colors but I can't tell if this is getting applied twice (which would be bad). It could apply the gamma as I render to my first FBO. It could do it when I blit the first FBO to the second FBO. Why not? I've gone so far as to take screen shots of my final frame and compare raw pixel color values to the colors I set them to in the program: I set the input color to RGB(1,2,3) and the output is RGB(13,22,28). That seems like quite a lot of color compression at the low end and leads me to question if the gamma is getting applied multiple times. I have just now gone through the sRGB equation and I can verify that the conversion seems to be only applied once as linear 1/255, 2/255, and 3/255 do indeed map to sRGB 13/255, 22/255, and 28/255 using the equation 1.055*C^(1/2.4)+0.055. Given that the expansion is so large for these low color values it really should be obvious if the sRGB color transform is getting applied more than once. So, I still haven't determined what the right thing to do is. does glEnable(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) only apply to the final framebuffer values, in which case I can just set this during my GL init routine and forget about it hereafter?

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• Can this way of storing typed objects be improved?

  - by Pindatjuh

  This is an "can it be improved"-question. Topic: Storing typed objects in memory. Background information: I'm building a compiler for the x86-32 Windows platform for my language. My goal includes typed objects. Idea: Every primitive is a semi-class (it can be used as if it was a normal class, but it's stored more compact). Every class is represented by primitives and some meta-data (containing class-properties, inheritance stuff, etc.). The meta-data is complex: it doesn't use fields but instead context-switches. For primitives, the meta-data is very small, compared to a "real" class, which is alot bigger. This enables another idea that "primitives are objects", in my language, which I found nessecairy. Example: If I have an array of 32 booleans, then the pure content of this array is exactly 4 byte (32 bits of booleans). The meta-data will contain flags that the type is an array of booleans, which contains 32 entries. The meta-data is very compacted, on bit-level: using a sort of "packing" mechanism, which is read by a FSM at runtime, when doing inspection of the type (like when passing the object to methods for checking, etc.) For instance (read from left to right, top to bottom, remember vertical position when going to the right, and check nearest column header for meaning of switch): Primitive? Array? Type-Meta 1 Byte? || Size (1 byte) 1 1 [...] 1 [...] done 0 2 Bytes? || Size (2 bytes) 1 [...] done || Size (4 bytes) 0 [...] done Integer? 1 Byte? 2 Bytes? 0 1 0 1 done 1 done 0 done Boolean? Byte? 0 1 0 done 1 done More-Primitives 0 .... Class-Stuff (Huge) 0 ... (After reaching done the data is inserted. || = byte alignment. [...] is variable sized. ... is not described here, for simplicity. And let's call them cost-based-data-structures.) For an array of 32 booleans containing all true values, the memory for this type would be (read top-down): 1 Primitive 1 Array 1 ArrayType: Primitive 0 Not-Array 0 Not-Integer 1 Boolean 0 Not-Byte (thus bit) 1 Integer Size: 1 Byte 00100000 Array size 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 Data (user defined) Thus, 8 bytes represent 32 booleans in an array: 11100101 00100000 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 How can I improve this? (Both performance- and memory-consumption wise)

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• How can I create the XML::Simple data structure using a Perl XML SAX parser?

  - by DVK

  Summary: I am looking a fast XML parser (most likely a wrapper around some standard SAX parser) which will produce per-record data structure 100% identical to those produced by XML::Simple. Details: We have a large code infrastructure which depends on processing records one-by-one and expects the record to be a data structure in a format produced by XML::Simple since it always used XML::Simple since early Jurassic era. An example simple XML is: <root> <rec><f1>v1</f1><f2>v2</f2></rec> <rec><f1>v1b</f1><f2>v2b</f2></rec> <rec><f1>v1c</f1><f2>v2c</f2></rec> </root> And example rough code is: sub process_record { my ($obj, $record_hash) = @_; # do_stuff } my $records = XML::Simple->XMLin(@args)->{root}; foreach my $record (@$records) { $obj->process_record($record) }; As everyone knows XML::Simple is, well, simple. And more importantly, it is very slow and a memory hog—due to being a DOM parser and needing to build/store 100% of data in memory. So, it's not the best tool for parsing an XML file consisting of large amount of small records record-by-record. However, re-writing the entire code (which consist of large amount of "process_record"-like methods) to work with standard SAX parser seems like an big task not worth the resources, even at the cost of living with XML::Simple. I'm looking for an existing module which will probably be based on a SAX parser (or anything fast with small memory footprint) which can be used to produce $record hashrefs one by one based on the XML pictured above that can be passed to $obj->process_record($record) and be 100% identical to what XML::Simple's hashrefs would have been. I don't care much what the interface of the new module is; e.g whether I need to call next_record() or give it a callback coderef accepting a record.

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• Using pointers, references, handles to generic datatypes, as generic and flexible as possible

  - by Patrick

  In my application I have lots of different data types, e.g. Car, Bicycle, Person, ... (they're actually other data types, but this is just for the example). Since I also have quite some 'generic' code in my application, and the application was originally written in C, pointers to Car, Bicycle, Person, ... are often passed as void-pointers to these generic modules, together with an identification of the type, like this: Car myCar; ShowNiceDialog ((void *)&myCar, DATATYPE_CAR); The 'ShowNiceDialog' method now uses meta-information (functions that map DATATYPE_CAR to interfaces to get the actual data out of Car) to get information of the car, based on the given data type. That way, the generic logic only has to be written once, and not every time again for every new data type. Of course, in C++ you could make this much easier by using a common root class, like this class RootClass { public: string getName() const = 0; }; class Car : public RootClass { ... }; void ShowNiceDialog (RootClass *root); The problem is that in some cases, we don't want to store the data type in a class, but in a totally different format to save memory. In some cases we have hundreds of millions of instances that we need to manage in the application, and we don't want to make a full class for every instance. Suppose we have a data type with 2 characteristics: A quantity (double, 8 bytes) A boolean (1 byte) Although we only need 9 bytes to store this information, putting it in a class means that we need at least 16 bytes (because of the padding), and with the v-pointer we possibly even need 24 bytes. For hundreds of millions of instances, every byte counts (I have a 64-bit variant of the application and in some cases it needs 6 GB of memory). The void-pointer approach has the advantage that we can almost encode anything in a void-pointer and decide how to use it if we want information from it (use it as a real pointer, as an index, ...), but at the cost of type-safety. Templated solutions don't help since the generic logic forms quite a big part of the application, and we don't want to templatize all this. Additionally, the data model can be extended at run time, which also means that templates won't help. Are there better (and type-safer) ways to handle this than a void-pointer? Any references to frameworks, whitepapers, research material regarding this?

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