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• Suggestions for getting an open source electron beam tracking code going

  - by Boaz

  I work in the field of accelerator physics and synchrotron radiation. High energy electrons circulating in large rings of magnets produce x-rays that are used for a variety of different kinds of science. Running and improving these facilities requires controlling and modelling the electron beam as it circulates in the ring. A code to model this basically requires trackers to follow the electrons through the elements (something called a symplectic integrator), and then the computation of different parameters associated with this motion. The problem with these codes is that every facility has there own. In principle the code is not so complex. And as a modelling project, one might think it has some general interest. Who doesn't want to be able to create a track in space out of magnets and watch the electrons circulate? There is a Matlab based code to do this called Accelerator Toolbox, but the creator of the code is no longer in the field. I put the code in Sourceforge under the name atcollab. The basic resource is in C- it is the set of symplectic integrators. These are available in the atcollab code here. It has been useful to put the code on Sourceforge in order to exchange code, but the community of users is quite small and most are too busy to put that much time into collaboration. So in terms of really improving the code, I don't think it has been so successful. Any piece of this picture could be recreated without that much difficulty, but overall it is a bit complex, and because each lab has their own installation with lots of add-on Matlab code, people find it hard to really work together and share code. Somehow I think we need to involve a wider community in our development, or just use some standard tools. But for that, I suppose it needs to be of some general interest. I think symplectic integrators may have some general interest. And the part about a plug-in architecture to build up the ring ought to fit other patterns. Or the other option is to just accept that this is not a problem of general interest, and work harder within our small community. Suggestions, or anecdotes of analogous experience would be appreciated.

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• State / Screen management in Entity Component Systems

  - by David Lively

  My entity/component system is happily humming along and, despite some performance concerns I initially had, everything is working fine. However, I've realized that I missed a crucial point when starting this thing: how do you handle different screens? At the moment, I have a GameManager class which owns a component manager and entity manager. When I create an entity, the entity manager assigns it an ID and makes sure it's tracked. When I modify the components that are assigned to an entity. an UpdateEntity method is called, which alerts each of the systems that they may need to add or remove the entity from their respective entity lists. A problem with this is that the collection of entities operated on by each system is determined solely by the individual Systems, typically based on a "required component" filter. (An entity has to have a Renderable component to be rendered, for instance.) In this situation, I can't just keep collections of entities per screen and only Update/Draw those collections. They'd have to either be added and removed depending on their applicability to the current screen, which would cause their associated components to be removed, or enable/disable entities in a group per screen to hide what's not supposed to be visible. These approaches seem like really, really crappy kludges. What's a good way to handle this? A pretty straightforward way that comes to mind is to create a separate GameManager (which in my implementation owns all of the systems, entities, etc.) per screen, which means that everything outside of the device context would be duplicated. That's bothersome because some things are always visible, or I might want to continue to display the game under a translucent menu window. Another option would be to add a "layer" key to the GameManager class, which could be checked against a displayable layer stack held by the game manager. *System.Draw() would be called for each active layer, in the required order as determined by the stack. When the systems request an iterator for their respective entity collections, it would be pre-filtered to a (cached) set of those entities that participate in the active layer. Those collections could be updated from the same UpdateEntity event that's already used to maintain each system's entity collections. Still, kinda feels like a hack. If I've coded myself into a corner, feel free to throw tomatoes as long as they're labeled with a helpful suggestion. Hooray for learning curves.

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• Book review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  - by DigiMortal

     Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is golden classic book that can be considered as mandatory reading for software project managers, team leads, higher level management and board members of software companies. If you make decisions about people then you cannot miss this book. If you are already good on managing developers then this book can make you even better – you will learn new stuff about successful development teams for sure. Why peopleware? Peopleware gives you very good hints about how to build up working environment for project teams where people can really do their work. Book also covers team building topics that are also important reading. As software developer I found practically all points in this book to be accurate and valid. Many times I have found my self thinking about same things and Peopleware made me more confident about my opinions. Peopleware covers also time management and planning topics that help you do way better job on using developers time effectively by minimizing the amount of interruptions by phone calls, pointless meetings and i-want-to-know-what-are-you-doing-right-now questions by managers who doesn’t write code anyway. I think if you follow suggestions given by Peopleware your developers are very happy. I suggest you to also read another great book – Death March by Edward Yourdon. Death March describes you effectively what happens when good advices given by Peopleware are totally ignored or worse yet – people are treated exactly opposite way. I consider also Death March as golden classics and I strongly recommend you to read this book too. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Part 1: Managing the Human Resource Chapter 1: Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Chapter 3: Vienna Waits for You Chapter 4: Quality-If Time Permits Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law Revisited Chapter 6: Laetrile Part II: The Office Environment Chapter 7: The Furniture Police Chapter 8: "You Never Get Anything Done Around Here Between 9 and 5" Chapter 9: Saving Money on Space Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Chapter 10: Brain Time Versus Body Time Chapter 11: The Telephone Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps Part III: The Right People Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor Chapter 15: Hiring a Juggler Chapter 16: Happy to Be Here Chapter 17: The Self-Healing System Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Chapter 18: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts Chapter 19: The Black Team Chapter 20: Teamicide Chapter 21: A Spaghetti Dinner Chapter 22: Open Kimono Chapter 23: Chemistry for Team Formation Part V: It't Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Chapter 24: Chaos and Order Chapter 25: Free Electrons Chapter 26: Holgar Dansk Part VI: Son of Peopleware Chapter 27: Teamicide, Revisited Chapter 28: Competition Chapter 29: Process Improvement Programs Chapter 30: Making Change Possible Chapter 31: Human Capital Chapter 32:Organizational Learning Chapter 33: The Ultimate Management Sin Is Chapter 34: The Making of Community Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

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• Using multiple diagrams per model in Entity Framework 5.0

  - by nikolaosk

  I have downloaded .Net framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 since it was released to MSDN subscribers on the 15th of August.For people that do not know about that yet please have a look at Jason Zander's excellent blog post .Since then I have been investigating the many new features that have been introduced in this release.In this post I will be looking into theIn order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 20120 using this link.My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine. I have also installed in my machine SQL Server 2012 developer edition. I have also downloaded and installed AdventureWorksLT2012 database.You can download this database from the codeplex website.   Before I start showcasing the demo I want to say that I strongly believe that Entity Framework is maturing really fast and now at version 5.0 can be used as your data access layer in all your .Net projects.I have posted extensively about Entity Framework in my blog.Please find all the EF related posts here. In this demo I will show you how to split an entity model into multiple diagrams using the new enhanced EF designer. We will not build an application in this demo.Sometimes our model can become too large to edit or view.In earlier versions we could only have one diagram per EDMX file.In EF 5.0 we can split the model into more diagrams.1) Launch VS 2012. Express edition will work fine.2) Create a New Project. From the available templates choose a Web Forms application  3) Add a new item in your project, an ADO.Net Entity Data Model. I have named it AdventureWorksLT.edmx.Then we will create the model from the database and click Next.Create a new connection by specifying the SQL Server instance and the database name and click OK.Then click Next in the wizard.In the next screen of the wizard select all the tables from the database and hit Finish.4) It will take a while for our .edmx diagram to be created. When I select an Entity (e.g Customer) from my diagram and right click on it,a new option appears "Move to new Diagram".Make sure you have the Model Browser window open.Have a look at the picture below 5) When we do that a new diagram is created and our new Entity is moved there.Have a look at the picture below  6) We can also right-click and include the related entities. Have a look at the picture below. 7) When we do that the related entities are copied to the new diagram.Have a look at the picture below  8) Now we can cut (CTRL+X) the entities from Diagram2 and paste them back to Diagram1.9) Finally another great enhancement of the EF 5.0 designer is that you can change colors in the various entities that make up the model.Select the entities you want to change color, then in the Properties window choose the color of your choice. Have a look at the picture below. To recap we have demonstrated how to split your entity model in multiple diagrams which comes handy in EF models that have a large number of entities in them Hope it helps!!!!

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• Sustainability Activities at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  Close to 50,000 participants will come to San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne events, held September 30-October 4, 2012 at Moscone Center. Oracle is very conscious of the impact that these events have on the environment and, as part of its ongoing commitment to sustainability, has developed a sustainable event program-now in its fifth year-that aims to maximize positive benefits and minimize negative impacts in a variety of ways. Click here for more details. At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, there will be many sessions and even a hands-on lab which discuss the sustainability solutions that Oracle provides for our customers. I wanted to highlight a few of those sessions here so if you will be at Oracle OpenWorld, you can make sure to attend them. One of the most compelling sessions promises to be our “Eco-Enterprise Innovation Awards and the Business Case for Sustainability” session on Wednesday, October 3 from 10:15 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. in Moscone West 3005. Oracle Chairman of the Board Jeff Henley, Chief Sustainability Officer Jon Chorley, and other Oracle executives will honor select customers with Oracle's Eco-Enterprise Innovation award. This award recognizes customers and their respective partners who rely on Oracle products to support their green business practices in order to reduce their environmental impact, while improving business efficiencies and reducing costs. Another interesting session is the “Tracking, Reporting, and Reducing Environmental Impact with Oracle Solutions” which occurs on Monday, October 1 from 4:45 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. in Moscone West Room 2022. This session covers Oracle’s overall sustainability strategy as well as Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting (EA&R), which leverages Oracle ERP and BI solutions for accurate, efficient tracking of energy, emissions, and other environmental data. If you want more details, make sure to visit the hands-on lab titled “Oracle Environmental Accounting & Reporting for Integrated Sustainability Reporting”. This hour-long lab will take place on Tuesday, October 2 at 5:00 p.m. in the Marriott Marquis Hotel-Nob Hill CD. Here you can learn how to use Oracle EA&R to collect sustainability-related data in an efficient and reliable manner as part of existing business processes in Oracle E-Business Suite or JD Edwards Enterprise One. Register for this hands-on lab here.  

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• Ubuntu 12.04.3 Graphics Issues: Broken Pipes, Reinstalled Xorg and Bumblebee

  - by user190488

  It seems I have a problem, and am only making it worse by following what I find online. I have a new Asus N550JV-D71 (not sure about the part after the dash, though I definitely know it includes 71). I decided to downgrade Windows 8 to 7, then dual boot Ubuntu 12.04 with it (there were issues with Windows 8, and I had a Windows 7 disk handy). It did work and, after installing Bumblebee in tty (because it wouldn't boot when it was first installed), it worked marvelously for a little less than a week. However, I restarted it last night and got the Could not write bytes: Broken pipes error. (I see it's a very common error, but I've looked at the majority of the suggested Similar Questions already.) I followed what I could find online, followed those instructions (making sure to not install any sort of graphics drivers other than what Bumblebee provides), and it just seems to go further and further downhill. I'm afraid I didn't write the exact steps to get to this point (it was late by the time I gave up the night before), but it involved reinstalling lightdm, xorg (and xserver?), and Bumblebee. I then changed the Bumblebee.conf file so that Device=nvidia. I'm pretty new to Linux in general (I've used it since 10.04, but I hadn't had issues up until this computer, so it let me stay a newbie), so I'm not exactly sure what log files to look at to find the errors to look up. However, I did look at lshw and noticed that displays was marked as unassigned. Also, if I try to start lightdm using the command line, it always stops at Stopping Mount network filesystems. I should note that there isn't an xorg.conf file, and no .Xauthority. I would really, really prefer not to reinstall 12.04 if possible. I managed to get grub to display only a short time ago, and I can't boot to the dvd drive unless I go into the BIOS settings and manually change the boot order (that was an issue from the beginning, before the Ubuntu install), and getting into those settings often means rebooting several times due to the fact that the window to get to it is extremely small. I have most of what I need backed up, however, in case it does get to that point. If I really have to, I can just use the latest Ubuntu version instead of the LTS, but the reason I chose 12.04 in the first place is because I need something stable-ish, and Windows isn't suitable to what I need to do. I should note that the reason I restarted last night in the first place was that it wasn't charging the battery, and the wifi kept on going out. Hardware: Nvidia GeForce GT 750M Intel HD graphics 4600

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• #SSAS #Tabular Workshop and Community Events in Netherlands and Denmark

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Next week I will finally start the roadshow of the SSAS Tabular Workshop, a 2-day seminar about the new BISM Tabular model for Analysis Services that has been introduced in SQL Server 2012. During these roadshows, we always try to arrange some speeches at local community events in the evening - we already defined for Copenhagen, we have some logistic issue in Amsterdam that we're trying to solve. Here is the timetable: Netherlands SSAS Workshop in Amsterdam, NL – April 16-17, 2012 2-day seminar, I and Alberto will be the trainers for this event, register here We're trying to manage a Community event but we still don't have a confirmation, stay tuned        Denmark SSAS Workshop in Copenhagen, DK – April 26-27, 2012 2-day seminar, I and Alberto will be the trainers for this event, register here Community event on April 26, 2012 This event will run in Hellerup, at Microsoft venue All details available here: http://msbip.dk/events/26/msbip-mode-nr-5/ People from Sweden are welcome! Just register to this private group on LinkedIn in order to announce your presence, so we’ll know how many people will attend In community events we’ll deliver two speeches – here are the descriptions: Inside xVelocity (VertiPaq) PowerPivot and BISM Tabular models in Analysis Services share a great columnar-based database engine called xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq). If you want to improve performance and optimize memory used, you have to understand some basic principles about how this engine works, how data is compressed, and how you can design a data model for better optimization. Prepare yourself to change your mind. xVelocity optimization techniques might seem counterintuitive and are absolutely different than OLAP and SQL ones! Choosing between Tabular and Multidimensional You have a new project and you have to make an important decision upfront. Should you use Tabular or Multidimensional? It is not easy to answer, because sometime there is a clear choice, but most of the times both decisions might be correct, at least at the beginning. In this session we’ll help you making an informed decision, correctly evaluating pros and cons of each one according to common scenarios, considering both short-term and long-term consequences of your choice. I hope to meet many people in this first dates. We have many other events coming in May and June, including an online event (for US time zones), and you can also attend our PreCon Day at TechEd US in Orland (PRC06) or TechEd Europe in Amsterdam. I’ll be a good customer for airline companies in the next three months! I’m just sorry that I hadn’t time to write other articles in the last month, but I’m accumulating material that I will need to write down during some flight – stay tuned…

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• Blender to 3ds max to cal3d format

  - by Kaliber64

  There are quite a few questions on cal3d but they are old and don't apply anymore. In Blender(must be 2.49a for python script to work!!!): I have a scene with 7 meshes, 1 armature, 10 bones. I tried going to one mesh to simplify it but doesn't change anything. I found a small blend file that was used for cal3d and it exported just fine. So I tried to copy it's setup with no success. EDIT*8/13/2012 In the last week here is what I have found so far. I made the mesh in the newest blender(2.62?) and exported it to import it in the old one(2.49a). Did an animation in the old one because importing new blend files to old blenders, its just said it would lose keyframe data and all was good. And then you get the last problem of it not exporting meshes. BUT I found that meshes made in the old one export regardless. I can't find any that won't export. So if I used the old blender to remake my model I could get it to export :) At this point I found a modified release of cal3d (because the most core model variable would not initiate as I made a really small test subject in old blender instead of remaking my big one which took 4 hours.) which fixes the morph objects and adds what cal3d left off with. Under their license they have to release the modification but it has no documentation so I have to figure it out on my own. Its mostly the same. But with this lib it came with a 3ds max exporter. My question now is how do I transfer armature and mesh information from blender to 3ds max in order to export into cal3d format. Every time I try the models are see through and small and there are no bones. The formats I have tried to import are .3ds .obj(mesh only) and COLLADA. In all of them the mesh is invisible and no bones. It says the default texture is on so I should be able to see it. All the vertices are present I found a vertex highlighter so I can see those. If any of this is confusing let me know so I can clear it up. Its late .<=sleep.

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• What is the difference between development and R&D?

  - by MainMa

  I was asked by a colleague to explain clearly the difference between ordinary development and research and development (R&D) and was unable to do it. After reading Wikipedia, I still don't have the precise answer. According to Wikipedia (slightly modified): There are two primary models: In one model, the primary function is to develop new products; in the other model, the primary function is to discover and create new knowledge about scientific and technological topics for the purpose of uncovering and enabling development of valuable new products, processes, and services. The first model is confusing. Does it mean that development (not R&D) consists exclusively in adding new features to a product, solving bugs and doing maintenance? What if something which was previously developed as a new feature becomes a separate product? The second model is less confusing, but still, how to qualify whether something is new knowledge or existent knowledge which is just rediscovered? Later, Wikipedia adds that ordinary development is different from R&D because of its: nearly immediate profit or immediate improvement. It's still not clear enough. How to qualify "nearly immediate profit"? What if a task has an immediate profit but requires heavy research? Or if it is basic but has uncertain profit, like the enforcement of a common style over the codebase? For example, does it belong to development or R&D to: Develop an engine which abstracts the access to the database, simplifying and shortening enormously the code of other applications (existent or ones which will be written in future) which should access to the database? Establish a new service-oriented architecture for the entire organization of company resources, in order to move from a bunch of separate and autonomous applications to a set of well-organized, interconnected web services, like what is used by Amazon? Design a new communication protocol to allow faster replication of data between two data centers of the company? Conceive a new type of software testing while working on a specific product, knowing that this type of testing will improve/simplify the testing process? Prove that Functional programming is more appropriate than OOP for a specific application, based on evidence, logic and previous experience? Enhance the existent application by adding gestures on tactile screens, after doing studies and testing that shows that those gestures improve the productivity of the users by a ratio of at least 1.4 for a precise set of tasks? Find a way to strongly enhance the Power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a data center? Create a Domain-Specific Language (DSL)? In short, how could I determine whether I'm doing R&D while working on something?

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• SOA Community Newsletter September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear SOA partner community member Are you ready for Oracle Open World 2012? If you are planning to attend, make sure that you prepare your trip to San Francisco. If you could not make it, watch the keynotes live on-demand. You can also plan and decide to visit the SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium 2012 and meet Tim Hall and Demed Lher from our product management team in London. As an Oracle partner you will get 50% discount on the conference pass, please use the code DJMXZ370 and avail your discount. The BPM Solution Catalogue is now live, make sure you use the process examples and contribute your processes. SOA Proactive support is the best resource to support your SOA implementations. To administrate your SOA systems Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is the best tool, you can now attend thefree on-demand training. EM12c, Real User Experience Insight 12R1 gives you all the details, checkout our new demo. The BPM11g demo for Oracle E-Business Suite has become available. A wonderful SOA demo case is the Fusion Order Demo, Antony Reynolds posted an article how to update it on SOA Suite PS5. If you do use Coherence e.g. for SOA Suite, checkout the extension from our partner CloudTran. In this edition to this you will also find articles from: Automatically Disable Proxy Service to avoid overloading OSB By Jian Liang & Storing SCA Metadata in the Oracle Metadata Services Repository by Nicolás Fonnegra Martinez and Markus Lohn & Exploring MDS Explorer by Mark Nelson & Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL by Rajesh Raheja & Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence by Jan van Zoggel & Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux Lonneke Dikmans & Generating an EJB SDO Service Interface for Oracle SOA Suite by Edwin Biemond. Jürgen Kress Oracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soanewsSeptember2012 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Can't save data for a member in a data form

  - by RahulS

  Implied sharing is an old thing everyone knows the reasons and solutions of that, still little theory about that: With Essbase implied sharing, some members are shared even if you do not explicitly set them as shared. These members are implied shared members. When an implied share relationship is created, each implied member assumes the other member’s value. Essbase assumes (or implies) a shared member relationship in these situations: 1. A parent has only one child 2. A parent has only one child that consolidates to the parent In a Planning form that contains members with an implied sharing relationship, when a value is added for the parent, the child assumes the same value after the form is saved. Likewise, if a value is added for the child, the parent usually assumes the same value after a form is saved.For example, when a calculation script or load rule populates an implied share member, the other implied share member assumes the value of the member populated by the calculation script or load rule. The last value calculated or imported takes precedence. The result is the same whether you refer to the parent or the child as a variable in a calculation script. For more information have a look at: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hp_admin_11122/ch14s11.html Now the issue which we are going to talk about is We loose data on save even when the parent is dynamic calc and has a single child. A dynamic calc parent to a single child:  If we design the form with following selection: In the data form we will find parent below the member and this is by design whenever you make a selection using commands to select all the member below parent, always children will appear before the parent: Lets try to enter data, Save it Now, try to change the way we selected members Here we go: Now the question again why this behavior: 1. Data from Planning data form passes to Essbase row by row, 2. Because in data form the child member appears before the parent, 3. First, data goes to Essbase for child (SingleStoreChild), 4. Then when Planning passes the data for parent there was #Missing or No data,  5. Over writes the data to #missing. PS: As we know that dynamic calc members are calculated on the fly they are not allocated with any memory in the Essbase, here the parent was dynamic calc and it was pointing to same memory as child in the background, when Planning was passing data to Essbase for second row it has updated the child with missing data.(Little confusing, let me know if you need more explanation) 6. As one of the solutions just change the order of appearance of parent and child. Cheers..!!! Rahul S. https://www.facebook.com/pages/HyperionPlanning/117320818374228

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• Installed LibreOffice 4 with ppa, how do I remove it and go back to LibreOffice 3?

  - by MMA

  EDIT This question is not at all a duplicate of How to downgrade from LibreOffice 4.0 to 3.6? The above mentioned question talks about downgrading from a specific version of LibreOffice, namely from 4.0 to 3.6. The solutions mentioned are not the ones I am looking for. They will work but I wanted a general solution without using PPA or downloading .deb files for from a higher version to a lower version. The above solutions suggest either downloading .deb files for LibreOffice 3.6 or adding repository for it. Furthermore, some of the answers put out-of-proportion~(applicable for the solution, however) stress on use of synaptic, not general command-line-solution. That made me wonder, at this very moment, if I take a fresh computer, and install Ubuntu 12.04, LibreOffice installation will work without a hitch. Then why I can not install LibreOffice in my 12.04 machine today from simple command line? This answer to my question, clarified everything. I need to use ppa-purge so that this resets all packages from a PPA to the standard versions released for my distribution. Basically it is like a way to restore my system back to the way it was before my installed packages from a PPA. This article further elaborates the idea. The above mentioned answer worked perfectly for me. Actually, this was an education for me since it taught me how do downgrade a package that was added via PPA. I had upgraded from LibreOffice 3 to LibreOffice 4 using the PPA. Now since I found that LibreOffice 4 has some issues, including handling my native language, I want to move back to LibreOffice 3. In order to accomplish this, I removed the LibreOffice config directory from my home and then purged LibreOffice from my machine. sudo apt-get purge libreoffice-* Then I removed the relevant PPA's using the sudo apt-add-repository --remove command. And then ran sudo apt-get update. Now, when I try to install LibreOffice using the command sudo apt-get install libreoffice I get an avalanche of output about unmet dependencies, something like, The following packages have unmet dependencies: libreoffice : Depends: libreoffice-core (= 1:3.5.7-0ubuntu4) but it is not going to be installed (snipped) If I dig the issue further, by using the command, sudo apt-get install libreoffice-core I get The following packages have unmet dependencies: libreoffice-core : Depends: libreoffice-common (> 1:3.5.7) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libexttextcat0 (>= 2.2-8) but it is not going to be installed Depends: ure (>= 3.5.7~) but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Could you please tell me how do I install LibreOffice 3 in my machine? I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

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• Less Can Be More In E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Today’s consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the products and services that interest them.  In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult. In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs. The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile have purchased. Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective. Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.

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• Less Can Be More In E-Commerce

  - by Michael Hylton

  Today’s consumers are inundated with product choices and vendors. Visit your favorite electronics retailer and see the vast assortment of flat panel televisions. Or the variety of detergents at the supermarket. All of this can be daunting for the average consumer who is looking for the products and services that interest them.  In a study titled “Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, the author, Sheena Iyengar found that participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. The same can be said for e-commerce and your website. Being able to quickly convert shoppers into buyers with effective merchandising is what makes leading businesses successful. You want to engage each individual visitor with the most-relevant content to drive higher conversions and order values while decreasing abandonment, but predicting what will resonate with each customer is difficult. In a world of choices, online merchandizing tools can help personalize, streamline, and refine what your customers view when they browse your online catalog. The key to being effective is to align your products and content as closely as possible with the customer’s needs. The goal on the home page is to promote your brand and push visitors farther into the site. The home page is often the starting point for repeat customers as well as for new visitors hoping to address their current product needs. As the customer selects different filters and narrows the choices, valuable information is being provided to the retailer about the customer’s current need—regardless of previous search behavior or what other customers with a similar demographic profile have purchased. Together with search pages, category browse pages are among the primary options available to customers as a means of finding products on your site. Once a customer reaches the product detail page, it is clear what that person desires, regardless of the segment the customer falls into. However, don’t disregard campaign-based promotions completely. A campaign targeted to all customers but featuring rule-driven promotions tied to the product can be effective. Click here to learn more about merchandizing techniques so what your customer sees if half full and not half empty.

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• OpenGLES GLSL Shader attributes always bound to 0

  - by codemonkey

  So I have a very simple vertex shader as follows #version 120 attribute vec3 position; attribute vec3 inColor; uniform mat4 mvp; varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void){ fragColor = inColor; gl_Position = mvp * vec4(position, 1.0); } Which I load, as well as the fragment shader: #version 120 varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void) { gl_FragColor = vec4(fragColor,1.0); } Which I then load, compile, and link to my shader program. I check for link status using glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_LINK_STATUS, &shaderSuccess); which returns GL_TRUE so I think its ok. However, when I query the active attributes and uniforms using #ifdef DEBUG int totalAttributes = -1; glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_ACTIVE_ATTRIBUTES, &totalAttributes); for(int i=0; i<totalAttributes; ++i) { int name_len=-1, num=-1; GLenum type = GL_ZERO; char name[100]; glGetActiveAttrib(shaderProgram, GLuint(i), sizeof(name)-1, &name_len, &num, &type, name ); name[name_len] = 0; GLuint location = glGetAttribLocation(shaderProgram, name); fprintf(stderr, "Attribute %s is bound at %d\n", name, location); } int totalUniforms = -1; glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_ACTIVE_UNIFORMS, &totalUniforms); for(int i=0; i<totalUniforms; ++i) { int name_len=-1, num=-1; GLenum type = GL_ZERO; char name[100]; glGetActiveUniform(shaderProgram, GLuint(i), sizeof(name)-1, &name_len, &num, &type, name ); name[name_len] = 0; GLuint location = glGetUniformLocation(shaderProgram, name); fprintf(stderr, "Uniform %s is bound at %d\n", name, location); } #endif I get: Attribute inColor is bound at 0 Attribute position is bound at 1 Uniform mvp is bound at 0 Which leads to failure when trying to use the shader to render the objects. I have tried switching the order of declaration of position & inColor, but still, only position is bound with the other two giving 0 Can someone please explain why this is happening? Thanks

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• box2d resize bodies arround point

  - by philipp

  I have a compound object, consisting of a b2Body, vector-graphics and a list polygons which describe the b2body's shapes. This object has its own transformation matrix to centralize the storage of transformations. So far everything is working quiet fine, even scaling works, but not if i scale around a point. In the initialization phase of the object it is scaled around a point. This happens in this order: transform the main matrix transform the vector graphics and the polygons recreate the b2Body After this function ran, the shapes and all the graphics are exactly where they should be, BUT: after the first steps of the b2World the graphical stuff moves away from the body. When I ran the debugger I found out that the position of the body is 0/0 the red dot shows the center of scaling. the first image shows the basic setup and the second the final position of the graphics. This distance stays constant for the rest of the simulation. If I set the position via myBody.SetPosition( sx, sy ); the whole scenario just plays a bit more distant for the origin. Any Idea how to fix this? EDIT:: I came deeper down to the problem and it lies in the fact that i must not scale the transform matrix for the b2body shapes around the center, but set the b2body's position back to the point after scaling. But how can I calculate that point? EDIT 2 :: I came ever deeper down to it, even solved it, but this is a slow solution and i hope that there is somebody who understands what formula I need. assuming to have a set polygons relative to an origin as basis shapes for a b2body: scaling the whole object around a certain point is done in the following steps: i scale everything around the center except the polygons i create a clone of the polygons matrix i scale this clone around the point i calculate dx, dy as difference of clone.tx - original.tx and clone.ty - original.ty i scale the original polygon matrix NOT around the point i recreate the body i create the fixture i set the position of the body to dx and dy done! So what i an interested in is a formula for dx and dy without cloning matrices, scaling the clone around a point, getting dx and dy and finally scale the vertex matrix.

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• Reporting on common code smells : A POC

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few blog entries, I’ve been looking at parsing TSQL scripts in a variety of ways for a variety of tasks.  In my last entry ‘How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way’, I looked at parsing SQL to report upon uses of SELECT *.  The obvious question leading on from this is, “Great, what about other code smells ?”  Well, using the language service parser to do that was turning out to be a bit of a hard job,  sure I was getting tokens but no real context.  I wasn't even being told when an end of statement had been reached. One of the other parsing options available from Microsoft is exposed in the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom’,  this is ,I believe, installed with the client development tools with SQLServer.  It is much more feature rich than the original parser I had used and breaks a TSQL script into intuitive classes for analysis. So, what sort of smells can I now find using it ?  Well, for an opening gambit quite a nice little list. Use of NOLOCK Set of READ UNCOMMITTED Use of SELECT * Insert without column references Explicit datatype conversion on Sargs Cross server selects Non use of two-part naming convention Table and Query hint usage Changes in set options Use of single line comments Use of ordinal column positions in ORDER BY clause Now, lets not argue the point that “It depends” as smells on some of these, but as an academic exercise it is quite interesting.  The code is available from this link :https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfk32sou4fzl2cw/TSQLDomTest.zip  All the usual disclaimers apply to this code, I cannot be held responsible for anything ranging from mild annoyance through to universe destruction due to the use of this code or examples. The zip file contains a powershell script and my test cases.  The assembly used requires .Net 4 to run, which means that you will need powershell 3 ( though im running through PowerGUI and all works ok ) .  The code searches for all .sql files in the folder hierarchy for the workingpath,  you can override this if you want by simply changing the $Folder variable, and processes each in turn for the smells.  Feedback is not great at the moment, all it does is output to an xml file (Smells.xml) the offset position and a description of the smell found. Right now, I am interested in your feedback.  What do you think ?  Is this (or should it be) more than an academic exercise ?  Can tooling such as this be used as some form of code quality measure ?  Does it Work ? Do you have a case listed above which is not being reported ? Do you have a case that you would love to be reported ? Let me know , please mailto: [email protected]. Thanks

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• RIM's current BB7 developer toolset is a joke

  - by mbrit

  tl;dr - RIM's current developer toolset is not fit for purpose.Background to this is that I'm currently working on a PhoneGap/Cordova project for a client that has to run on BlackBerry. The tooling is so ridiculous to use that even though I had a gentle dig at them in a Guardian piece it's worth having a more full-on attack.At the moment, RIM's pitch is that apps are built for the current BBOS7 devices using WebWorks. This is an HTML-based toolset. Essentially a browser is spun up in a native app container and your app is powered by JavaScript. Specific JavaScript libraries exist that thunk down to native capabilities no the device. I happen to use PhoneCap/Cordova in combination with this.The tooling is non-existent. I'm using TextMate, Ant, and Terminal to develop the app. There's no "console.log" output, and no debugging. The only way to instrument the app is to put "alert" calls in your code.Apart from the fact that that's *not* fine in 2012, how about this… every time you deploy a new app to the device, the device has to reboot. This process takes six minutes on a relatively modern BlackBerry device. How about this as well - in order to get a file into the package it has to be signed. My small app over here has 100 different files (75 or so generated). Signing doesn't happen locally, it happens on RIM's servers in Waterloo. Thus whenever you deploy the app you have this utility have to call RIM's servers 100 times. More to the point, sometimes during the day these servers have "micro-downtime" moments where they're unreachable for five or ten minutes, normally two or three times a day. Oh yes, you'll also get an email sent to you per signing on success or failure. 100 inbound emails, per deployment.(I started this post at the beginning of one of these cycles, by the way. That's how long it takes to build and deploy *once*. By the way, the change I made didn't work.)To clarify:* Change the script,* Build it using Ant,* Ant will spin up a Java app that talks to RIM's servers to sign it.* Receive 100 emails, assuming the server is up.* App deployed - takes about 30 seconds.* BlackBerry device restarts - takes about six minutes.* Find and open the app. Go through security prompts.* Test the app, with no "console.log" output and no debugger."Why not use the simulator?" I hear you ask. Well, apart from the fact that the simulator refused to reach any network service over HTTPS that I happen to own? (Some people suggest changing DNS settings for this known issue.) Admittedly, the simulator does show you console.log, but you still have the "six minute" restart issue on the simulator.Developers will understand this problem. Breaking concentration for six-plus minutes every time you want to deploy an app turns developing into a nightmare. Combining that with no worthy debugging tools turns the toolset into a joke.

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• Walmart's Mobile Self-Checkout

  - by David Dorf

  Reuters recently reported that Walmart was testing an iPhone-based self-checkout at a store near its headquarters.  Consumers scan items as they're placed in the physical basket, then the virtual basket is transferred to an existing self-checkout station where payment is tendered.  A very solid solution, but not exactly original. Before we go further, let's look at the possible cost savings for Walmart.  According to the article: Pushing more shoppers to scan their own items and make payments without the help of a cashier could save Wal-Mart millions of dollars, Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley said on March 7. The company spends about $12 million in cashier wages every second at its Walmart U.S. stores. Um, yeah. Using back-of-the-napkin math, I calculated Walmart's cashiers are making $157k per hour.  A more accurate statement would be saving $12M per year for each second saved on the average transaction time.  So if this self-checkout approach saves 2 seconds per transaction on average, Walmart would save $24M per year on labor.  Maybe.  Sometimes that savings will be used to do other tasks in the store, so it may not directly translate to less employees. When I saw this approach demonstrated in Sweden, there were a few differences, which may or may not be in Walmart's plans.  First, the consumers were identified based on their loyalty card.  In order to offset the inevitable shrink, retailers need to save on labor but also increase basket size, typically via in-aisle promotions.  As they scan items, retailers should target promos, and that's easier to do if you know some shopping history.  Last I checked, Walmart had no loyalty program. Second, at the self-checkout station consumers were randomly selected for an audit in which they must re-scan all the items just like you do at a typical self-checkout.  If you were found to be stealing, your ability to use the system can be revoked.  That's a tough one in the US, especially when the system goes wrong, either by mistake or by lying.  At least in my view, the Swedes are bit more trustworthy than the people of Walmart. So while I think the idea of mobile self-checkout has merit, perhaps its not right for Walmart.

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• 3D terrain map with Hexagon Grids (XNA)

  - by Rob

  I'm working on a hobby project (I'm a web/backend developer by day) and I want to create a 3D Tile (terrain) engine. I'm using XNA, but I can use MonoGame, OpenGL, or straight DirectX, so the answer does not have to be XNA specific. I'm more looking for some high level advice on how to approach this problem. I know about creating height maps and such, there are thousands of references out there on the net for that, this is a bit more specific. I'm more concerned with is the approach to get a 3D hexagon tile grid out of my terrain (since the terrain, and all 3d objects, are basically triangles). The first approach I thought about is to basically draw the triangles on the screen in the following order (blue numbers) to give me the triangles for terrain (black triangles) and then make hexes out of the triangles (red hex). http://screencast.com/t/ebrH2g5V This approach seems complicated to me since i'm basically having to draw 4 different types of triangles. The next approach I thought of was to use the existing triangles like I did for a square grid and get my hexes from 6 triangles as follows http://screencast.com/t/w9b7qKzVJtb8 This seems like the easier approach to me since there are only 2 types of triangles (i would have to play with the heights and widths to get a "perfect" hexagon, but the idea is the same. So I'm looking for: 1) Any suggestions on which approach I should take, and why. 2) How would I translate mouse position to a hexagon grid position (especially when moving the camera around), for example in the second image if the mouse pointer were the green circle, how would I determine to highlight that hexagon and then translating that into grid coordinates (assuming it is 0,0)? 3) Any references, articles, books, etc - to get me going in the right direction. Note: I've done hex grid's and mouse-grid coordinate conversion before in 2d. looking for some pointers on how to do the same in 3d. The result I would like to achieve is something similar to the following: http :// www. youtube .com / watch?v=Ri92YkyC3fw (sorry about the youtube link, but it will only let me post 2 links in this post... same rep problem i mention below...) Thanks for any help! P.S. Sorry for not posting the images inline, I apparently don't have enough rep on this stack exchange site.

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• ApiChange Corporate Edition

  - by Alois Kraus

  In my inital announcement I could only cover a small subset what ApiChange can do for you. Lets look at how ApiChange can help you to fix bugs due to wrong usage of an Api within a fraction of time than it would take normally. It happens that software is tested and some bugs show up. One bug could be …. : We get way too man log messages during our test run. Now you have the task to find the most frequent messages and eliminate the Log calls from the source code. But what about the myriads other log calls? How can we check that the distribution of log calls is nearly equal across all developers? And if not how can we contact the developer to check his code? ApiChange can help you too connect these loose ends. It combines several information silos into one cohesive view. The picture below shows how it is able to fill the gaps. The public version does currently “only” parse the binaries and pdbs to give you for a –whousesmethod query the following colums: If it happens that you have Rational ClearCase (a source control system) in your development shop and an Active Directory in place then ApiChange will try to determine from the source file which was determined from the pdb the last check in user which should be present in your Active Directory. From there it is only a small hop to an LDAP query to your AD domain or the GC (Global Catalog) to get from the user name his Full name Email Phone number Department …. ApiChange will append this additional data all of your query results which contain source files if you add the –fileinfo option. As I said this is currently not enabled by default since the AD domain needs to be configured which are currently only some hard coded values in the SiteConstants.cs source file of ApiChange.Api.dll. Once you got this data you can generate metrics based on source file, developer, assembly, … and add additional data by drag and drop directly into the pivot tables inside Excel. This allows you to e.g. to generate a report which lists the source files with most log calls in descending order along with the developer name and email in the pivot table. Armed with this knowledge you can take meaningful measures e.g. to ask the developer if the huge number of log calls in this source file can be optimized. I am aware that this is a very specific scenario but it is a huge time saver when you are able to fill the missing gaps of information. ApiChange does this in an extensible way. namespace ApiChange.ExternalData {     public interface IFileInformationProvider     {         UserInfo GetInformationFromFile(string fileName);     } } It defines an interface where you can implement your custom information provider to close the gap between source control system and the real person I have to send an email to ask if his code needs a closer inspection.

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• ArchBeat Facebook Friday: Top 10 Shared Links - May 23-29, 2014

  - by OTN ArchBeat

  Among the 5,144 fans of the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page the following Top 10 items were the most popular over the last seven days, May 23-29, 2014. GlassFish/Java EE Community Open Forum Today! | Reza Rahman Have questions about Glassfish? Java EE/GlassFish evangelist Reza Rahman has answers, and you can pick his brain tomorrow during an online forum organized by the London Glassfish User Group and C2B2. The event is free, but you must register in order to participate. Click the link for more information. Twitter Tuesday - Top 10 @ArchBeat Tweets - May 20-26, 2014 The top 10 @OTNArchBeat tweets for the week of May 20-26, 2014. Topics covered include ADF, Cloud, GoldenGate, KScope14, OBIEE, ODI, WebLogic, WebCenter, and more. FrameworkFolders Support has come to Oracle WebCenter Portal | JayJay Zheng Interested in working with Framework Folders in Oracle WebCenter Portal? Oracle ACE JayJay Zheng reviews the essentials. Video: Programming Best Practices - ADF Business Components | Frank Nimphius Frank Nimphius discusses best practices and recommendations for ADF Business Components in the latest video from ADF Architecture TV. Video: Kscope 2014 Preview: Data Modeling and Moving Meditation with Kent Graziano For your mind and your body! Oracle ACE Director Kent Graziano previews his Kscope 2014 data modeling presentations and the early morning Chi Gung sessions he will once again lead for Kscope attendees. OAG and OES Integration for Web API Security: skin and guts | Andre Correa A-Team architect Andre Correa's post examines a strategy for web API security that uses OAG (Oracle API Gateway) and OES (Oracle Entitlements Server). Getting Started with Coherence*Web in WebLogic Server 12.1.2 | Tim Middleton Solution architect Tim Middleton shows you how to configure Coherence*Web in WebLogic Server 12.1.2 and deploy a basic web application. SOA and Business Processes: You are the Process! Part of the 13-part "Industrial SOA" article series, this article looks at best practices for modeling and managing effective business processes. Authentication in Oracle Identity Federation/ IdP | Damien Carru Damien Carru discuss authentication when OIF acts as an IdP and how the server can be configured to use specific OAM Authentication Schemes to challenge the user. Caveats on Using WebLogic Server with JDK7 | JayJay Zheng Quick tech tips from Oracle ACE JayJay Zheng.

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• Modelling highly specific business requirements

  - by AndyBursh

  How can one go about modelling highly specific business requirements, which have no precedent in the system? Take for example the following requirement: When a purchase order contains N lines, is over X value in total and is being recorded against project Y, an email needs to be sent to persons A and B with the details This requirement supplements other requirements surrounding purchase orders, but comes in at a much later date in response to some ongoing problem elsewhere in the business. Persons A and B are not part of any role or group in the system, and don't hold any specific responsibility; they are simply the two people the business has appointed to receive these emails in this very specific case. Projects are also data driven, so project Y has no special properties to distinguish it from any other project. The only way to identify it is to compare its identifier to a magic number. How can one go about modelling this kind of case without introducing too much additional complexity? That I can think of right now, there are a couple of options. Perform the checks and actions inline with the existing code. Here we find the correct spot in the code, check the conditions in the requirement and send the emails to hardcoded addresses. Of course this is fraught with issues. At the very least it stops working if one of these people leaves or changes their email address. At worst you have to ensure that any tests and test data are aware that additional actions are taken for a specific set of criteria. Introduce some form of events system. Here we introduce an eventing system, so that we might react to some event, and fulfil the requirement outside of the usual path of execution. This sounds like a cleaner solution than option 1, but the work involved is ultimately probably slightly overkill for this one small requirement. That said, having it in place does allow the system to handle these kinds of specific requirements consistently and easily in the future. Are there any other (good/better) ways of handling highly specific requirements? I mean other than telling the other parts of the business no!

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• changing drive nodes & hdparm

  - by Kalamalka Kid

  I am currently attempting to create a command that works at startup to kill the power on two of my very noisy hard drives. I have edited the etc/rc.local file to include this command: sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdc sudo hdparm -y /dev/sdd exit 0 While I think this should work, it seems the allocated drives keep switching around every time I reboot. I have sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde but they keep getting jumbled around (making the drive I wish to shut different than sdd which is making the task of shutting down the right drive on start-up quite cumbersome. I had a perfectly functioning ftstab file working which disappeard, but I restored it from the back up into the etc/ dir: # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> #Entry for /dev/sda1 : UUID=43c09daf-08a5-44f2-89b0-fc7c6f0d1e67 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 #Entry for /dev/sdd1 : UUID=443AFBAD7FE50945 /media/DX100 ntfs-3g defaults,nosuid,nodev,locale=en_CA.UTF-8 0 0 #Entry for /dev/sdb1 : UUID=FCE456F5E456B21E /media/GalaxyM83 ntfs-3g defaults,nosuid,nodev,locale=en_CA.UTF-8 0 0 #Entry for /dev/sdf1 : UUID=1CA057FDA057DBB8 /media/Holideck ntfs-3g defaults,nosuid,nodev,locale=en_CA.UTF-8 0 0 #Entry for /dev/sdc1 : UUID=7ABB49654B799D40 /media/JX3P ntfs defaults,nosuid,nodev,locale=en_CA.UTF-8 0 0 it seems every time I boot the order of the drives changes. I do not know how to resolve this. A quick workaround the problem was to go with UUID instead of the DEV letter by editing the etc/rc.local file to include: hdparm -y /dev/disk/by-uuid/443AFBAD7FE50945 hdparm -y /dev/disk/by-uuid/7ABB49654B799D40 So I thought I was in the clear, as I heard both hard drives die down during the boot sequence, BUT, as soon as I log in both drives start up again! so now I have to figure out what is making them start up again after log in, or perhaps another way to get them to turn off. Is there some kind of command i can get to execute after log in? I tried editing the startup applications to include an autossh with: autoshh - sudo hdparm -y /dev/disk/by-uuid/7ABB49654B799D40 autoshh - sudo hdparm -y /dev/disk/by-uuid/443AFBAD7FE50945 but this did not seem to work to turn off the disks after log in.

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• Cheating on Technical Debt

  - by Tony Davis

  One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code debt, is a convenient term to cover all the compromises between the ideal solution and the actual solution, reflecting the reality of the pressures of commercial coding. The one time you’re guaranteed to hear one developer, or DBA, pass judgment on another is when he or she inherits their project, and is surprised by the amount of technical debt left lying around in the form of inelegant architecture, incomplete tests, confusing interface design, no documentation, and so on. It is often expedient for a Project Manager to ignore the build-up of technical debt, the cut corners, not-quite-finished features and rushed designs that mean progress is satisfyingly rapid in the short term. It’s far less satisfying for the poor person who inherits the code. Nothing sends a colder chill down the spine than the dawning realization that you’ve inherited a system crippled with performance and functional issues that will take months of pain to fix before you can even begin to make progress on any of the planned new features. It’s often hard to justify this ‘debt paying’ time to the project owners and managers. It just looks as if you are making no progress, in marked contrast to your predecessor. There can be many good reasons for allowing technical debt to build up, at least in the short term. Often, rapid prototyping is essential, there is a temporary shortfall in test resources, or the domain knowledge is incomplete. It may be necessary to hit a specific deadline with a prototype, or proof-of-concept, to explore a possible market opportunity, with planned iterations and refactoring to follow later. However, it is a crime for a developer to build up technical debt without making this clear to the project participants. He or she needs to record it explicitly. A design compromise made in to order to hit a deadline, be it an outright hack, or a decision made without time for rigorous investigation and testing, needs to be documented with the same rigor that one tracks a bug. What’s the best way to do this? Ideally, we’d have some kind of objective assessment of the level of technical debt in a software project, although that smacks of Science Fiction even as I write it. I’d be interested of hear of any methods you’ve used, but I’m sure most teams have to rely simply on the integrity of their colleagues and the clear perceptions of the project manager… Cheers, Tony.

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