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  • Create Custom Playlists in Windows Media Player 12

    - by DigitalGeekery
    A playlist is a group of songs or media files that are grouped together based on a theme. Today we’ll look at how to create your own custom playlists in Windows Media Player 12. Create Custom Playlists Open Windows Media Player and switch to the Library view. Click on the Play tab at the top right to reveal the List pane.   If you currently have songs listed on the List pane, you can remove them by clicking Clear list.   To add songs to your playlist, right-click on the song title, select Add to, and then click Play list. You can also drag and drop the song title right onto the play list area. Hold down the Control [Ctrl] key while clicking to select more than one track at a time.   Changing the Playlist Order You can click and drag each item in your playlist to move it up or down.   You can also right click on the title and select Move up or Move down, or to completely remove a track from your playlist. You have the option to shuffle your list by clicking the Options list icon and selecting Shuffle list from the dropdown list. By selecting Sort list by you can sort by Title, Artist, Album, Release date, and more. Saving and naming your playlist To save your playlist, click on the Save list button. You’ll be prompted to enter a name for your playlist in the text box. Click away when you are finished. Windows Media Player will display your most recent playlists in the Navigation panel. Simply select the playlist anytime you want to listen to it.   Conclusion Custom playlists are a great way to group your music by themes such as mood, genre, activity, season, and more. If you are new to Windows Media Player 12, check out our post on managing your music in Windows Media Player. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesShare Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Install and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxMake Windows Media Player Automatically Open in Mini Player ModeWhat are wmpnscfg.exe and wmpnetwk.exe and Why Are They Running? TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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  • Adding Attributes to Generated Classes

    ASP.NET MVC 2 adds support for data annotations, implemented via attributes on your model classes.  Depending on your design, you may be using an OR/M tool like Entity Framework or LINQ-to-SQL to generate your entity classes, and you may further be using these entities directly as your Model.  This is fairly common, and alleviates the need to do mapping between POCO domain objects and such entities (though there are certainly pros and cons to using such entities directly). As an example, the current version of the NerdDinner application (available on CodePlex at nerddinner.codeplex.com) uses Entity Framework for its model.  Thus, there is a NerdDinner.edmx file in the project, and a generated NerdDinner.Models.Dinner class.  Fortunately, these generated classes are marked as partial, so you can extend their behavior via your own partial class in a separate file.  However, if for instance the generated Dinner class has a property Title of type string, you cant then add your own Title of type string for the purpose of adding data annotations to it, like this: public partial class Dinner { [Required] public string Title { get;set; } } This will result in a compilation error, because the generated Dinner class already contains a definition of Title.  How then can we add attributes to this generated code?  Do we need to go into the T4 template and add a special case that says if were generated a Dinner class and it has a Title property, add this attribute?  Ick. MetadataType to the Rescue The MetadataType attribute can be used to define a type which contains attributes (metadata) for a given class.  It is applied to the class you want to add metadata to (Dinner), and it refers to a totally separate class to which youre free to add whatever methods and properties you like.  Using this attribute, our partial Dinner class might look like this: [MetadataType(typeof(Dinner_Validation))] public partial class Dinner {}   public class Dinner_Validation { [Required] public string Title { get; set; } } In this case the Dinner_Validation class is public, but if you were concerned about muddying your API with such classes, it could instead have been created as a private class within Dinner.  Having the validation attributes specified in their own class (with no other responsibilities) complies with the Single Responsibility Principle and makes it easy for you to test that the validation rules you expect are in place via these annotations/attributes. Thanks to Julie Lerman for her help with this.  Right after she showed me how to do this, I realized it was also already being done in the project I was working on. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • How to shoot yourself in the foot (DO NOT Read in the office)

    - by TATWORTH
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TATWORTH/archive/2013/06/21/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-do-not-read.aspxLet me make it absolutely clear - the following is:merely collated by your Geek from http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3917012#xx3917012xxvery, very very funny so you read it in the presence of others at your own riskso here is the list - you have been warned!C You shoot yourself in the foot.   C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."   FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling facility.   Modula-2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.   COBOL USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.   Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...   BASIC Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.   Forth Foot yourself in the shoot.   APL You shoot yourself in the foot; then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.   Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.   Snobol If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.   HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.   Prolog You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.   370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.   FORTRAN-77 You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you still can't do exception-processing.   Modula-2 (alternative) You perform a shooting on what might be currently a foot with what might be currently a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.   BASIC (compiled) You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.   Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.   Forth (alternative) BULLET DUP3 * GUN LOAD FOOT AIM TRIGGER PULL BANG! EMIT DEAD IF DROP ROT THEN (This takes about five bytes of memory, executes in two to ten clock cycles on any processor and can be used to replace any existing function of the language as well as in any future words). (Welcome to bottom up programming - where you, too, can perform compiler pre-processing instead of writing code)   APL (alternative) You hear a gunshot and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or @#&^$%&%^ foot   Pascal (alternative) Same as Modula-2 except that the bullet is not the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.   Snobol (alternative) You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).   Prolog (alternative) You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun, which then explodes in your face.   COMAL You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol, but the bore is clogged, and the pressure build-up blows apart both the pistol and your hand. or draw_pistol aim_at_foot(left) pull_trigger hop(swearing)   Scheme As Lisp, but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.   Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.   Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at the feet." or The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarette. or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. or After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and confidently aim at your foot knowing it is safe. However the cordite in the round does an Unchecked Conversion, fires and shoots you in the foot anyway.   Eiffel   You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. or You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bulletHole. Object Oriented Pascal You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet fired from what might currently be a gun.   PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes and drops the original one on your foot. Postscript foot bullets 6 locate loadgun aim gun shoot showpage or It takes the bullet ten minutes to travel from the gun to your foot, by which time you're long since gone out to lunch. The text comes out great, though.   PERL You stab yourself in the foot repeatedly with an incredibly large and very heavy Swiss Army knife. or You pick up the gun and begin to load it. The gun and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't feel. Assembly Language You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.or The bullet travels to your foot instantly, but it took you three weeks to load the round and aim the gun.   BCPL You shoot yourself somewhere in the leg -- you can't get any finer resolution than that. Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.   Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.   Powerbuilder While attempting to load the gun you discover that the LoadGun system function is buggy; as a work around you tape the bullet to the outside of the gun and unsuccessfully attempt to fire it with a nail. In frustration you club your foot with the butt of the gun and explain to your client that this approximates the functionality of shooting yourself in the foot and that the next version of Powerbuilder will fix it.   Standard ML By the time you get your code to typecheck, you're using a shoot to foot yourself in the gun.   MUMPS You shoot 583149 AK-47 teflon-tipped, hollow-point, armour-piercing bullets into even-numbered toes on odd-numbered feet of everyone in the building -- with one line of code. Three weeks later you shoot yourself in the head rather than try to modify that line.   Java You locate the Gun class, but discover that the Bullet class is abstract, so you extend it and write the missing part of the implementation. Then you implement the ShootAble interface for your foot, and recompile the Foot class. The interface lets the bullet call the doDamage method on the Foot, so the Foot can damage itself in the most effective way. Now you run the program, and call the doShoot method on the instance of the Gun class. First the Gun creates an instance of Bullet, which calls the doFire method on the Gun. The Gun calls the hit(Bullet) method on the Foot, and the instance of Bullet is passed to the Foot. But this causes an IllegalHitByBullet exception to be thrown, and you die.   Unix You shoot yourself in the foot or % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %   370 JCL (alternative) You shoot yourself in the head just thinking about it.   DOS JCL You first find the building you're in in the phone book, then find your office number in the corporate phone book. Then you have to write this down, then describe, in cubits, your exact location, in relation to the door (right hand side thereof). Then you need to write down the location of the gun (loading it is a proprietary utility), then you load it, and the COBOL program, and run them, and, with luck, it may be run tonight.   VMS   $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE" BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/ACTION=AUTOMATIC/ LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GNU $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT   %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1 -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image or %SYS-F-FTSHT, foot shot (fifty lines of traceback omitted) sh,csh, etc You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages, then your foot falls asleep. You shoot the computer and switch to C.   Apple System 7 Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small bomb appears with note "Error of Type 1 has occurred."   Windows 3.1 Double click the gun icon and wait. Eventually a window opens giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus balloon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click "shoot" button and a small box appears with note "Unable to open Shoot.dll, check that path is correct."   Windows 95 Your gun is not compatible with this OS and you must buy an upgrade and install it before you can continue. Then you will be informed that you don't have enough memory.   CP/M I remember when shooting yourself in the foot with a BB gun was a big deal.   DOS You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.   MSDOS You shoot yourself in the foot, but can unshoot yourself with add-on software.   Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.   Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.   dBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain, you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. or You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one scheduled to actually shoot bullets.   DBase IV, V1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed hand grenade and the whole building blows up.   SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. or Insert into Foot Select Bullet >From Gun.Hand Where Chamber = 'LOADED' And Trigger = 'PULLED'   Clipper You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot and discover that the gun that the bullets fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. Oracle The menus for coding foot_shooting have not been implemented yet and you can't do foot shooting in SQL.   English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. (For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run happily.) Revelation [an implementation of the PICK Operating System] You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.   FlagShip Starting at the top of your head, you aim the gun at yourself repeatedly until, half an hour later, the gun is finally pointing at your foot and you pull the trigger. A new foot with a hole in it appears but you can't work out how to get rid of the old one and your gun doesn't work anymore.   FidoNet You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.   PicoSpan [a UNIX-based computer conferencing system] You can't shoot yourself in the foot because you're not a host. or (host variation) Whenever you shoot yourself in the foot, someone opens a topic in policy about it.   Internet You put your foot in your mouth, shoot it, then spam the bullet so that everybody gets shot in the foot.   troff rmtroff -ms -Hdrwp | lpr -Pwp2 & .*place bullet in footer .B .NR FT +3i .in 4 .bu Shoot! .br .sp .in -4 .br .bp NR HD -2i .*   Genetic Algorithms You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.   CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) You only fail to shoot everything that isn't your foot.   MS-SQL Server MS-SQL Server’s gun comes pre-loaded with an unlimited supply of Teflon coated bullets, and it only has two discernible features: the muzzle and the trigger. If that wasn't enough, MS-SQL Server also puts the gun in your hand, applies local anesthetic to the skin of your forefinger and stitches it to the gun's trigger. Meanwhile, another process has set up a spinal block to numb your lower body. It will then proceeded to surgically remove your foot, cryogenically freeze it for preservation, and attach it to the muzzle of the gun so that no matter where you aim, you will shoot your foot. In order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, you need to unstitch your trigger finger, remove your foot from the muzzle of the gun, and have it surgically reattached. Then you probably want to get some crutches and go out to buy a book on SQL Server Performance Tuning.   Sybase Sybase's gun requires assembly, and you need to go out and purchase your own clip and bullets to load the gun. Assembly is complicated by the fact that Sybase has hidden the gun behind a big stack of reference manuals, but it hasn't told you where that stack is. While you were off finding the gun, assembling it, buying bullets, etc., Sybase was also busy surgically removing your foot and cryogenically freezing it for preservation. Instead of attaching it to the muzzle of the gun, though, it packed your foot on dry ice and sent it UPS-Ground to an unnamed hookah bar somewhere in the middle east. In order to shoot your foot, you must modify your gun with a GPS system for targeting and hire some guy named "Indy" to find the hookah bar and wire the coordinates back to you. By this time, you've probably become so daunted at the tasks stand between you and shooting your foot that you hire a guy who's read all the books on Sybase to help you shoot your foot. If you're lucky, he'll be smart enough both to find your foot and to stop you from shooting it.   Magic software You spend 1 week looking up the correct syntax for GUN. When you find it, you realise that GUN will not let you shoot in your own foot. It will allow you to shoot almost anything but your foot. You then decide to build your own gun. You can't use the standard barrel since this will only allow for standard bullets, which will not fire if the barrel is pointed at your foot. After four weeks, you have created your own custom gun. It blows up in your hand without warning, because you failed to initialise the safety catch and it doesn't know whether the initial state is "0", 0, NULL, "ZERO", 0.0, 0,0, "0.0", or "0,00". You fix the problem with your remaining hand by nesting 12 safety catches, and then decide to build the gun without safety catch. You then shoot the management and retire to a happy life where you code in languages that will allow you to shoot your foot in under 10 days.FirefoxLets you shoot yourself in as many feet as you'd like, while using multiple great addons! IEA moving target in terms of standard ammunition size and doesn't always work properly with non-Microsoft ammunition, so sometimes you shoot something other than your foot. However, it's the corporate world's standard foot-shooting apparatus. Hackers seem to enjoy rigging websites up to trigger cascading foot-shooting failures. Windows 98 About the same as Windows 95 in terms of overall bullet capacity and triggering mechanisms. Includes updated DirectShot API. A new version was released later on to support USB guns, Windows 98 SE.WPF:You get your baseball glove and a ball and you head out to your backyard, where you throw balls to your pitchback. Then your unkempt-haired-cargo-shorts-and-sandals-with-white-socks-wearing neighbor uses XAML to sculpt your arm into a gun, the ball into a bullet and the pitchback into your foot. By now, however, only the neighbor can get it to work and he's only around from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM. LOGO: You very carefully lay out the trajectory of the bullet. Then you start the gun, which fires very slowly. You walk precisely to the point where the bullet will travel and wait, but just before it gets to you, your class time is up and one of the other kids has already used the system to hack into Sony's PS3 network. Flash: Someone has designed a beautiful-looking gun that anyone can shoot their feet with for free. It weighs six hundred pounds. All kinds of people are shooting themselves in the feet, and sending the link to everyone else so that they can too. That is, except for the criminals, who are all stealing iOS devices that the gun won't work with.APL: Its (mostly) all greek to me. Lisp: Place ((gun in ((hand sight (foot then shoot))))) (Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses)Apple OS/X and iOS Once a year, Steve Jobs returns from sick leave to tell millions of unwavering fans how they will be able to shoot themselves in the foot differently this year. They retweet and blog about it ad nauseam, and wait in line to be the first to experience "shoot different".Windows ME Usually fails, even at shooting you in the foot. Yo dawg, I heard you like shooting yourself in the foot. So I put a gun in your gun, so you can shoot yourself in the foot while you shoot yourself in the foot. (Okay, I'm not especially proud of this joke.) Windows 2000 Now you really do have to log in, before you are allowed to shoot yourself in the foot.Windows XPYou thought you learned your lesson: Don't use Windows ME. Then, along came this new creature, built on top of Windows NT! So you spend the next couple days installing antivirus software, patches and service packs, just so you can get that driver to install, and then proceed to shoot yourself in the foot. Windows Vista Newer! Glossier! Shootier! Windows 7 The bullets come out a lot smoother. Active Directory Each bullet now has an attached Bullet Identifier, and can be uniquely identified. Policies can be applied to dictate fragmentation, and the gun will occasionally have a confusing delay after the trigger has been pulled. PythonYou try to use import foot; foot.shoot() only to realize that's only available in 3.0, to which you can't yet upgrade from 2.7 because of all those extension libs lacking support. Solaris Shoots best when used on SPARC hardware, but still runs the trigger GUI under Java. After weeks of learning the appropriate STOP command to prevent the trigger from automatically being pressed on boot, you think you've got it under control. Then the one time you ever use dtrace, it hits a bug that fires the gun. MySQL The feature that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot has been in development for about 6 years, and they are adding it into the next version, which is coming out REAL SOON NOW, promise! But you can always check it out of source control and try it yourself (just not in any environment where data integrity is important because it will probably explode.) PostgreSQLAllows you to have a smug look on your face while you shoot yourself in the foot, because those MySQL guys STILL don't have that feature. NoSQL Barrel? Who needs a barrel? Just put the bullet on your foot, and strike it with a hammer. See? It's so much simpler and more efficient that way. You can even strike multiple bullets in one swing if you swing with a good enough arc, because hammers are easy to use. Getting them to synchronize is a little difficult, though.Eclipse There are about a dozen different packages for shooting yourself in the foot, with weird interdependencies on outdated components. Once you finally navigate the morass and get one installed, you then have something to look at while you shoot yourself in the foot with that package: You can watch the screen redraw.Outlook Makes it really easy to let everyone know you shot yourself in the foot!Shooting yourself in the foot using delegates.You really need to shoot yourself in the foot but you hate firearms (you don't want any dependency on the specifics of shooting) so you delegate it to somebody else. You don't care how it is done as long is shooting your foot. You can do it asynchronously in case you know you may faint so you are called back/slapped in the face by your shooter/friend (or background worker) when everything is done.C#You prepare the gun and the bullet, carefully modeling all of the physics of a bullet traveling through a foot. Just before you're about to pull the trigger, you stumble on System.Windows.BodyParts.Foot.ShootAt(System.Windows.Firearms.IGun gun) in the extended framework, realize you just wasted the entire afternoon, and shoot yourself in the head.PHP<?phprequire("foot_safety_check.php");?><!DOCTYPE HTML><html><head> <!--Lower!--><title>Shooting me in the foot</title></head> <body> <!--LOWER!!!--><leg> <!--OK, I made this one up...--><footer><?php echo (dungSift($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "ie"))?("Your foot is safe, but you might want to wear a hard hat!"):("<div class=\"shot\">BANG!</div>"); ?></footer></leg> </body> </html>

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  • Internal Mutation of Persistent Data Structures

    - by Greg Ros
    To clarify, when I mean use the terms persistent and immutable on a data structure, I mean that: The state of the data structure remains unchanged for its lifetime. It always holds the same data, and the same operations always produce the same results. The data structure allows Add, Remove, and similar methods that return new objects of its kind, modified as instructed, that may or may not share some of the data of the original object. However, while a data structure may seem to the user as persistent, it may do other things under the hood. To be sure, all data structures are, internally, at least somewhere, based on mutable storage. If I were to base a persistent vector on an array, and copy it whenever Add is invoked, it would still be persistent, as long as I modify only locally created arrays. However, sometimes, you can greatly increase performance by mutating a data structure under the hood. In more, say, insidious, dangerous, and destructive ways. Ways that might leave the abstraction untouched, not letting the user know anything has changed about the data structure, but being critical in the implementation level. For example, let's say that we have a class called ArrayVector implemented using an array. Whenever you invoke Add, you get a ArrayVector build on top of a newly allocated array that has an additional item. A sequence of such updates will involve n array copies and allocations. Here is an illustration: However, let's say we implement a lazy mechanism that stores all sorts of updates -- such as Add, Set, and others in a queue. In this case, each update requires constant time (adding an item to a queue), and no array allocation is involved. When a user tries to get an item in the array, all the queued modifications are applied under the hood, requiring a single array allocation and copy (since we know exactly what data the final array will hold, and how big it will be). Future get operations will be performed on an empty cache, so they will take a single operation. But in order to implement this, we need to 'switch' or mutate the internal array to the new one, and empty the cache -- a very dangerous action. However, considering that in many circumstances (most updates are going to occur in sequence, after all), this can save a lot of time and memory, it might be worth it -- you will need to ensure exclusive access to the internal state, of course. This isn't a question about the efficacy of such a data structure. It's a more general question. Is it ever acceptable to mutate the internal state of a supposedly persistent or immutable object in destructive and dangerous ways? Does performance justify it? Would you still be able to call it immutable? Oh, and could you implement this sort of laziness without mutating the data structure in the specified fashion?

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 06, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, January 06, 2011Popular ReleasesStyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14980.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the correct path ...VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.SSH.NET Library: 2011.1.6: Fixes CommandTimeout default value is fixed to infinite. Port Forwarding feature improvements Memory leaks fixes New Features Add ErrorOccurred event to handle errors that occurred on different thread New and improve SFTP features SftpFile now has more attributes and some operations Most standard operations now available Allow specify encoding for command execution KeyboardInteractiveConnectionInfo class added for "keyboard-interactive" authentication. Add ability to specify bo...UltimateJB: Ultimate JB 2.03 PL3 KAKAROTO: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 2.43 !!! Conclusion : - ultimateJB DEFAULT => Pas de spoof mais disponible pour les PS3 suivantes : 3.41_kiosk 3.41 3.40 3.30 3.21 3.15 3.10 3.01 2.76 2.70 2.60 2.53 2.43.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...VidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch....NET Voice Recorder: Auto-Tune Release: This is the source code and binaries to accompany the article on the Coding 4 Fun website. It is the Auto Tuner release of the .NET Voice Recorder application.BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.2.0: - Simulation Log is now automatically disabled and hidden when running 10 or more iterations - Hit and Expertise are now entered by Rating, and include option for a Racial Expertise bonus - Added option for boss to use a periodic magic ability (Dragon Breath) - Added option for boss to periodically Enrage, gaining a Damage/Attack Speed buffASP.NET MVC CMS ( Using CommonLibrary.NET ): CommonLibrary.NET CMS 0.9.5 Alpha: CommonLibrary CMSA simple yet powerful CMS system in ASP.NET MVC 2 using C# 4.0. ActiveRecord based components for Blogs, Widgets, Pages, Parts, Events, Feedback, BlogRolls, Links Includes several widgets ( tag cloud, archives, recent, user cloud, links twitter, blog roll and more ) Built using the http://commonlibrarynet.codeplex.com framework. ( Uses TDD, DDD, Models/Entities, Code Generation ) Can run w/ In-Memory Repositories or Sql Server Database See Documentation tab for Ins...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.9 BETA: 2.2.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in the Gobl...xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7 Beta: xUnit.net release 1.7 betaBuild #1533 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision)...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: New feature - Added Windows Phone 7 project New feature - Added dynamic support to LINQ to JSON New feature - Added dynamic support to serializer New feature - Added INotifyCollectionChanged to JContainer in .NET 4 build New feature - Added ReadAsDateTimeOffset to JsonReader New feature - Added ReadAsDecimal to JsonReader New feature - Added covariance to IJEnumerable type parameter New feature - Added XmlSerializer style Specified property support New feature - Added ...DbDocument: DbDoc Initial Version: DbDoc Initial versionASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.2: Atomic CMS 2.1.2 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide N2 CMS: 2.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) All-round improvements and bugfixes File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open the proj...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 1.0: - Norwegian translation - French translation - German translation - WBFS dump for analysis - Scalable full HQ cover - Support for log file - Load game images improved - Support for image splitting - Diff for images after transfer - Support for scrubbing modes - Search functionality for log - Recurse depth for Files/Load - Show progress while downloading game cover - Supports more databases for cover download - Game cover loading routines improvedAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.1: Fix: Fixed a bug where pressing Save As would not select the Mastery Directory by default Unexpected errors are now always reported to the user before closing AutoLoL down.* Extracted champion data to Data directory** Added disclaimer to notify users this application has nothing to do with Riot Games Inc. Updated Codeplex image * An error report will be shown to the user which can help the developers to find out what caused the error, this should improve support ** We are working on ...TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.1.8: TortoiseHg 1.1.8 is a minor bug fix release, with minor improvementsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.6 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.6 with the following new feature: * TextDecorations property is implemented in Title for Chart. * TitleTextDecorations property is implemented in Axis. * MinPointHeight property is now applicable for Column and Bar Charts. Also this release includes few bug fixes: * ToolTipText property of DataSeries was not getting applied from Style. * Chart threw exception if IndicatorEnabled property was set to true and Too...New Projects.NET Framework Extensions Packages: Lightweight NuGet packages with reusable source code extending core .NET functionality, typically in self-contained source files added to your projects as internal classes that can be easily kept up-to-date with NuGet..NET Random Mock Extensions: .NET Random Mock Extensions allow to generate by 1 line of code object implementing any interface or class and fill its properties with random values. This can be usefull for generating test data objects for View or unit testing while you have no real domain object model.ancc: anccASP.NET Social Controls: ASP.NET Social Controls is a small collection of server controls designed to make integrating social sharing utilities such as ShareThis, AddThis and AddToAny easier, more manageable, and X/HTML-compliant, with configuration files and per-instance settings.Autofac for WindowsPhone7: This project hosts the releases for Autofac built for WindowsPhone7AutoSensitivity: AutoSensitivity allows you to define different mouse sensitivities (speeds) for your tocuhpad and mouse and automatically switch between them (based on mouse connect / disconnect).BaseCode: basecodeCaliburn Micro Silverlight Navigation: Caliburn Micro Silverlight Navigation adds navigation to Caliburn Micro UI Framework by applying the ViewModel-First principle. Debian 5 Agent for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Debian 5 System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent. Debian 5 Management Pack For System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Debian 5 Management Pack for SCOM 2007 R2. It will be useless without the Agent (in another project).Eventbrite Helper for WebMatrix: The Eventbrite Helper for WebMatrix makes it simple to promote your Eventbrite events in your WebMatrix site. With a few lines of code you will be able to display your events on your web site with integration with Windows Live Calendar and Google Calendar.Eye Check: EyeCheck is an eye health testing project. It contains a set of tests to examine eye health. It's developed in C# using the Silverlight technology.Hooly Search: This ASP.NET project lets you browse through and search text within holy booksIssueVision.ST: A Silverlight LOB sample using Self-tracking Entities, WCF Services, WIF, MVVM Light toolkit, MEF, and T4 Templates.Lawyer Officer: Projeto desenvolvido como meu trabalho de conclusão de curso para formação em bacharelado em sistemas da informação da FATEF-São VicenteLINQtoROOT: Translates LINQ queries from the .NET world in to CERN's ROOT language (C++) and then runs them (locally or on a PROOF server).OA: ??????????Open Manuscript System: Open Manuscript Systems (OMS) is a research journal management and publishing system with manuscript tracking that has been developed in this project to expand and improve access to research.ProjectCNPM_Vinhlt_Teacher: Ðây là b?n CNPM demo c?a nhóm 6,K52a3 HUS VN. b?n demo này cung là project dâu ti?n tri?n khai phát tri?n th? nghi?m trên mô hình m?ng - Nhi?u member cùng phát tri?n cùng lúc QuanLyNhanKhau: WPF test.RazorPad: RazorPad is a quick and simple stand-alone editing environment that allows anyone (even non-developers) to author Razor templates. It is developed in WPF using C# and relies on the System.WebPages.Razor libraries (included in the project download). Rovio Tour Guide: More details to follow soon....long story short building a robotic tour guide using the Rovio roving webcam platform for proof of concept.ScrumPilot: ScrumPilot is a viewer of events coming from Team Foundation Server The main goal of this project is to help team to follow in real time the Checkins and WorkItems changing. Team can do comments to each event and they can preview some TFS artifacts.S-DMS: S-DMS?????????(Document Manage System)Sharepoint Documentation Generator: New MOSS feature to automatically generate documentation/tables for fields, content types, lists, users, etc...ShengjieGao's projects: ?????Stylish DOS Box: Since the introduction of Windows 3.11 I am trying to avoid the DOS box and use any applet provided with GUI in Windows system. Yet, I realize that there is no week passed by without me opening the DOS box! This project will give the DOS Box a new look.Table2DTO: Auto generate code to build objects (DTOs, Models, etc) from a data table.Techweb: Alon's and Simon's 236607 homework assignments.TLC5940 Driver for Netduino: An Netduino Library for the TI TLC5940 16-Channel PWM Chip. Tratando Exceptions da Send Port na Orchestration: Quando a Send Port é do tipo Request-Response manipular o exception é intuitivo, já que basta colocar um escopo e adicionar um exception do tipo System.Exception. Mas quando a porta é one-way a coisa complica um pouco.UAC Runner: UAC Runner is a small application which allows the running of applications as an administrator from the command line using Windows UAC.Ubuntu 10 Agent for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Ubuntu 10 System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent.Ubuntu 10 Management Pack For System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2: Ubuntu 10 Management Pack for SCOM 2007 R2. It will be useless without the Agent (in another project). It is based on Red Hat 5 Management Pack. See the Download section to download the MPs and the source files (XML) Whe Online Storage: Whe Online Storage, is an 3. party online storage system and tools for free source. C#, .NET 4.0, SilverlightWindows Phone MVP: An MVP implementation for Windows Phone.

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  • Elastic PaaS with WebLogic and OpenStack, part I

    - by Jernej Kaše
    In my previous blog I described the steps to get OpenStack on Solaris up and running. Now we'll explore how WebLogic and OpenStack can work together to deliver truly elastic Middleware Platform as a Service. Middleware / Platform as a Service goals First, let's define what PaaS should be : PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the complexity of managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities. To break it down: - PaaS provides a complete platform for hosting solutions (Java EE, SOA, BPM, ...) - Infrastructure provisioning (virtual machine, OS, platform) and managing is hidden from the PaaS user [administrator or developer] - Additionally, PaaS could / should define target SLAs, and the platform should ensure the SLAs are meet automatically. PaaS use case To make it more tangible, we have an IT Administrator who has the requirement to deploy a Java EE enterprise application. The application is used by external users who need to submit reports by the end of each month. As a result, the number of concurrent users will fluctuate, with expected huge spikes around the end of each month. The SLA agreed by the management is that no more than 100 requests should be waiting to be processes at any given time. In addition, the IT admin has no more than 3 days to have the platform and the application operational. The Challenges Some of the challenges the IT Administrator is facing are: - how are we going to ensure the processing power? - how are we going to provision the (virtual) machines, Java EE platform and deploy the application? - how are we going to monitor the SLA? - how are we going to react to SLA, and increase capacity?  The Ideal Solution Ideally, the whole process should be automated, "set it and forget" and require no human interaction: - The vendor packages the solution as deployable image(s) - The images are deployed to the IaaS - From there, automated processes take care of SLA  Solution Architecture with WebLogic 12c, Dynamic Clusters, OpenStack & Solaris OracleSolaris provides OS and virtualisation through Solaris Zones OpenStack is a part of Solaris 11.2 and provides Cloud Management (console and API) WebLogic 12c with Dynamic Clusters provides the Platform Trafic Manager provides load balancing On top of out that, we are going to implement a small control script - Cloud Manager - which is going to monitor SLA through WebLogic Diagnostic Framework. In case there are more than 100 pending requests, the script will: - provision a new virtual machine based on image which is configured for the WebLogic domain - add the machine to WebLogic domain - Increase the number of servers in dynamic cluster - Start the newly provisioned server  Stay tuned for part II The hole solution with working demo will be presented in one of our Partner WebCasts in June, exact date TBA. Jernej Kaše is a Fusion Middleware Specialist working closely with Oracle Partners in the ECEMEA region to grow their business by leveraging Oracle technology.

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  • Video stutter when using external drive

    - by psion
    When using boxee to play video files off of an external western digital 1TB drive formatted NTFS, I notice a slight stutter in the video every 5-10 seconds. When using mplayer, it doesn't stutter as often, but it still stutters occasionally. If I play the video off of the local sata drive, it plays fine even in boxee. I use this computer as my HTPC and I just switched from windows to linux on it. In windows, I never had any sort of stutter playing movies from the drive. I am using the latest intel graphics drivers (for the intel GMA 950) root@eee-htpc:/home/htpc# grep wd /etc/mtab /dev/sdb1 /mnt/wd2 fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=512 0 0 I notice that despite trying to use ntfs or ntfs-3g, ubuntu uses ntfs-fuse which I've heard is slower. /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 80 MB in 3.07 seconds = 26.08 MB/sec root@eee-htpc:/mnt/wd2# dd if=/dev/zero of=./120mb bs=1024 count=120000 root@eee-htpc:/mnt/wd2# time mv ./120mb /home/htpc real 0m2.095s user 0m0.016s sys 0m0.736s Even though fuse has a reputation for being slow, it should easily be fast enough for playing standard definition video files. So why the video stutter? edit: The issue seems to be overhead cpu usage from either playing off of a usb device or ntfs/fuse. Watching CPU usage with top, local files use 10-40% CPU. Watching the same video on the external formatted ntfs, it spikes to 170% (over 100% because of hyperthreading). To me it seems like it must be overhead from the fuse driver, though I don't know if it has more or less overhead than ntfs-3g. It's a EEEBox B202 that has an atom 270, so not exactly the most powerful out there. edit2: I believe the solution would be to use non-fuse drivers or different fuse drivers. so far I have not been able to. edit3: I've probably edited this more times than I should, but as an update I have upgraded ntfs drivers to ntfs-3g 2010.8.8 external FUSE 28 - Third Generation NTFS Driver using the following PPA - ppa:x3lectric/team-iquik-releases. When first opening a video file in boxee that's on ntfs there's still the same amount of lag. After a few minutes of video, the lag seems to go away and the cpu usage comes down to 10-40%. Every so often though, it begins to stutter again. Also, if I skip ahead/back in the file, it begins to stutter a lot.

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  • How far is too far?

    - by David Dorf
    Previously I've talked about Safeway's personalized pricing as well as Target's use of analytics to learn about customers.  Then last week I read about Orbitz tailoring their hotel offers based on the browser used.  (Orbitz claims that Mac users are 40% more likely than PC users to book four- or five-star hotels.)  So just how far is too far when tailoring the retail experience? When most consumers read about these types of tactics, they tend to feel violated, as if someone was reading their personal diary.  Nobody wants to be tricked into buying things.  Walking into a grocery store and seeing crates of apples stacked high looks enticing, but the crates are just for display and the apples may be over a year old.  Even though its much cheaper to print markdown tags, many retailers manually write the price tags because consumers think they deal is better if the price is hand-written. The technology already exists to personalize prices and experiences for consumers.  People get upset thinking they paid more for something than a neighbor, but it already happens all the time with cars, flights, and the use of loyalty programs and coupons. There are many variables at play for any purchase.  They only difference is that the customer segments are getting smaller, sometimes reaching a size of one. There's two ways to look at this.  Retailers have always manipulated the environment to get consumers to buy more -- or -- Retailers are getting better at tuning the shopping experience for consumers.  I choose the latter, and so do most consumers by spending their money in the stores they like.  Consumers like to see fresh flowers at the entrance to the grocery store, and they like to see specials scrawled on chalkboards. The key is making sure that consumers benefit from the experience as well.  I'm willing to give up some personal information in exchange for discounts and more relevant marketing, and the next-generation of shoppers are even less concerned about privacy.  Retailers need to use all the tools available to differentiate their offers and connect with their customers. So if Orbitz wants to put three-star hotels at the top of the list for me because I'm using a PC, that's fine by me.

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  • Overload Avoidance

    - by mikef
    A little under a year ago, Matt Simmons wrote a rather reflective article about his terrifying brush with stress-induced ill health. SysAdmins and DBAs have always been prime victims of work-related stress, but I wonder if that predilection is perhaps getting worse, despite the best efforts of Matt and his trusty side-kick, HR. The constant pressure from share-holders and CFOs to 'streamline' the workforce is partially to blame, but the more recent culprit is technology itself. I can't deny that the rise of technologies like virtualization, PowerCLI, PowerShell, and a host of others has been a tremendous boon. As a result, individual IT professionals are now able to handle more and more tasks and manage increasingly large and complex environments. But, without a doubt, this is a two-edged sword; The reward for competence is invariably more work. Unfortunately, SysAdmins play such a pivotal role in modern business that it's easy to see how they can very quickly become swamped in conflicting demands coming from different directions. However, that doesn't justify the ridiculous hours many are asked (or volunteer) to devote to their work. Admirably though their commitment is, it isn't healthy for them, it sets a dangerous expectation, and eventually something will snap. There are times when everyone needs to step up to the plate outside of 'normal' work hours, but that time isn't all the time. Naturally, with all that lovely technology, you can automate more and more of those tricky tasks to keep on top of the workload, but you are still only human. Clever though you may be, there is a very real limit to how far technology can take you. I'm not suggesting that you avoid these technologies, or deliberately aim for mediocrity; I'm just saying that you need to be more than just technically skilled (and Wesley Nonapeptide riffs on and around this topic in his excellent 'Telepathic Robot Drones' blog post). You need to be able to manage expectations, not just Exchange. Specifically, that means your own expectations of what you are capable of, because those come before everyone else's. After all, how can you keep your work-life balance under control, if you're the one setting the bar way too high? Talking to your manager, or discussing issues with your users, is only going to be productive if you have some facts to work with. "Know Thyself" is the first law of managing work overload, and this is obviously a skill which people develop over time; the fact that veteran Sysadmins exist at all is testament to this. I'd just love to know how you get to that point. Personally, I'm using RescueTime to keep myself honest, but I'm open to recommendations for better methods. Do you track your own time, do you have an intuitive sense of what is possible, or do you just rely on someone else to handle that all for you? Cheers, Michael

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  • SQLAuthority News – SQL Server Wait Stats – eBook to Download on Kindle – Answer to FREE PDF Download Request

    - by pinaldave
    Being a book author is a completely new experience for me. I am yet to come across the issues faced by expert book authors. I assume that these interesting issues can be routine ones for expert book authors. One of the biggest requests I am getting for my SQL Server Wait Stats [Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle] book is my humble attempt to write a book. This is our very first experiment, and the book is beginning of the subject of SQL Server Wait Stats; we will come up with a new version of the book later next year when we have enough information for the SQL Server 2012 version. Following are the top 2 requests that I keep on receiving in emails, on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. “Please send us FREE PDF of your book so we do not have to purchase it.” “If you can share with us the eBook (free and downloadable) format of your book, we will share it with everybody we know and you will get additional exposure.” Here is my response for the abovementioned requests: If you really need my book and cannot purchase it due to financial trouble, then feel free to let me know and I will purchase it myself and ship it to you. If you are in a country where the print book not available, then you can buy the Kindle book, which is available online in any country, and you can just read it on your computer and mobile devices. You DO NOT have to own a Kindle to read a Kindle format book. You can freely download Kindle software on your desired format and purchase the book online. For next 5 days, the kindle book is available at 3.99 in USA, and in other countries, the price is anywhere between 3.99 and 5.99. The price will go up by USD 2 everywhere across the world after 1st November, 2011. Here is the link to download Kindle Software for free PC, WP7, and in marketplace for various other mobile devices. I thank you for giving warm response to SQL Server Wait Stats book. I am motivated to write the next expanded version of this book. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Oracle Linux Training Across Five Continents

    - by Antoinette O'Sullivan
    The Oracle Linux System Administration course, a top selling course, provides you with a broad selection of key competencies you need to be a great Linux system administrator. And you can now take this course from your desk or in classrooms across all five contents. You can take this 5-day instructor-led course through the follow delivery methods: Training-on-Demand: Start training within 24 hours of registering. You following lecture material at your own pace via streaming video and book time on a lab environment to suit your schedule. Live-Virtual Event: Follow a live event from your own desk, no travel required. You can choose from a selection of events on the schedule to suit a different time zones. In-Class Event: Travel to an education center to take this course. Below is a selection of the in-class events already on the schedule. AFRICA  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Nairobi, Kenya  13 October 2014  English  Johannesburg, South Africa  24 November 2014  English AMERICA  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Mississauga, Canada  27 October 2014  English  Chicago, IL, United States  13 October 2014  English  Roseville, MN, United States  13 October 2014  English ASIA  Location  Date  Delivery  Jakarta, Indonesia  20 October 2014  English  Petaling Jaya, Malaysia  25 August 2014  English  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia  8 December 2014  English  Istanbul, Turkey  10 November 2014  Turkish   Dubai, United Arab Emirates  4 January 2015  English AUSTRALIA  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Canberra, Australia  20 October 2014  English  Melbourne, Australia  20 October 2014  English EUROPE  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Paris, France  6 October 2014  French  Milan, Italy  20 October 2014  Italian  Rome, Italy  8 September 2014  Italian  Bucharest, Romania  27 October 2014  Romanian  Madrid, Spain  1 September 2014  Spanish The Oracle Linux System Administration course is the recommended training course to prepare for you for the Oracle Linux 5 & 6 System Administrator OCA certification exam. Those who have acquired the skills provided in the Oracle Linux System Administration course, can advance their learning by taking the Oracle Linux Advanced Administration course. You can take this 5-day instructor led course as a live-virtual event or an in-class event. Below is a selection of the in-class events on the schedule:  Location  Date  Delivery Language  Jakarta, Indonesia  27 October 2014  English  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia  6 October 2014  English  Bangkok, Thailand  20 October 2014  English  Belmont, CA, United States  15 September 2014  English For information on the Oracle Linux curriculum, go to http://oracle.com/education/linux.

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  • Most Unprofessional Workplace

    - by TehGrumpyCoder
    I've worked lots of places in lots of roles: Delivery truck driver, Boilermaker, antenna rigger, Professional Musician, Electronic Technician, Electrical Engineer, and for most of my career: Software Turkey. I want to say this large company is the most unprofessional place I've ever worked, but then I think about other jobs such as TTI that stiffed us all for 10 months salary -- or had us work 2-1/2 years at 66% however you want to look at it, or maybe NeoPlanet with a cast from a bad sitcom running the show, I could go on, but I digress (as usual). So maybe this place isn't the *most* unprofessional, but the personnel rank up there. I'm in a small room off a factory. There are 3 managerial offices, and 36 common-folk of various skill-sets in a variety of single to quad cubicles. No matter where you sit though, because of the layout and location, you've got a hard wall as one wall of your cubicle. Because of that hard wall, everything echoes. I get off the phone, and the guy in the next cubicle makes a comment in response to my phone conversation... I hate that it can be heard and I hate that they do that! These people have no problem yelling from cube to cube to carry on running conversations some of which are actually work-related. There's a lady two cubes away that talks so loud I can clearly hear every phone conversation she has... all work-related but still... Then the one in the next cubicle must have been raised on a farm because there's only one volume setting: LOUD... "HEY MARGE, CAN I GET IN FOR A QUICK APPOINTMENT AFTER WORK TONIGHT?" ... sigh Also that cube is the 'party cube' so that's where all the candy, cake, donuts, and leftovers sits. Anything MzLoud brings in has to have a verbal recipe associated with it at least 10 times during the day, and of course at volume. I've had running conversations over the top of my cube from people in the next one on each side. The weird thing is... the boss sits with an open door closer to this whole fiasco than me. So I wear a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and crank up Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Wes Montgomery, or Jimmy Smith to the point I can't hear the racket... what the heck, I already have a hearing loss from playing guitar.

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  • How to implement a simple bullet trajectory

    - by AirieFenix
    I searched and searched and although it's a fair simple question, I don't find the proper answer but general ideas (which I already have). I have a top-down game and I want to implement a gun which shoots bullets that follow a simple path (no physics nor change of trajectory, just go from A to B thing). a: vector of the position of the gun/player. b: vector of the mouse position (cross-hair). w: the vector of the bullet's trajectory. So, w=b-a. And the position of the bullet = [x=x0+speed*time*normalized w.x , y=y0+speed*time * normalized w.y]. I have the constructor: public Shot(int shipX, int shipY, int mouseX, int mouseY) { //I get mouse with Gdx.input.getX()/getY() ... this.shotTime = TimeUtils.millis(); this.posX = shipX; this.posY = shipY; //I used aVector = aVector.nor() here before but for some reason didn't work float tmp = (float) (Math.pow(mouseX-shipX, 2) + Math.pow(mouseY-shipY, 2)); tmp = (float) Math.sqrt(Math.abs(tmp)); this.vecX = (mouseX-shipX)/tmp; this.vecY = (mouseY-shipY)/tmp; } And here I update the position and draw the shot: public void drawShot(SpriteBatch batch) { this.lifeTime = TimeUtils.millis() - this.shotTime; //position = positionBefore + v*t this.posX = this.posX + this.vecX*this.lifeTime*speed*Gdx.graphics.getDeltaTime(); this.posY = this.posY + this.vecY*this.lifeTime*speed*Gdx.graphics.getDeltaTime(); ... } Now, the behavior of the bullet seems very awkward, not going exactly where my mouse is (it's like the mouse is 30px off) and with a random speed. I know I probably need to open the old algebra book from college but I'd like somebody says if I'm in the right direction (or points me to it); if it's a calculation problem, a code problem or both. Also, is it possible that Gdx.input.getX() gives me non-precise position? Because when I draw the cross-hair it also draws off the cursor position. Sorry for the long post and sorry if it's a very basic question. Thanks!

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  • Design pattern for an ASP.NET project using Entity Framework

    - by MPelletier
    I'm building a website in ASP.NET (Web Forms) on top of an engine with business rules (which basically resides in a separate DLL), connected to a database mapped with Entity Framework (in a 3rd, separate project). I designed the Engine first, which has an Entity Framework context, and then went on to work on the website, which presents various reports. I believe I made a terrible design mistake in that the website has its own context (which sounded normal at first). I present this mockup of the engine and a report page's code behind: Engine (in separate DLL): public Engine { DatabaseEntities _engineContext; public Engine() { // Connection string and procedure managed in DB layer _engineContext = DatabaseEntities.Connect(); } public ChangeSomeEntity(SomeEntity someEntity, int newValue) { //Suppose there's some validation too, non trivial stuff SomeEntity.Value = newValue; _engineContext.SaveChanges(); } } And report: public partial class MyReport : Page { Engine _engine; DatabaseEntities _webpageContext; public MyReport() { _engine = new Engine(); _databaseContext = DatabaseEntities.Connect(); } public void ChangeSomeEntityButton_Clicked(object sender, EventArgs e) { SomeEntity someEntity; //Wrong way: //Get the entity from the webpage context someEntity = _webpageContext.SomeEntities.Single(s => s.Id == SomeEntityId); //Send the entity from _webpageContext to the engine _engine.ChangeSomeEntity(someEntity, SomeEntityNewValue); // <- oops, conflict of context //Right(?) way: //Get the entity from the engine context someEntity = _engine.GetSomeEntity(SomeEntityId); //undefined above //Send the entity from the engine's context to the engine _engine.ChangeSomeEntity(someEntity, SomeEntityNewValue); // <- oops, conflict of context } } Because the webpage has its own context, giving the Engine an entity from a different context will cause an error. I happen to know not to do that, to only give the Engine entities from its own context. But this is a very error-prone design. I see the error of my ways now. I just don't know the right path. I'm considering: Creating the connection in the Engine and passing it off to the webpage. Always instantiate an Engine, make its context accessible from a property, sharing it. Possible problems: other conflicts? Slow? Concurrency issues if I want to expand to AJAX? Creating the connection from the webpage and passing it off to the Engine (I believe that's dependency injection?) Only talking through ID's. Creates redundancy, not always practical, sounds archaic. But at the same time, I already recuperate stuff from the page as ID's that I need to fetch anyways. What would be best compromise here for safety, ease-of-use and understanding, stability, and speed?

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  • New Information Center - Reviewing Security For FMW 11g

    - by Daniel Mortimer
    Announcing ... Information Center: Reviewing Security For Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g [ID 1458051.2] has been published.  Screenshot of ID 1458051.2 What is an Information Center? Information Centers use widgets to aggregate knowledge content, such as support documents, product documentation, support community threads, which is pertinent to a given task or intent. Widgets either contain static lists or better still some widgets are dynamic. A dynamic widget uses a query criteria to present a list of support documents relevant to the title / subject matter of the widget. The content of a dynamic widget is refreshed automatically every 24 hours. Once you are in an Information Center, you can use the left hand menu to navigate to other Tasks / Intent Information Centers (e.g "Install and Configure", "Patch", "Troubleshoot", "Upgrade" which are available for the chosen product. Are Information Centers easy to find? You can go straight to the new "Reviewing Security" Information Center by using the hyperlink given above. There are, however, two other methods which make Information Centers easier to find. Browse Knowledge Refine Your Search Browse Knowledge The "Browse Knowledge" is currently found in the "Knowledge" Tab Page in My Oracle Support. As illustrated by the screenshots below, you can find Information Centers by choosing a product (e.g "Oracle Fusion Middleware"), a version and an action / intent. If an Information Center exists for your selection the "Advisor Found" button is enabled. Clicking on this button will take you straight to the desired Information Center.Screenshot - Browse Knowledge 1 Screenshot - Browse Knowledge 2 Screenshot - Browse Knowledge 3 Refine Your Search Refine your search is a dialogue which is triggered by certain keywords that you may enter into the Global Search field in the top right hand corner of My Oracle Support. The "Refine Your Search" works in a similar manner to "Browse Knowledge". Choose your product and version. The appropriate Task / Intent should already be selected for you. Thereafter, click the Go button. Screenshot - Refine Your Search 1 Screenshot - Refine Your Search 2 Screenshot - Refine Your Search 3

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  • Smarter Ways to Unlock Your Unused Contingency Budgets

    - by Melissa Centurio Lopes
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Cash flow is becoming increasingly important in the current economy; senior executives are looking for smarter ways of unlocking unused funds for new or ongoing capital expenditure projects. With project contingency budgets on average equaling 10 percent of overall costs, are you confident that you can release this cash without risking existing investments or the health of your overall project portfolio? This is the central question posed in a new report from the EPPM board, Hedging Your Bets? Optimizing Investment Opportunities for Great Cash Flow. The board is Oracle’s international steering committee, which brings together senior figures from leading organizations to discuss the critical role of enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM). C-Level Visibility Will Unlock Funds In addition to exploring how unlocking your contingency funds enables you to augment your cash flow (without resorting to expensive borrowing), the report offers a number of suggestions on how this can be done in a risk-free way, including Building an effective governance framework that shows the demonstrable value of every project within the portfolio Undertaking contingency planning risk assessments that give you complete portfolio wide visibility into all risk factors Establishing executive ownership of the portfolio to promote a more realistic appreciation of the risk levels inherent in the portfolio Creating a chief risk officer role that can review consolidated contingencies and risks so they are not considered in isolation The overriding message behind the report—and the work carried out by the EPPM board—is the need for increased C-level visibility across the entire enterprise project portfolio to enable better business decisions. Read the complete report in English, Chinese, German, or French. Read more in the October Edition of the quarterly Information InDepth EPPM Newsletter

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  • Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 failed

    - by Rupert
    Today Ubuntu asked me to upgrade to 11.04. The installation went completely fine until right at the end when the following packages failed: install-info ubuntu-standard The installer hung so I had to shut it down manually. Ubuntu still works fine but it says that the upgrade didn't work properly so I am hesitant to restart it until I have resolved the problem in case I can't get back in. I am running Ubuntu inside the latest version of Virtual Box and was previously running version 10.10. I have tried installing install-info manually with apt-get but I get the following error: Unhandled exception: [#<SystemStackError: stack level too deep>] /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:842:in `block in <class:Autotest>': undefined method `backtrace' for [#<SystemStackError: stack level too deep>]:Array (NoMethodError) from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:828:in `[]' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:828:in `block in hook' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:828:in `each' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:828:in `any?' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:828:in `hook' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:344:in `rescue in run' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:320:in `run' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/lib/autotest.rb:241:in `run' from /usr/local/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ZenTest-4.5.0/bin/autotest:6:in `<top (required)>' from /usr/local/ruby/bin/autotest:19:in `load' from /usr/local/ruby/bin/autotest:19:in `<main>' dpkg: error processing install-info (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of info: info depends on install-info; however: Package install-info is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing info (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ubuntu-standard: ubuntu-standard depends on info; however: Package info is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing ubuntu-standard (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates it's a follow-up error from a previous failure. No apport report written because the error message indicates it's a follow-up error from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: install-info info ubuntu-standard E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Any ideas on what I should try next?

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  • Correcting Grammar for Microsoft Products and Technology

    I see book authors, editors, bloggers, press, team members, and occasionally even a VP misspell our products, technologies, and features that I thought I would build and maintain a list of the correct capitalization and spelling of the most commonly misspelled Microsoft products and technologies. Sources: Internal site (brandtools) and the Microsoft Trademarks Web site. Last updated: April 27, 2010   Incorrect Correct .net or .Net .NET .Net framework 4.0, .NET framework 4.0 .NET Framework AdCenter, Ad Center, Adcenter adCenter Ado.net, ADO.Net ADO.NET Asp.net, ASP.Net ASP.NET Asp.Net ajax, Asp.NET Ajax ASP.NET AJAX Asp.Net Mvc ASP.NET MVC Biz Spark, Bizspark BizSpark Clear Type, Clear type, Cleartype ClearType Directaccess, Direct Access DirectAccess Direct Show, Directshow DirectShow Direct X DirectX Dream Spark, Dreamspark DreamSpark Home Group, Home group HomeGroup HotMail, Hot Mail Hotmail Info Path, Infopath InfoPath Intellisense, Intellisense IntelliSense Iron Ruby IronRuby Kin KIN Linq LINQ MSN Messenger Windows Live Messenger One Note, Onenote OneNote Open type, Opentype OpenType PlayTo, Play to Play To Power Point, Powerpoint PowerPoint Powershell, Power Shell PowerShell Sea Dragon, Seadragon SeaDragon Sharepoint, Share Point SharePoint Silver Light, SilverLight Silverlight Skydrive, Sky Drive SkyDrive Sql Server SQL Server Visual Basic .net (the .net was removed in the 2005 version) Visual Basic  Visual C# Express 2010 or Visual Basic Express 2010 or Visual C++ Express 2010 Visual version 2010 Express as in Visual C# 2010 Express, Visual Basic 2010 Express Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 or Visual Studio Professional 2010 Visual Studio 2010 version, as in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 Professional WebSite Spark, Website spark Website Spark Win 32 Win32 Windows Mobile (except when referring to previous versions like 5.0 or 6), Windows phone 7 Series Windows Phone Xaml XAML XBOX, xbox Xbox Xbox Live, XBOX Live Xbox LIVE   Caveats These guidelines dont apply to URLs (ex: www.asp.net) or to code namespaces, variables, and classes should follow the .NET Framework naming guidelines. This list only covers capitalization/spacing rules, it doesnt cover the correct usage of (tm) or symbols or the correct word usage rules. For those, refer to the trademark Web site. Also note that I have no idea why we are so inconsistent say on keeping features/brands two words versus one word or the order of product/version/year.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

    - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
    Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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  • How To: Spell Check InfoPath web form in SharePoint 2010

    - by Jeremy Ramos
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/JeremyRamos/archive/2013/11/07/how-to-spell-check-infopath-web-form-in-sharepoint-2010.aspxThis is a sequel to my 2011 post about How To: Spell Check InfoPath Web Form in SharePoint. This time I will share how I managed to achieve Spell Checking in SharePoint 2010. This time round, we have changed our Online Forms strategy to use Custom lists instead of Form Libraries. I thought everything will be smooth sailing as we are using all OOTB features. So, we customised a Custom list form using InfoPath and added a few Rich Text Boxes (Spell Check is a requirement for this specific project). All is good in the InfoPath client including the Spell Checker so, happy days, I published straight away.Here comes the surprises now. I browsed to my Custom List and clicked Add New Item. This launched my Form in a modal dialog format. I went to my Rich Text Boxes to check the spell checker, and voila, it's disabled!I tried hacking the FormServer.aspx and the CustomSpellCheckEntirePage.js again but the new FormServer.aspx behaves differently than of MOSS 2007's. I searched for answers in many blogs to no avail. Often ending up being linked to my old blog post. I also tried placing the spell check javascript into a Content Editor Webpart of the Item's New Form and Edit form. It is launching the Spell Check dialog but it's not spellchecking the page correctly.At this point, I decided I needed to get my project across ASAP so enough with experimentations and logged a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support.On a call with the Support Engineer, I browsed through the Custom List and to the item to demonstrate my problem. Suddenly, the Spell Check tab in the toolbar is now Enabled! Surprised? Not much, it's Microsoft!Anyway, to cut my story short, here is a summary of my solution:Navigate to your Custom ListIn the Ribbon Toolbar, navigate to List > Customize List > Form Web Parts > Content Type Forms > (Item) New Form. This will display the newifs.aspx which is the page displayed when Add New Item is clicked. This page, just like any other SharePoint page, contains webparts. In this case, we have the InfoPath Form Web Part.Add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) on top of the InfoPath Form Web Part. (A blank CEWP would do for this example)Navigate to Page and click Stop EditingClick Add New Item again and navigate to a Rich Text box. Tadah! The Spell Check tab is now enabled!Do the same steps for the (Item) Edit Form to enable Spell Checks when editing an item.This "no code" solution discovered purely by accident!

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  • ray collision with rectangle and floating point accuracy

    - by phq
    I'm trying to solve a problem with a ray bouncing on a box. Actually it is a sphere but for simplicity the box dimensions are expanded by the sphere radius when doing the collision test making the sphere a single ray. It is done by projecting the ray onto all faces of the box and pick the one that is closest. However because I'm using floating point variables I fear that the projected point onto the surface might be interpreted as being below in the next iteration, also I will later allow the sphere to move which might make that scenario more likely. Also the bounce coefficient might be as low as zero, making the sphere continue along the surface. So my naive solution is to project not only forwards but backwards to catch those cases. That is where I got into problems shown in the figure: In the first iteration the first black arrow is calculated and we end up at a point on the surface of the box. In the second iteration the "back projection" hits the other surface making the second black arrow bounce on the wrong surface. If there are several boxes close to each other this has further consequences making the sphere fall through them all. So my main question is how to handle possible floating point accuracy when placing the sphere on the box surface so it does not fall through. In writing this question I got the idea to have a threshold to only accept back projections a certain amount much smaller than the box but larger than the possible accuracy limitation, this would only cause the "false" back projection when the sphere hit the box on an edge which would appear naturally. To clarify my original approach, the arrows shown in the image is not only the path the sphere travels but is also representing a single time step in the simulation. In reality the time step is much smaller about 0.05 of the box size. The path traveled is projected onto possible sides to avoid traveling past a thinner object at higher speeds. In normal situations the floating point accuracy is not an issue but there are two situations where I have the concern. When the new position at the end of the time step is located very close to the surface, very unlikely though. When using a bounce factor of 0, here it happens every time the sphere hit a box. To add some loss of accuracy, the motivation for my concern, is that the sphere and box are in different coordinate systems and thus the sphere location is transformed for every test. This last one is why I'm not willing to stand on luck that one floating point value lying on top of the box always will be interpreted the same. I did not know voronoi regions by name, but looking at it I'm not sure how it would be used in a projection scenario that I'm using here.

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  • It's called College.

    - by jeffreyabecker
    Today I saw yet another 'GUID vs int as your primary key' article. Like most of the ones I've read this was filled with technical misrepresentations and out-right fallices. Chef's famous line that "There's a time and a place for everything children" applies here. GUIDs have distinct advantages and disadvantages which should be considered when choosing a data type for the primary key. Fallacy 1: "Its easier" An integer data type(tinyint, smallint, int, bigint) is a better artifical key than a GUID because its easier to remember. I'm a firm believer that your artifical primary keys should be opaque gibberish. PK's are an implementation detail which should never be exposed to the user or relied on for business logic. If you want things to come back in an order, add and ORDER BY clause and SortOrder fields. If you want a human-usable look-up add a business key with a unique constraint. If you want to know what order things were inserted into a table add a timestamp. Fallacy 2: "Size Matters" For many applications, the size of the artifical primary key is going to be irrelevant. The particular article which kicked this post off stated repeatedly that joining against an int has better performance than joining against a GUID. In computer science the performance of your algorithm is always a function of the number of data points. This still holds true for databases. Unless your table is very large, the performance difference between an int and a guid probably isnt going to be mesurable let alone noticeable. My personal experience is that the performance becomes an issue when you start having billions of rows in the table. At this point, you should probably start looking to move from int to bigint so the effective space/performance gain isnt as much as you'd think. GUID Advantages: Insert-ability / Mergeability: You can reliably insert guids into tables without key collisions. Database Independence: Saving entities to the database often requires knowing ids. With identity based ids the id must be selected back after every insert. GUIDs can be generated application-side allowing much faster inserts. GUID Disadvantages: Generatability: You can calculate the next id for an integer pk pretty easily in your head but will need a program to generate GUIDs. Solution: "Select top 100 newid() from sysobjects" Fragmentation: most GUID generation algorithms generate pseudo random GUIDs. This can cause inserts into the middle of your clustered index. Solutions: add a default of newsequentialid() or use GuidComb in NHibernate.

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  • Why is Spritebatch drawing my Textures out of order?

    - by Andrew
    I just started working with XNA Studio after programming 2D games in java. Because of this, I have absolutely no experience with Spritebatch and sprite sorting. In java, I could just layer the images by calling the draw methods in order. For a while, my Spritebatch was working fine in deferred sorting mode, but when I made a change to one of my textures, it suddenly started drawing them out of order. I have searched for a solution to this problem, but nothing seems to work. I have tried adding layer depths to the sprites and changing the sort mode to BackToFront or FrontToBack or even immediate, but nothing seems to work. Here is my drawing code: protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Gray); Game1.spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.PointClamp, null, null); for (int x = 0; x < 5; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < 5; y++) { region[x, y].draw(((float)w / aw)); // Draws the Tile-Based background } } player.draw(spriteBatch, ((float)w / aw));//draws the character (This method is where the problem occurs) enemy.draw(spriteBatch, (float)w/aw); // draws a basic enemy Game1.spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } player.draw method: public void draw(SpriteBatch sb, float ratio){ //draws the player base (The character without hair or equipment) sb.Draw(playerbase[0], new Rectangle((int)(pos.X - (24 * ratio)), (int)(pos.Y - (48 * ratio)), (int)(48 * ratio), (int)(48 * ratio)), new Rectangle(orientation * 48, animFrame * 48, 48, 48), Color.White,0,Vector2.Zero,SpriteEffects.None,0); //draws the player's hair sb.Draw(playerbase[3], new Rectangle((int)(pos.X - (24 * ratio)), (int)(pos.Y - (48 * ratio)), (int)(48 * ratio), (int)(48 * ratio)), new Rectangle(orientation * 48, animFrame * 48, 48, 48), Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, SpriteEffects.None, 0); //draws the player's shirt sb.Draw(equipment[0], new Rectangle((int)(pos.X - (24 * ratio)), (int)(pos.Y - (48 * ratio)), (int)(48 * ratio), (int)(48 * ratio)), new Rectangle(orientation * 48, animFrame * 48, 48, 48), Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, SpriteEffects.None, 0); //draws the player's pants sb.Draw(equipment[1], new Rectangle((int)(pos.X - (24 * ratio)), (int)(pos.Y - (48 * ratio)), (int)(48 * ratio), (int)(48 * ratio)), new Rectangle(orientation * 48, animFrame * 48, 48, 48), Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, SpriteEffects.None, 0); //draws the player's shoes sb.Draw(equipment[2], new Rectangle((int)(pos.X - (24 * ratio)), (int)(pos.Y - (48 * ratio)), (int)(48 * ratio), (int)(48 * ratio)), new Rectangle(orientation * 48, animFrame * 48, 48, 48), Color.White, 0, Vector2.Zero, SpriteEffects.None, 0); } the game has a top-down perspective much like the early legend of zelda games. It draws sections of the texture depending on which direction the character is facing and the animation frame. However, instead of drawing the character in the order the draw methods are called, it ends up drawing the character out of order. Please help me with this problem.

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  • Wordpress Installation (on IIS and SQL Server)

    - by Davide Mauri
    To proceed with the installation of Wordpress on SQL Server and IIS, first of all, you need to do the following steps Create a database on SQL Server that will be used by Wordpress Create login that can access to the just created database and put the user into ddladmin, db_datareader, db_datawriter roles Download and unpack Wordpress 3.3.2 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) zip file into a directory of your choice Download the wp-db-abstraction 1.1.4 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) plugin from wordpress.org website Now that the basic action has been done, you can start to setup and configure your Wordpress installation. Unpack and follow the instructions in the README.TXT file to install the Database Abstraction Layer. Mainly you have to: Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins.  This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory.  If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it. Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php Now you can create an application pool in IIS like the following one Create a website, using the above Application Pool, that points to the folder where you unpacked Wordpress files. Be sure to give the “Write” permission to the IIS account, as pointed out in this (old, but still quite valid) installation manual: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#iis Now you’re ready to go. Point your browser to the configured website and the Wordpress installation screen will be there for you. When you’re requested to enter information to connect to MySQL database, simply skip that page, leaving the default values. If you have installed the Database Abstraction Layer, another database installation screen will appear after the one used by MySQL, and here you can enter the configuration information needed to connect to SQL Server. After having finished the installation steps, you should be able to access and navigate your wordpress site.  A final touch, and it’s done: just add the needed rewrite rules http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#urlrewrite and that’s it! Well. Not really. Unfortunately the current (as of 27 May 2012) version of the Database Abstraction Layer (1.1.4) has some bugs. Luckily they can be quickly fixed: Backslash Fix http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-db-abstraction-fix-problems-with-backslash-usage Select Top 0 Fix Make the change to the file “.\wp-content\mu-plugins\wp-db-abstraction\translations\sqlsrv\translations.php” suggested by “debettap”   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3485384&group_id=315685&atid=1328061 And now you have a 100% working Wordpress installation on SQL Server! Since I also wanted to take advantage of SQL Server Full Text Search, I’ve created a very simple wordpress plugin to setup full-text search and to use it as website search engine: http://wpfts.codeplex.com/ Enjoy!

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  • Oracle at ASMC PDI 2012

    - by jeffrey.waterman
    Recently, I had the pleasure of representing Oracle at the American Society of Military Comptrollers National Professional Development Institute (PDI).  The PDI is the premier training event for resource managers in the Department of Defense and US Coast Guard.  Each year they assemble top presenters and key note speakers to convey their experiences and share the upcoming goals and vision for the Defense Department's financial and resource management community.  This year, the common themes were centered around 'auditability' and 'efficiency'.   What is auditability?  There were many definitions/themes tossed around, but to summarize my notes, it boiled down to:- the proper tracking of funds- audit readiness- proper controls- proper documentation There were sessions regarding entire programs focused on the need for auditability.  For example, FIAR: Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (http://comptroller.defense.gov/fiar/index.html)   The FIAR stresses the "...improve(ment of) the Department's financial processes, controls and information." The entire conference, one set of solutions kept popping into my head around, "how can Oracle's solutions assist the Department of Defense", or any other Federal Agency, improve their financial processes and controls?   One answer came to mind:  Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management. Commonly referred to as "GRC". Let me summarize the main components around Oracle's GRC solution: GRC Manager: This solution is the central repository for documenting business processes, policies, and established controls.  All identified risks and issues are documented within the repository as well as action plans necessary for mitigation. GRC Controls:  This solution consists of a set of tools which are embedded with your ERP (financial, human resource, supply chain, etc.) applications to detect, prevent, and/or enforce the policies and procedures established by your Agency.  Components of the solution include:- Application Access Control Governor: a robust tool for managing application roles and responsibilities; simplify segregation of duty maintenance- Configuration Controls Governor: complete audit trail for changes made to configurations- Transactions Control Governor: track violations of internal controls; alert management to suspicious activities; be warned when high dollar transactions are occurring on an irregular basis; - Preventative Controls Governor: prevent sensitive information from being viewed by unauthorized parties; enforce field, block, and form change control If you are in the financial or resource management community and are concerned about auditability within your organization I suggest you follow up this post by reading about Oracle's GRC solutions.  www.oracle.com/grc Please feel free to follow up with thought and questions in the comments section below.  Also, if you have a topic you would like addressed in this blog, just drop me a note at [email protected]  or leave the suggestion in the comment section as well. Thank you for reading.

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