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• College Courses through distance learning

  - by Matt

  I realize this isn't really a programming question, but didn't really know where to post this in the stackexchange and because I am a computer science major i thought id ask here. This is pretty unique to the programmer community since my degree is about 95% programming. I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can. So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for. Class I need: Only need one C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms C SC 445 Algorithms C SC 473 Automata Only need one C SC 452 Operating Systems C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category. Some other classes I can take are: CSC 447 - Green Computing CSC 425 - Computer Networking CSC 460 - Database Design CSC 466 - Computer Security I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need. Thanks! Descriptions Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security. Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast. Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications. Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers. Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers. Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems. Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound). Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages). Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases.

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• Day 4 - Game Sprites In Action

  - by dapostolov

  Yesterday I drew an image on the screen. Most exciting, but ... I spent more time blogging about it then actual coding. So this next little while I'm going to streamline my game and research and simply post key notes. Quick notes on the last session: The most important thing I wanted to point out were the following methods:           spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);           spriteBatch.End(); The spriteBatch object is used to draw Textures and a 2D texture is called a Sprite A texture is generally an image, which is called an Asset in XNA The Draw Method in the Game1.cs is looped (until exit) and utilises the spriteBatch object to draw a Scene To begin drawing a Scene you call the Begin Method. To end a Scene you call the End Method. And to place an image on the Scene you call the Draw method. The most simple implementation of the draw method is:           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White); 1) sprite - the 2D texture you loaded to draw 2) position - the 2d vector, a set of x & y coordinates 3) Color.White - the tint to apply to the texture, in this case, white light = nothing, nada, no tint. Game Sprites In Action! Today, I played around with Draw methods to get comfortable with their "quirks". The following is an example of the above draw method, but with more parameters available for us to use. Let's investigate!             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position2, null, Color.White, MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), new Vector2(sprite.Width / 2, sprite.Height / 2), 1.0F, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0F); The parameters (in order): 1) sprite  the texture to display 2) position2 the position on the screen / scene this can also be a rectangle 3) null the portion of the image to display within an image null = display full image this is generally used for animation strips / grids (more on this below) 4) Color.White Texture tinting White = no tint 5) MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f) rotation of the object, in this case 45 degrees rotates from the set plotting point. 6) new Vector(0,0) the plotting point in this case the top left corner the image will rotate from the top left of the texture in the code above, the point is set to the middle of the image. 7) 1.0f Image scaling (1x) 8) SpriteEffects.None you can flip the image horizontally or vertically 9) 0.0f The z index of the image. 0 = closer, 1 behind? And playing around with different combinations I was able to come up with the following whacky display:   Checking off Yesterdays Intention List: learn game development terminology (in progress) - We learned sprite, scene, texture, and asset. how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen (completed) - The thing to note was, it's was in radians and I found a cool helper method to convert degrees into radians. Also, the image rotates from it's specified point. how to layer static images on the screen (completed) - I couldn't seem to get the zIndex working, but one things for sure, the order you draw the image in also determines how it is rendered on the screen. understand image scaling (in progress) - I'm not sure I have this fully covered, but for the most part plug a number in the scaling field and the image grows / shrinks accordingly. can we reuse images? (completed) - yes, I loaded one image and plotted the bugger all over the screen. understand how framerate is handled in XNA (in progress) - I hacked together some code to display the framerate each second. A framerate of 60 appears to be the standard. Interesting to note, the GameTime object does provide you with some cool timing capabilities, such as...is the game running slow? Need to investigate this down the road. how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen (in progress) - i got text rendered on the screen, and i understand containing rectangles. However, I didn't display "shapes" & "colors" how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) (todo) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques (in progress) - I was able to create a stripe animation of numbers ranging from 1 - 4, each block was 40 x 40 pixles for a total stripe size of 160 x 40. Using the portion (source Rectangle) parameter, i limited this display to each section at varying intervals. It was interesting to note my first implementation animated at rocket speed. I then tried to create a smoother animation by limiting the redraw capacity, which seemed to work. I guess a little more research will have to be put into this for animating characters / scenes. how to detect colliding images or screen edges (todo) - but the rectangle object can detect collisions I believe. how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching (in progress) - I haven't figured out how to modify a specific color to be another color, but the tinting parameter definately could be used. As for stretching, use the rectangle object as the positioning and the image will stretch to fit! how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel (completed) - as per basic animation techniques what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) (todo) Tomorrows Intention Tomorrow I am going to take a stab at rendering a game menu and from there I'm going to investigate how I can improve upon the code and techniques. Intention List: Render a menu, fancy or not Show the mouse cursor Hook up click event A basic animation of somesort Investigate image / menu techniques D.

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• Welcome to Jackstown

  - by fatherjack

  I live in a small town, the population count isn't that great but let me introduce you to some of the population. We'll start with Martin the Doc, he fixes up anything that gets poorly, so much so that he could be classed as the doctor, the vet and even the garage mechanic. He's got a reputation that he can fix anything and that hasn't been proved wrong yet. He's great friends with Brian (who gets called "Brains") the teacher who seems to have a sound understanding of any topic you care to pass his way. If he isn't sure he tells you and then goes to find out and comes back with a full answer real quick. Its good to have that sort of research capability close at hand. Brains is also great at encouraging anyone who needs a bit of support to get them up to speed and working on their jobs. Steve sees Brains regularly, that's because he is the librarian, he keeps all sorts of reading material and nowadays there's even video to watch about any topic you like. Steve keeps scouring all sorts of places to get the content that's needed and he keeps it in good order so that what ever is needed can be found quickly. He also has to make sure that old stuff gets marked as probably out of date so that anyone reading it wont get mislead. Over the road from him is Greg, he's the town crier. We don't have a newspaper here so Greg keeps us all informed of what's going on "out of town" - what new stuff we might make use of and what wont work in a small place like this. If we are interested he goes ahead and gets people in to demonstrate their products  and tell us about the details. Greg is pretty good at getting us discounts too. Now Greg's brother Ian works for the mayors office in the "waste management department" nowadays its all about the recycling but he still has to make sure that the stuff that cant be used any more gets disposed of properly. It depends on the type of waste he's dealing with that decides how it need to be treated and he has to know a lot about the different methods and when to use which ones. There are two people that keep the peace in town, Brent is the detective, investigating wrong doings and applying justice where necessary and Bart is the diplomat who smooths things over when any people have a dispute or disagreement. Brent is meticulous in his investigations and fair in the way he handles any situation he finds. Discretion is his byword. There's a rumour that Bart used to work for the United Nations but what ever his history there is no denying his ability to get apparently irreconcilable parties working together to their combined benefit. Someone who works closely with Bart is Brad, he is the translator in town. He has several languages that he can converse in but he can also explain things from someone's point of view or  and make it understandable to someone else. To keep things on the straight and narrow from a legal perspective is Ben the solicitor, making sure we all abide by the rules.Two people who make for an interesting evening's conversation if you get them together are Aaron and Grant, Aaron is the local planning inspector and Grant is an inventor of some reputation. Anything being constructed around here needs Aarons agreement. He's quite flexible in his rules though; if you can justify what you want to do with solid logic but he wont stand for any development going on without his inclusion. That gets a demolition notice and there's no argument. Grant as I mentioned is the inventor in town, if something can be improved or created then Grant is your man. He mainly works on his own but isnt averse to getting specific advice and assistance from specialist from out of town if they can help him finish his creations.There aren't too many people left for you to meet in the town, there's Rob, he's an ex professional sportsman. He played Hockey, Football, Cricket, you name it. He was in his element as goal keeper / wicket keeper and that shows in his personal life. He just goes about his business and people often don't even know that he's helped them. Really low profile, doesn't get any glory but saves people from lots of problems, even disasters on occasion. There goes Neil, he's a bit of an odd person, some people say he's gifted with special clairvoyant powers, personally I think he's got his ear to the ground and knows where to find out the important news as soon as its made public. Anyone getting a visit from Neil is best off to follow his advice though, he's usually spot on and you wont be caught by surprise if you follow his recommendations – wherever it comes from.Poor old Andrew is the last person to introduce you to. Andrew doesn't show himself too often but when he does it seems that people find a reason to blame him for their problems, whether he had anything to do with their predicament or not. In all honesty, without fail, and to his great credit, he takes it in good grace and never retaliates or gets annoyed when he's out and about.  It pays off too as its very often the case that those who were blaming him recently suddenly find they need his help and they readily forget the issues pretty rapidly.And then there's me, what do I do in town? Well, I'm just a DBA with a lot of hats. (Jackstown Pop. 1)

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• EPM and Business Analytics Talking-head Videos from Oracle OpenWorld 2013

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Here is a selection of 2 to 3 minute video interviews at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld: 1. George Somogyi, Solutions Architect, New Edge Group, talks about the importance of having their integrated Oracle Hyperion Platform consisting of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management, Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and Oracle Business Intelligence Extended Edition plus their use of Oracle Managed Cloud Services. Speaker: George Somogyi @ http://youtu.be/kWn0dQxCUy8 2. Gregg Thompson, Director of Financial Systems for ADT, talks about using Oracle Data Relationship Management prior to implementing an Enterprise Performance Management solution. Gregg confirmed that there are big benefits to bringing the full Oracle Hyperion Financial Close suite online with Oracle DRM as the metadata source. Reduced maintenance time and use of external consultants translates into significant time and cost savings and faster implementation times. Speaker: Gregg Thompson @ http://youtu.be/XnFrR9Uk4xk 3. Jeff Spangler, Director Financial Planning and Analysis for Speedy Cash Holdings Corp, talked to us about the benefits achieved through implementing Oracle Hyperion Planning and financial reporting solutions. He also describes how the use of Data Relationship Management will keep the process running smoothly now and in the future. Speaker: Jeff Spangler @ http://youtu.be/kkkuMkgJ22U 4. Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision at Oracle, talks about Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision, how it is an integral part of the financial close process and that it provides better internal controls and automation of this task. Marc talks about Oracle Partners and customers alike who are seeing great value. Speaker: Marc Seewald @ http://youtu.be/lM_nfvACGuA 5. Matt Bradley, SVP of Product Development for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Applications at Oracle, talked to us about different deployment options for Oracle EPM. Cloud services (SaaS), managed services, on-premise, off-premise all have their merits, and organizations need flexibility to easily move between them as their companies evolve. Speaker: Matt Bradley @ http://youtu.be/ATO7Z9dbE-o 6. Neil Sellers, Partner, Qubix International talks about their experience with previewing Oracle’s new Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. He describes the benefits of the step-by-step task lists, the speed of getting the application up and running, and the huge benefits of not having to manage the software and hardware side of the planning process. Speaker: Neil Sellers @ http://youtu.be/xmosO28e4_I 7. Praveen Pasupuleti, Senior Business Intelligence Development Manager of Citrix Systems Inc., talks about their Oracle Hyperion Planning upgrade and the huge performance improvement now experienced in forecasting. He also talked about the benefits of Oracle Hyperion Workforce Planning achieved by Citrix. Speaker: Praveen Pasupuleti @ http://youtu.be/d1e_4hLqw8c 8. CheckPoint Consulting, talked to us about how Enterprise Performance Management should be viewed as an entire solution, rather than as a bunch of applications in silos, to provide significant benefits; and how Data Relationship Management can tie it all together effectively. Speaker: Ron Dimon @ http://youtu.be/sRwbdbbXvUE 9. Sonal Kulkarni, Enterprise Performance Management Leader, Cummins Inc., talks about their use of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Management (Account Reconciliation Manager), Oracle Hyperion Financial Management and Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and how this is providing efficiency, visibility and compliance benefits. Speaker: Sonal Kulkarni @ http://youtu.be/OEgup5dKyVc 10. Todd Renard, Manager Financial Planning and Business Analytics for B/E Aerospace Inc., talks about the huge benefits that B/E Aerospace is experiencing from Oracle Financial Close Suite. He was extremely excited about Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management and how this helps them integrate a new business in as little as three weeks. Speaker: Todd Renard @ http://youtu.be/nIfqK46uVI8 11. Peter Smolianski, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia Courts, talked to us about how D.C. Courts is using Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management to push their 5 year plan forward, to report results to their constituents, and take accountability for process changes to become more efficient. Speaker: Peter Smolianski @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-DtB5pl-uk 12. Rich Wilkie, Senior Director of Product Management for Financial Close Suite at Oracle, talked to us about Oracle Financial Management Analytics. He told us how the prebuilt dashboards on top of Oracle Hyperion Financial Close Suite make it easy for everyone to see the numbers and understand where they are in the close process, and if there is an issue, they can see where it is. Executives are excited to get this information on mobile devices too. Speaker: Rich Wilkie @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UHuHgx74Yg 13. Dinesh Balebail, Senior Director of Software Development for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, talked to us about the power and speed of Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management and how it is being used to do deep costing for Telecoms, Hospitals, Banks and other high transaction volume organizations effectively. Speaker: Dinesh Balebail @ http://youtu.be/ivx5AZCXAfs /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• Can't connect to Wired Network after installing 12.04

  - by ezz9

  I have installed 12.04 into a used HP Compaq DC 7100 CMT. Plugged in LAN cable into the computer and it says network disconnected. from what I understand on the things I've read, it's not getting the address right, maybe it's just a guess (hardware address 00:16:35:78:47:bb). I know the LAN cable is working I can get on the net with the old computer. (Old computer is using device MAC address; Auto eth0 00:11:11:E6:4F:FE). I have put this address into the newer HP and it shows last used (minutes ago) but no Internet sever not found. I tried the hardware address it says never. I feel and think this should be easy to fix. But I just don't know. Here is the info everyone has asked for, but they never say what I should do. sudo lshw -C network; rfkill list; cat /etc/network/interfaces; cat /etc/lsb-release; lspci -nn; lsusb; uname -a; ifconfig; route -n *-network description: ethernet interface product; NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:40:00.0 logical name: eth0 verson: 01 serial: 00:16:35:78:47:bb size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000-fd configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion= 3.121 duplex=full firmware=5751-v3.29a latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twi sted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:17 memory:f0400000-f040ffff auto lo iface lo inet loopback DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION= "Ubuntu 12.04 LTS" 00:00.0 host bridge [0600]: Inter Corporation 82915G/P/GV/GL/PL/910GL Memory Con troller Hub [8086:2580] (rev 04) 00.02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL inte grated Graphics Controller [8086:2582] (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2660] (rev 03) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2662] (rev 03) 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #1 [8086:2658] (rev 03) 00:1d.1 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #2 [8086:2659] (rev 03) 00:1d.2 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #3 [8086:265a] (rev 03) 00:1d.3 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB UHCI #4 [8086:265b] (rev 03) 00:1d.7 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Fam ily) USB2 UHCI Controller [8086:265c] (rev 03) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI bridge [8086:244e] (rev d 3) 00:1e.2 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/ FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Autio conrtroller [8086:266e] (rev 03) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/RF (ICH6/ICH6R) LPC Interfa ce Bridge [8086:2640] (rev 03) 00:1f.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 fami ly) IDE Controller [8086:266f] (rev 03) 00:1f.2 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FW (ICH6/ICH6W) SATA Con troller [8086:2651] (rev 03) 40:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetXreme BCM5751 Gigab it Ethernet PCI Express [14e4:1677} (rev 01) Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Linux bob-desktop 3.2.0-23-generic-pae #36-Ubuntu SMP Tpr 10 22:19:09 UTC 20 12 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16:35:78:47:bb inet6 addr: fe80::216:35ff:47bb/64 Scope:link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:2517 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:164 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:164508 (164.5 KB) TX bytes: 40884 (40.0 KB) Interrupt:17 lo Link encap:Local loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:3290 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:3290 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen: 0 RX bytes:267212 (267.2 KB) TX bytes: 267212 (267.2 KB) Kernel Ip routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface ran this sudo dhclient eth0 no reply ran this ip addr 1: lo <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: eth0: <BROADCAST ,MULTICAST ,UP ,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP qlen 1000 link/enter 00:16:35:78:47:BB brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 169.254.7.172/16 brd 169.254.255.255 scope link eth0:avahi inet6 fe80::216:35ff:fe78:47bb/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever Help please.

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• EU Digital Agenda scores 85/100

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  If the Digital Agenda was a bottle of wine and I were wine critic Robert Parker, I would say the Digital Agenda has "a great bouquet, many good elements, with astringent, dry and puckering mouth feel that will not please everyone, but still displaying some finesse. A somewhat controlled effort with no surprises and a few noticeable flaws in the delivery. Noticeably shorter aftertaste than advertised by the producers. Score: 85/100. Enjoy now". The EU Digital Agenda states that "standards are vital for interoperability" and has a whole chapter on interoperability and standards. With this strong emphasis, there is hope the EU's outdated standardization system finally is headed for reform. It has been 23 years since the legal framework of standardisation was completed by Council Decision 87/95/EEC8 in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector. Standardization is market driven. For several decades the IT industry has been developing standards and specifications in global open standards development organisations (fora/consortia), many of which have transparency procedures and practices far superior to the European Standards Organizations. The Digital Agenda rightly states: "reflecting the rise and growing importance of ICT standards developed by certain global fora and consortia". Some fora/consortia, of course, are distorted, influenced by single vendors, have poor track record, and need constant vigilance, but they are the minority. Therefore, the recognition needs to be accompanied by eligibility criteria focused on openness. Will the EU reform its ICT standardization by the end of 2010? Possibly, and only if DG Enterprise takes on board that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have driven half of the productivity growth in Europe over the past 15 years, a prominent fact in the EU's excellent Digital Competitiveness report 2010 published on Monday 17 May. It is ok to single out the ICT sector. It simply is the most important sector right now as it fuels growth in all other sectors. Let's not wait for the entire standardization package which may take another few years. Europe does not have time. The Digital Agenda is an umbrella strategy with deliveries from a host of actors across the Commission. For instance, the EU promises to issue "guidance on transparent ex-ante disclosure rules for essential intellectual property rights and licensing terms and conditions in the context of standard setting", by 2011 in the Horisontal Guidelines now out for public consultation by DG COMP and to some extent by DG ENTR's standardization policy reform. This is important. The EU will issue procurement guidance as interoperability frameworks are put into practice. This is a joint responsibility of several DGs, and is likely to suffer coordination problems, controversy and delays. We have seen plenty of the latter already and I have commented on the Commission's own interoperability elsewhere, with mixed luck. :( Yesterday, I watched the cartoonesque Korean western film The Good, the Bad and the Weird. In the movie (and I meant in the movie only), a bandit, a thief, and a bounty hunter, all excellent at whatever they do, fight for a treasure map. Whether that is a good analogy for the situation within the Commission, others are better judges of than I. However, as a movie fanatic, I still await the final shoot-out, and, as in the film, the only certainty is that "life is about chasing and being chased". The missed opportunity (in this case not following up the push from Member States to better define open standards based interoperability) is a casualty of the chaos ensued in the European Wild West (and I mean that in the most endearing sense, and my excuses beforehand to actors who possibly justifiably cannot bear being compared to fictional movie characters). Instead of exposing the ongoing fight, the EU opted for the legalistic use of the term "standards" throughout the document. This is a term that--to the EU-- excludes most standards used by the IT industry world wide. So, while it, for a moment, meant "weapon down", it will not lead to lasting peace. The Digital Agenda calls for the Member States to "Implement commitments on interoperability and standards in the Malmö and Granada Declarations by 2013". This is a far cry from the actual Ministerial Declarations which called upon the Commission to help them with this implementation by recognizing and further defining open standards based interoperability. Unless there is more forthcoming from the Commission, the market's judgement will be: you simply fall short. Generally, I think the EU focus now should be "from policy to practice" and the Digital Agenda does indeed stop short of tackling some highly practical issues. There is need for progress beyond the Digital Agenda. Here are some suggestions that would help Europe re-take global leadership on openness, public sector reform, and economic growth: A strong European software strategy centred around open standards based interoperability by 2011. An ambitious new eCommission strategy for 2011-15 focused on migration to open standards by 2015. Aligning the IT portfolio across the Commission into one Digital Agenda DG by 2012. Focusing all best practice exchange in eGovernment on one social networking site, epractice.eu (full disclosure: I had a role in getting that site up and running) Prioritizing public sector needs in global standardization over European standardization by 2014.

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• JDK bug migration: components and subcomponents

  - by darcy

  One subtask of the JDK migration from the legacy bug tracking system to JIRA was reclassifying bugs from a three-level taxonomy in the legacy system, (product, category, subcategory), to a fundamentally two-level scheme in our customized JIRA instance, (component, subcomponent). In the JDK JIRA system, there is technically a third project-level classification, but by design a large majority of JDK-related bugs were migrated into a single "JDK" project. In the end, over 450 legacy subcategories were simplified into about 120 subcomponents in JIRA. The 120 subcomponents are distributed among 17 components. A rule of thumb used was that a subcategory had to have at least 50 bugs in it for it to be retained. Below is a listing the component / subcomponent classification of the JDK JIRA project along with some notes and guidance on which OpenJDK email addresses cover different areas. Eventually, a separate incidents project to host new issues filed at bugs.sun.com will use a slightly simplified version of this scheme. The preponderance of bugs and subcomponents for the JDK are in library-related areas, with components named foo-libs and subcomponents primarily named after packages. While there was an overall condensation of subcomponents in the migration, in some cases long-standing informal divisions in core libraries based on naming conventions in the description were promoted to formal subcomponents. For example, hundreds of bugs in the java.util subcomponent whose descriptions started with "(coll)" were moved into java.util:collections. Likewise, java.lang bugs starting with "(reflect)" and "(proxy)" were moved into java.lang:reflect. client-libs (Predominantly discussed on 2d-dev and awt-dev and swing-dev.) 2d demo java.awt java.awt:i18n java.beans (See beans-dev.) javax.accessibility javax.imageio javax.sound (See sound-dev.) javax.swing core-libs (See core-libs-dev.) java.io java.io:serialization java.lang java.lang.invoke java.lang:class_loading java.lang:reflect java.math java.net java.nio (Discussed on nio-dev.) java.nio.charsets java.rmi java.sql java.sql:bridge java.text java.util java.util.concurrent java.util.jar java.util.logging java.util.regex java.util:collections java.util:i18n javax.annotation.processing javax.lang.model javax.naming (JNDI) javax.script javax.script:javascript javax.sql org.openjdk.jigsaw (See jigsaw-dev.) security-libs (See security-dev.) java.security javax.crypto (JCE: includes SunJCE/MSCAPI/UCRYPTO/ECC) javax.crypto:pkcs11 (JCE: PKCS11 only) javax.net.ssl (JSSE, includes javax.security.cert) javax.security javax.smartcardio javax.xml.crypto org.ietf.jgss org.ietf.jgss:krb5 other-libs corba corba:idl corba:orb corba:rmi-iiop javadb other (When no other subcomponent is more appropriate; use judiciously.) Most of the subcomponents in the xml component are related to jaxp. xml jax-ws jaxb javax.xml.parsers (JAXP) javax.xml.stream (JAXP) javax.xml.transform (JAXP) javax.xml.validation (JAXP) javax.xml.xpath (JAXP) jaxp (JAXP) org.w3c.dom (JAXP) org.xml.sax (JAXP) For OpenJDK, most JVM-related bugs are connected to the HotSpot Java virtual machine. hotspot (See hotspot-dev.) build compiler (See hotspot-compiler-dev.) gc (garbage collection, see hotspot-gc-dev.) jfr (Java Flight Recorder) jni (Java Native Interface) jvmti (JVM Tool Interface) mvm (Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine) runtime (See hotspot-runtime-dev.) svc (Servicability) test core-svc (See serviceability-dev.) debugger java.lang.instrument java.lang.management javax.management tools The full JDK bug database contains entries related to legacy virtual machines that predate HotSpot as well as retired APIs. vm-legacy jit (Sun Exact VM) jit_symantec (Symantec VM, before Exact VM) jvmdi (JVM Debug Interface ) jvmpi (JVM Profiler Interface ) runtime (Exact VM Runtime) Notable command line tools in the $JDK/bin directory have corresponding subcomponents. tools appletviewer apt (See compiler-dev.) hprof jar javac (See compiler-dev.) javadoc(tool) (See compiler-dev.) javah (See compiler-dev.) javap (See compiler-dev.) jconsole launcher updaters (Timezone updaters, etc.) visualvm Some aspects of JDK infrastructure directly affect JDK Hg repositories, but other do not. infrastructure build (See build-dev and build-infra-dev.) licensing (Covers updates to the third party readme, licenses, and similar files.) release_eng (Release engineering) staging (Staging of web pages related to JDK releases.) The specification subcomponent encompasses the formal language and virtual machine specifications. specification language (The Java Language Specification) vm (The Java Virtual Machine Specification) The code for the deploy and install areas is not currently included in OpenJDK. deploy deployment_toolkit plugin webstart install auto_update install servicetags In the JDK, there are a number of cross-cutting concerns whose organization is essentially orthogonal to other areas. Since these areas generally have dedicated teams working on them, it is easier to find bugs of interest if these bugs are grouped first by their cross-cutting component rather than by the affected technology. docs doclet guides hotspot release_notes tools tutorial embedded build hotspot libraries globalization locale-data translation performance hotspot libraries The list of subcomponents will no doubt grow over time, but my inclination is to resist that growth since the addition of each subcomponent makes the system as a whole more complicated and harder to use. When the system gets closer to being externalized, I plan to post more blog entries describing recommended use of various custom fields in the JDK project.

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• Is this proper OO design for C++?

  - by user121917

  I recently took a software processes course and this is my first time attempting OO design on my own. I am trying to follow OO design principles and C++ conventions. I attempted and gave up on MVC for this application, but I am trying to "decouple" my classes such that they can be easily unit-tested and so that I can easily change the GUI library used and/or the target OS. At this time, I have finished designing classes but have not yet started implementing methods. The function of the software is to log all packets sent and received, and display them on the screen (like WireShark, but for one local process only). The software accomplishes this by hooking the send() and recv() functions in winsock32.dll, or some other pair of analogous functions depending on what the intended Target is. The hooks add packets to SendPacketList/RecvPacketList. The GuiLogic class starts a thread which checks for new packets. When new packets are found, it utilizes the PacketFilter class to determine the formatting for the new packet, and then sends it to MainWindow, a native win32 window (with intent to later port to Qt).1 Full size image of UML class diagram Here are my classes in skeleton/header form (this is my actual code): class PacketModel { protected: std::vector<byte> data; int id; public: PacketModel(); PacketModel(byte* data, unsigned int size); PacketModel(int id, byte* data, unsigned int size); int GetLen(); bool IsValid(); //len >= sizeof(opcode_t) opcode_t GetOpcode(); byte* GetData(); //returns &(data[0]) bool GetData(byte* outdata, int maxlen); void SetData(byte* pdata, int len); int GetId(); void SetId(int id); bool ParseData(char* instr); bool StringRepr(char* outstr); byte& operator[] (const int index); }; class SendPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* returnAddy; public: byte* GetReturnAddy(); void SetReturnAddy(byte* addy); }; class RecvPacket : public PacketModel { protected: byte* callAddy; public: byte* GetCallAddy(); void SetCallAddy(byte* addy); }; //problem: packets may be added to list at any time by any number of threads //solution: critical section associated with each packet list class Synch { public: void Enter(); void Leave(); }; template<class PacketType> class PacketList { private: static const int MAX_STORED_PACKETS = 1000; public: static const int DEFAULT_SHOWN_PACKETS = 100; private: vector<PacketType> list; Synch synch; //wrapper for critical section public: void AddPacket(PacketType* packet); PacketType* GetPacket(int id); int TotalPackets(); }; class SendPacketList : PacketList<SendPacket> { }; class RecvPacketList : PacketList<RecvPacket> { }; class Target //one socket { bool Send(SendPacket* packet); bool Inject(RecvPacket* packet); bool InitSendHook(SendPacketList* sendList); bool InitRecvHook(RecvPacketList* recvList); }; class FilterModel { private: opcode_t opcode; int colorID; bool bFilter; char name[41]; }; class FilterFile { private: FilterModel filter; public: void Save(); void Load(); FilterModel* GetFilter(opcode_t opcode); }; class PacketFilter { private: FilterFile filters; public: bool IsFiltered(opcode_t opcode); bool GetName(opcode_t opcode, char* namestr); //return false if name does not exist COLORREF GetColor(opcode_t opcode); //return default color if no custom color }; class GuiLogic { private: SendPacketList sendList; RecvPacketList recvList; PacketFilter packetFilter; void GetPacketRepr(PacketModel* packet); void ReadNew(); void AddToWindow(); public: void Refresh(); //called from thread void GetPacketInfo(int id); //called from MainWindow }; I'm looking for a general review of my OO design, use of UML, and use of C++ features. I especially just want to know if I'm doing anything considerably wrong. From what I've read, design review is on-topic for this site (and off-topic for the Code Review site). Any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading this.

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• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

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• Getting a handle on mobile data

  - by Eric Jensen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} written by Ashok Joshi The proliferation of mobile devices in the corporate world is both a blessing as well as a challenge.  Mobile devices improve productivity and the velocity of business for the end users; on the other hand, IT departments need to manage the corporate data and applications that run on these devices. Oracle Database Mobile Server (DMS for short) provides a simple and effective way to deal with the management challenge.  DMS supports data synchronization between a central Oracle database server and data on mobile devices.  It also provides authentication, encryption and application and device management.  Finally, DMS is a highly scalable solution that can be used to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.   Here’s a simplified outline of how such a solution might work. Each device runs local sync and mgmt agents that handle bidirectional data flow with an Oracle enterprise backend, run remote commands, and provide status to the management console. For example, mobile admins could monitor multiple networks of mobile devices, upgrade their software remotely, and even destroy the local database on a compromised device. DMS supports either Oracle Berkeley DB or SQLite for device-local storage, and runs on a wide variety of mobile platforms. The schema for the device-local database is pretty simple – it contains the name of the application that’s installed on the device as well as details such as product name, version number, time of last access etc. Each mobile user has an account on the monitoring system.  DMS supports authentication via the Oracle database authentication mechanisms or alternately, via an external authentication server such as Oracle Identity Management. DMS also provides the option of encrypting the data on disk as well as while it is being synchronized. Whenever a device connects with DMS, it sends the list of all local application changes to the server; the server updates the central repository with this information.  Synchronization can be triggered on-demand, whenever there’s a change on the device (e.g. new application installed or an existing application removed) or via a rule-based schedule (e.g. every Saturday). Synchronization is very fast and efficient, since only the changes are propagated.  This includes resume capability; should synchronization be interrupted for any reason, the next synchronization will resume where the previous synchronization was interrupted. If the device should be lost or stolen, DMS has the capability to remove the applications and/or data from the device. This ability to control access to sensitive data and applications is critical in the corporate environment. The central repository also allows the IT manager to track the kinds of applications that mobile users use and recommend patches and upgrades, while still allowing the mobile user full control over what applications s/he downloads and uses on the device.  This is useful since most devices are used for corporate as well as personal information. In certain restricted use scenarios, the IT manager can also control whether a certain application can be installed on a mobile device.  Should an unapproved application be installed, it can easily be removed the next time the device connects with the central server. Oracle Database mobile server provides a simple, effective and highly secure and scalable solution for managing the data and applications for the mobile workforce.

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• How to Tell If Your Computer is Overheating and What to Do About It

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Heat is a computer’s enemy. Computers are designed with heat dispersion and ventilation in mind so they don’t overheat. If too much heat builds up, your computer may become unstable or suddenly shut down. The CPU and graphics card produce much more heat when running demanding applications. If there’s a problem with your computer’s cooling system, an excess of heat could even physically damage its components. Is Your Computer Overheating? When using a typical computer in a typical way, you shouldn’t have to worry about overheating at all. However, if you’re encountering system instability issues like abrupt shut downs, blue screens, and freezes — especially while doing something demanding like playing PC games or encoding video — your computer may be overheating. This can happen for several reasons. Your computer’s case may be full of dust, a fan may have failed, something may be blocking your computer’s vents, or you may have a compact laptop that was never designed to run at maximum performance for hours on end. Monitoring Your Computer’s Temperature First, bear in mind that different CPUs and GPUs (graphics cards) have different optimal temperature ranges. Before getting too worried about a temperature, be sure to check your computer’s documentation — or its CPU or graphics card specifications — and ensure you know the temperature ranges your hardware can handle. You can monitor your computer’s temperatures in a variety of different ways. First, you may have a way to monitor temperature that is already built into your system. You can often view temperature values in your computer’s BIOS or UEFI settings screen. This allows you to quickly see your computer’s temperature if Windows freezes or blue screens on you — just boot the computer, enter the BIOS or UEFI screen, and check the temperatures displayed there. Note that not all BIOSes or UEFI screens will display this information, but it is very common. There are also programs that will display your computer’s temperature. Such programs just read the sensors inside your computer and show you the temperature value they report, so there are a wide variety of tools you can use for this, from the simple Speccy system information utility to an advanced tool like SpeedFan. HWMonitor also offer this feature, displaying a wide variety of sensor information. Be sure to look at your CPU and graphics card temperatures. You can also find other temperatures, such as the temperature of your hard drive, but these components will generally only overheat if it becomes extremely hot in the computer’s case. They shouldn’t generate too much heat on their own. If you think your computer may be overheating, don’t just glance as these sensors once and ignore them. Do something demanding with your computer, such as running a CPU burn-in test with Prime 95, playing a PC game, or running a graphical benchmark. Monitor the computer’s temperature while you do this, even checking a few hours later — does any component overheat after you push it hard for a while? Preventing Your Computer From Overheating If your computer is overheating, here are some things you can do about it: Dust Out Your Computer’s Case: Dust accumulates in desktop PC cases and even laptops over time, clogging fans and blocking air flow. This dust can cause ventilation problems, trapping heat and preventing your PC from cooling itself properly. Be sure to clean your computer’s case occasionally to prevent dust build-up. Unfortunately, it’s often more difficult to dust out overheating laptops. Ensure Proper Ventilation: Put the computer in a location where it can properly ventilate itself. If it’s a desktop, don’t push the case up against a wall so that the computer’s vents become blocked or leave it near a radiator or heating vent. If it’s a laptop, be careful to not block its air vents, particularly when doing something demanding. For example, putting a laptop down on a mattress, allowing it to sink in, and leaving it there can lead to overheating — especially if the laptop is doing something demanding and generating heat it can’t get rid of. Check if Fans Are Running: If you’re not sure why your computer started overheating, open its case and check that all the fans are running. It’s possible that a CPU, graphics card, or case fan failed or became unplugged, reducing air flow. Tune Up Heat Sinks: If your CPU is overheating, its heat sink may not be seated correctly or its thermal paste may be old. You may need to remove the heat sink and re-apply new thermal paste before reseating the heat sink properly. This tip applies more to tweakers, overclockers, and people who build their own PCs, especially if they may have made a mistake when originally applying the thermal paste. This is often much more difficult when it comes to laptops, which generally aren’t designed to be user-serviceable. That can lead to trouble if the laptop becomes filled with dust and needs to be cleaned out, especially if the laptop was never designed to be opened by users at all. Consult our guide to diagnosing and fixing an overheating laptop for help with cooling down a hot laptop. Overheating is a definite danger when overclocking your CPU or graphics card. Overclocking will cause your components to run hotter, and the additional heat will cause problems unless you can properly cool your components. If you’ve overclocked your hardware and it has started to overheat — well, throttle back the overclock! Image Credit: Vinni Malek on Flickr     

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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• Why is my Ubuntu system not using the correct kernel?

  - by Brooks Moses

  We're having a bit of confusion on a Ubuntu remote system -- /boot/grub/menu.lst suggests the system should boot into kernel 2.6.35-30-generic, but it is actually running kernel 2.6.32-27-generic. Where should I look to start figuring out why this is happening and how to fix it? Specifically, /boot/grub/menu.lst has default 0 and the first entry is title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2- ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic Further, I've confirmed that /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic and /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic exist and have appropriate permissions. Meanwhile, uname -a returns: $ uname -a Linux cuda2 2.6.32-27-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 2 00:51:09 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux Edit: I've also tried re-running update-grub, and rebooting; no luck. Here's the full menu.lst, as requested by a commenter: # menu.lst - See: grub(8), info grub, update-grub(8) # grub-install(8), grub-floppy(8), # grub-md5-crypt, /usr/share/doc/grub # and /usr/share/doc/grub-legacy-doc/. ## default num # Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and # the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used. # # You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry # is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'. # WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use 'savedefault' or your # array will desync and will not let you boot your system. default 0 ## timeout sec # Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry # (normally the first entry defined). timeout 3 ## hiddenmenu # Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu) hiddenmenu # Pretty colours #color cyan/blue white/blue ## password ['--md5'] passwd # If used in the first section of a menu file, disable all interactive editing # control (menu entry editor and command-line) and entries protected by the # command 'lock' # e.g. password topsecret # password --md5 $1$gLhU0/$aW78kHK1QfV3P2b2znUoe/ # password topsecret # # examples # # title Windows 95/98/NT/2000 # root (hd0,0) # makeactive # chainloader +1 # # title Linux # root (hd0,1) # kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro # # # Put static boot stanzas before and/or after AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST ### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST ## lines between the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST markers will be modified ## by the debian update-grub script except for the default options below ## DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs ## ## Start Default Options ## ## default kernel options ## default kernel options for automagic boot options ## If you want special options for specific kernels use kopt_x_y_z ## where x.y.z is kernel version. Minor versions can be omitted. ## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro ## kopt_2_6_8=root=/dev/hdc1 ro ## kopt_2_6_8_2_686=root=/dev/hdc2 ro # kopt=root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro ## default grub root device ## e.g. groot=(hd0,0) # groot=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ## should update-grub create alternative automagic boot options ## e.g. alternative=true ## alternative=false # alternative=true ## should update-grub lock alternative automagic boot options ## e.g. lockalternative=true ## lockalternative=false # lockalternative=false ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the ## alternatives ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5 # defoptions=quiet splash ## should update-grub lock old automagic boot options ## e.g. lockold=false ## lockold=true # lockold=false ## Xen hypervisor options to use with the default Xen boot option # xenhopt= ## Xen Linux kernel options to use with the default Xen boot option # xenkopt=console=tty0 ## altoption boot targets option ## multiple altoptions lines are allowed ## e.g. altoptions=(extra menu suffix) extra boot options ## altoptions=(recovery) single # altoptions=(recovery mode) single ## controls how many kernels should be put into the menu.lst ## only counts the first occurence of a kernel, not the ## alternative kernel options ## e.g. howmany=all ## howmany=7 # howmany=all ## specify if running in Xen domU or have grub detect automatically ## update-grub will ignore non-xen kernels when running in domU and vice versa ## e.g. indomU=detect ## indomU=true ## indomU=false # indomU=detect ## should update-grub create memtest86 boot option ## e.g. memtest86=true ## memtest86=false # memtest86=true ## should update-grub adjust the value of the default booted system ## can be true or false # updatedefaultentry=false ## should update-grub add savedefault to the default options ## can be true or false # savedefault=false ## ## End Default Options ## title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.35-30-generic (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-30-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-30-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-32-server uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-32-server (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-32-server root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-32-server title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-27-generic uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic title Ubuntu 10.10, kernel 2.6.32-27-generic (recovery mode) uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=UUID=67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic title Chainload into GRUB 2 root 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/grub/core.img title Ubuntu 10.10, memtest86+ uuid 67717ee3-cbf9-45d2-ae97-820256f4c4fd kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST To add complication and joy to my life, this is a desktop machine in a remote datacenter; we don't have either local access or serial-console access. Suggestions?

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• why installing lame it is getting failed

  - by Rahul Mehta

  I want to install ffmpeg with mp3lame enabled for this m following this tutorial , http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9868359&postcount=1289 and in step 2 error is libfaac is not found ? and in step 5 installing lame is giving this error , why it is getting failed , please advised what to do ? reach121@youngib:~/lame-3.98.4$ sudo checkinstall --pkgname=lame-ffmpeg --pkgversion="3.98.4" --backup=no --default --deldoc=yes checkinstall 1.6.2, Copyright 2009 Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran This software is released under the GNU GPL. ***************************************** **** Debian package creation selected *** ***************************************** This package will be built according to these values: 0 - Maintainer: [ root@youngib ] 1 - Summary: [ Package created with checkinstall 1.6.2 ] 2 - Name: [ lame-ffmpeg ] 3 - Version: [ 3.98.4 ] 4 - Release: [ 1 ] 5 - License: [ GPL ] 6 - Group: [ checkinstall ] 7 - Architecture: [ amd64 ] 8 - Source location: [ lame-3.98.4 ] 9 - Alternate source location: [ ] 10 - Requires: [ ] 11 - Provides: [ lame-ffmpeg ] 12 - Conflicts: [ ] 13 - Replaces: [ ] Enter a number to change any of them or press ENTER to continue: Installing with make install... ========================= Installation results =========================== Making install in mpglib make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/mpglib' Making install in libmp3lame make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' Making install in i386 make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/i386' Making install in vector make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame/vector' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' test -z "/usr/local/lib" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/lib" /bin/bash ../libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c 'libmp3lame.la' '/usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.la' /usr/bin/install -c .libs/libmp3lame.lai /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.la /usr/bin/install -c .libs/libmp3lame.a /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.a chmod 644 /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.a ranlib /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.a PATH="$PATH:/sbin" ldconfig -n /usr/local/lib ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Libraries have been installed in: /usr/local/lib If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries in a given directory, LIBDIR, you must either use libtool, and specify the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR' flag during linking and do at least one of the following: - add LIBDIR to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH' environment variable during execution - add LIBDIR to the `LD_RUN_PATH' environment variable during linking - use the `-Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR' linker flag - have your system administrator add LIBDIR to `/etc/ld.so.conf' See any operating system documentation about shared libraries for more information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/libmp3lame' Making install in frontend make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' test -z "/usr/local/bin" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/bin" /bin/bash ../libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c 'lame' '/usr/local/bin/lame' /usr/bin/install -c lame /usr/local/bin/lame make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/frontend' Making install in Dll make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/Dll' Making install in debian make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'. make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/debian' Making install in doc make[1]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc' Making install in html make[2]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[3]: Entering directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'. test -z "/usr/local/share/doc/lame/html" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/share/doc/lame/html" /bin/mkdir: cannot create directory `/usr/local/share/doc': No such file or directory make[3]: *** [install-pkghtmlDATA] Error 1 make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[2]: *** [install-am] Error 2 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc/html' make[1]: *** [install-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/reach121/lame-3.98.4/doc' make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1 **** Installation failed. Aborting package creation. Cleaning up...OK Bye. reach121@youngib:~/lame-3.98.4$

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• Global Perspective: Oracle AppAdvantage Does its Stage Debut in the UK

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Global Perspective is a monthly series that brings experiences, business needs and real-world use cases from regions across the globe. This month’s feature is a follow-up from last month’s Global Perspective note from a well known ACE Director based in EMEA. My first contribution to this blog was before Oracle Open World and I was quite excited about where this initiative would take me in my understanding of the value of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Rimi Bewtra from the Oracle AppAdvantage team came as promised to the Oracle ACE Director briefings and explained what this initiative was all about and I then asked the directors to take part in the new survey. The story was really well received and then at the SOA advisory board that many of these ACE Directors already take part in there was a further discussion on how this initiative will help customers understand the benefits of adoption. A few days later Rick Beers launched the program at a lunch of invited customer executives which included one from Pella who talked about their projects (a quick recap on that here). I wasn’t able to stay for the whole event but what really interested me was that these executives who understood the technology but where looking for how they could use them to drive their businesses. Lots of ideas were bubbling up in my head about how we can use this in user groups to help our members, and the timing was fantastic as just three weeks later we had UKOUG_Apps13, our flagship Applications conference in the UK. We had independently working with Oracle marketing in the UK on an initiative called Apps Transformation to help our members look beyond just the application they use today. We have had a Fusion community page but felt the options open are now much wider than Fusion Applications, there are acquired applications, social, mobility and of course the underlying technology, Oracle Fusion Middleware. I was really pleased to be allowed to give the Oracle AppAdvantage story as a session in our conference and we are planning a special Apps Transformation event in March where I hope the Oracle AppAdvantage team will take part and we will have the results of the survey to discuss. But, life also came full circle for me. In my first post, I talked about Andrew Sutherland and his original theory that Oracle Fusion Middleware adoption had technical drivers. Well, Andrew was a speaker at our event and he gave a potted, tech-talk free update on Oracle Open World. Andrew talked about the Prevailing Technology Winds, and what is driving this today and he talked about that in the past it was the move from simply automating processes (ERP etc), through the altering of those processes (SOA) and onto consolidation. The next drivers are around the need to predict, both faster and more accurately; how to better exploit the information that we have available. He went on to talk about The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – harnessing these forces of change with Oracle technology. Gartner really likes this concept and if you want to know more you can get their paper here. All this has made me think, and I hope it will make you too. Technology can help us drive our businesses better and understanding your needs can be the first step on your journey, which was the theme of our event in the UK. I spoke to a number of the delegates and I hope to share some of their stories in later posts. If you have a story to share, the survey is at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P335DD3 About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Debra has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Leader and then Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts Editor’s Note: Debra has kindly agreed to share her musings and experience in a monthly column on the Fusion Middleware blog so do stay tuned…

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• Blog Buzz - Devoxx 2011

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Some day I will make it to Devoxx – for now, I’m content to vicariously follow the blogs of attendees and pick up on what’s happening.  I’ve been doing more blog "fishing," looking for the best commentary on 2011 Devoxx. There’s plenty of food for thought – and the ideas are not half-baked.The bloggers are out in full, offering useful summaries and commentary on Devoxx goings-on.Constantin Partac, a Java developer and a member of Transylvania JUG, a community from Cluj-Napoca/Romania, offers an excellent summary of the Devoxx keynotes. Here’s a sample:“Oracle Opening Keynote and JDK 7, 8, and 9 Presentation•    Oracle is committed to Java and wants to provide support for it on any device.•    JSE 7 for Mac will be released next week.•    Oracle would like Java developers to be involved in JCP, to adopt a JSR and to attend local JUG meetings.•    JEE 7 will be released next year.•    JEE 7 is focused on cloud integration, some of the features are already implemented in glassfish 4 development branch.•    JSE 8 will be release in summer of 2013 due to “enterprise community request” as they can not keep the pace with an 18    month release cycle.•    The main features included in JSE8 are lambda support, project Jigsaw, new Date/Time API, project Coin++ and adding   support for sensors. JSE 9 probably will focus on some of these features:1.    self tuning JVM2.    improved native language integration3.    processing enhancement for big data4.    reification (adding runtime class type info for generic types)5.    unification of primitive and corresponding object classes6.    meta-object protocol in order to use type and methods define in other JVM languages7.    multi-tenancy8.    JVM resource management” Thanks Constantin! Ivan St. Ivanov, of SAP Labs Bulgaria, also commented on the keynotes with a different focus.  He summarizes Henrik Stahl’s look ahead to Java SE 8 and JavaFX 3.0; Cameron Purdy on Java EE and the cloud; celebrated Java Champion Josh Bloch on what’s good and bad about Java; Mark Reinhold’s quick look ahead to Java SE 9; and Brian Goetz on lambdas and default methods in Java SE 8. Here’s St. Ivanov’s account of Josh Bloch’s comments on the pluses of Java:“He started with the virtues of the platform. To name a few:    Tightly specified language primitives and evaluation order – int is always 32 bits and operations are executed always from left  to right, without compilers messing around    Dynamic linking – when you change a class, you need to recompile and rebuild just the jar that has it and not the whole application    Syntax  similarity with C/C++ – most existing developers at that time felt like at home    Object orientations – it was cool at that time as well as functional programming is today    It was statically typed language – helps in faster runtime, better IDE support, etc.    No operator overloading – well, I’m not sure why it is good. Scala has it for example and that’s why it is far better for defining DSLs. But I will not argue with Josh.”It’s worth checking out St. Ivanov’s summary of Bloch’s views on what’s not so great about Java as well. What's Coming in JAX-RS 2.0Marek Potociar, Principal Software Engineer at Oracle and currently specification lead of Java EE RESTful web services API (JAX-RS), blogged on his talk about what's coming in JAX-RS 2.0, scheduled for final release in mid-2012.  Here’s a taste:“Perhaps the most wanted addition to the JAX-RS is the Client API, that would complete the JAX-RS story, that is currently server-side only. In JAX-RS 2.0 we are adding a completely interface-based and fluent client API that blends nicely in with the existing fluent response builder pattern on the server-side. When we started with the client API, the first proposal contained around 30 classes. Thanks to the feedback from our Expert Group we managed to reduce the number of API classes to 14 (2 of them being exceptions)! The resulting is compact while at the same time we still managed to create an API that reflects the method invocation context flow (e.g. once you decide on the target URI and start setting headers on the request, your IDE will not try to offer you a URI setter in the code completion). This is a subtle but very important usability aspect of an API…” Obviously, Devoxx is a great Java conference, one that is hitting this year at a time when much is brewing in the platform and beginning to be anticipated.

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• Why do my 512x512 bitmaps look jaggy on Android OpenGL?

  - by Milo Mordaunt

  This is sort of driving me nuts, I've googled and googled and tried everything I can think of, but my sprites still look super blurry and super jaggy. Example: Here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2TmpiZkFycUNmRTA If you click through to the actual full size image you should see what I mean, it's like it's taking and average of every 5*5 pixels or something, the background looks really blurry and blocky, but the ball is the worst. The clouds look all right for some reason, probably because they're mostly transparent. I know the pngs aren't top notch themselves but hey, I'm no artist! I would imagine it's a problem with either: a. How the pngs are made example sprite (512x512): https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2a2RRQlJiQTFJUEE b. How my Matrices work This is the relevant parts of the renderer: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 unused) { if(world != null) { dt = System.currentTimeMillis() - endTime; world.update( (float) dt); // Redraw background color GLES20.glClear(GLES20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mvMatrix, 0, 0f, 0f, 0f); world.draw(mvMatrix, mProjMatrix); endTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); } else { Log.d(TAG, "There is no world...."); } } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 unused, int width, int height) { GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); Matrix.orthoM(mProjMatrix, 0, 0, width /2, 0, height /2, -1.f, 1.f); } And this is what each Quad does when draw is called: public void draw(float[] mvMatrix, float[] pMatrix) { Matrix.setIdentityM(mMatrix, 0); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mMatrix, 0, xPos, yPos, 0.f); Matrix.multiplyMM(mvMatrix, 0, mvMatrix, 0, mMatrix, 0); Matrix.scaleM(mvMatrix, 0, scale, scale, 0f); Matrix.rotateM(mvMatrix, 0, angle, 0f, 0f, -1f); GLES20.glUseProgram(mProgram); posAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "vPosition"); texAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "aTexCo"); uSampler = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uSampler"); int alphaHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "alpha"); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(posAttr, COORDS_PER_VERTEX, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, vertexBuffer); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(texAttr, 2, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, texCoBuffer); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); GLES20.glUniform1i(uSampler, 0); GLES20.glUniform1f(alphaHandle, alpha); mMVMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uMVMatrix"); mPMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uPMatrix"); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mMVMatrixHandle, 1, false, mvMatrix, 0); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mPMatrixHandle, 1, false, pMatrix, 0); GLES20.glDrawElements(GLES20.GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 4, GLES20.GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, indicesBuffer); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); } c. How my texture loading/blending/shaders setup works Here is the renderer setup: public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 unused, EGLConfig config) { // Set the background frame color GLES20.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); GLES20.glDisable(GLES20.GL_DEPTH_TEST); GLES20.glDepthMask(false); GLES20.glBlendFunc(GLES20.GL_ONE, GLES20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_BLEND); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_DITHER); } Here is the vertex shader: attribute vec4 vPosition; attribute vec2 aTexCo; varying vec2 vTexCo; uniform mat4 uMVMatrix; uniform mat4 uPMatrix; void main() { gl_Position = uPMatrix * uMVMatrix * vPosition; vTexCo = aTexCo; } And here's the fragment shader: precision mediump float; uniform sampler2D uSampler; uniform vec4 vColor; varying vec2 vTexCo; varying float alpha; void main() { vec4 color = texture2D(uSampler, vec2(vTexCo)); gl_FragColor = color; if(gl_FragColor.a == 0.0) { "discard; } } This is how textures are loaded: private int loadTexture(int rescource) { int[] texture = new int[1]; BitmapFactory.Options opts = new BitmapFactory.Options(); opts.inScaled = false; Bitmap temp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(context.getResources(), rescource, opts); GLES20.glGenTextures(1, texture, 0); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLUtils.texImage2D(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, temp, 0); GLES20.glGenerateMipmap(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); temp.recycle(); return texture[0]; } I'm sure I'm doing about 20,000 things wrong, so I'm really sorry if the problem is blindingly obvious... The test device is a Galaxy Note, running a JellyBean custom ROM, if that matters at all. So the screen resolution is 1280x800, which means... The background is 1024x1024, so yeah it might be a little blurry, but shouldn't be made of lego. Thank you so much, any answer at all would be appreciated.

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• How many developers before continuous integration becomes effective for us?

  - by Carnotaurus

  There is an overhead associated with continuous integration, e.g., set up, re-training, awareness activities, stoppage to fix "bugs" that turn out to be data issues, enforced separation of concerns programming styles, etc. At what point does continuous integration pay for itself? EDIT: These were my findings The set-up was CruiseControl.Net with Nant, reading from VSS or TFS. Here are a few reasons for failure, which have nothing to do with the setup: Cost of investigation: The time spent investigating whether a red light is due a genuine logical inconsistency in the code, data quality, or another source such as an infrastructure problem (e.g., a network issue, a timeout reading from source control, third party server is down, etc., etc.) Political costs over infrastructure: I considered performing an "infrastructure" check for each method in the test run. I had no solution to the timeout except to replace the build server. Red tape got in the way and there was no server replacement. Cost of fixing unit tests: A red light due to a data quality issue could be an indicator of a badly written unit test. So, data dependent unit tests were re-written to reduce the likelihood of a red light due to bad data. In many cases, necessary data was inserted into the test environment to be able to accurately run its unit tests. It makes sense to say that by making the data more robust then the test becomes more robust if it is dependent on this data. Of course, this worked well! Cost of coverage, i.e., writing unit tests for already existing code: There was the problem of unit test coverage. There were thousands of methods that had no unit tests. So, a sizeable amount of man days would be needed to create those. As this would be too difficult to provide a business case, it was decided that unit tests would be used for any new public method going forward. Those that did not have a unit test were termed 'potentially infra red'. An intestesting point here is that static methods were a moot point in how it would be possible to uniquely determine how a specific static method had failed. Cost of bespoke releases: Nant scripts only go so far. They are not that useful for, say, CMS dependent builds for EPiServer, CMS, or any UI oriented database deployment. These are the types of issues that occured on the build server for hourly test runs and overnight QA builds. I entertain that these to be unnecessary as a build master can perform these tasks manually at the time of release, esp., with a one man band and a small build. So, single step builds have not justified use of CI in my experience. What about the more complex, multistep builds? These can be a pain to build, especially without a Nant script. So, even having created one, these were no more successful. The costs of fixing the red light issues outweighed the benefits. Eventually, developers lost interest and questioned the validity of the red light. Having given it a fair try, I believe that CI is expensive and there is a lot of working around the edges instead of just getting the job done. It's more cost effective to employ experienced developers who do not make a mess of large projects than introduce and maintain an alarm system. This is the case even if those developers leave. It doesn't matter if a good developer leaves because processes that he follows would ensure that he writes requirement specs, design specs, sticks to the coding guidelines, and comments his code so that it is readable. All this is reviewed. If this is not happening then his team leader is not doing his job, which should be picked up by his manager and so on. For CI to work, it is not enough to just write unit tests, attempt to maintain full coverage, and ensure a working infrastructure for sizable systems. The bottom line: One might question whether fixing as many bugs before release is even desirable from a business prespective. CI involves a lot of work to capture a handful of bugs that the customer could identify in UAT or the company could get paid for fixing as part of a client service agreement when the warranty period expires anyway.

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• MCM Lab exam this week

  - by Rob Farley

  In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously. It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people actually search the internet for the results of mathematical questions? Really?) The list of Skills Measured for this exam is quite short, but can essentially be broken down into one word “Anything”. The Preparation Materials section is even better. Classroom Training – none available. Microsoft E-Learning – none available. Microsoft Press Books – none available. Practice Tests – none available. But there are links to Readiness Videos and a page which has no resources listed, but tells you a list of people who have already qualified. Three in Australia who have MCM SQL Server 2008 so far. The list doesn’t include some of the latest batch, such as Jason Strate or Tom LaRock. I’ve used SQL Server for almost 15 years. During that time I’ve been awarded SQL Server MVP seven times, but the MVP award doesn’t actually mean all that much when considering this particular certification. I know lots of MVPs who have tried this particular exam and failed – including Jason and Tom. Right now, I have no idea whether I’ll pass or not. People tell me I’ll pass no problem, but I honestly have no idea. There’s something about that “Anything” aspect that worries me. I keep looking at the list of things in the Readiness Videos, and think to myself “I’m comfortable with Resource Governor (or whatever) – that should be fine.” Except that then I feel like I maybe don’t know all the different things that can go wrong with Resource Governor (or whatever), and I wonder what kind of situations I’ll be faced with. And then I find myself looking through the stuff that’s explained in the videos, and wondering what kinds of things I should know that I don’t, and then I get amazingly bored and frustrated (after all, I tell people that these exams aren’t supposed to be studied for – you’ve been studying for the last 15 years, right?), and I figure “What’s the worst that can happen? A fail?” I’m told that the exam provides a list of scenarios (maybe 14 of them?) and you have 5.5 hours to complete them. When I say “complete”, I mean complete – you don’t get to leave them unfinished, that’ll get you ‘nil points’ for that scenario. Apparently no-one gets to complete all of them. Now, I’m a consultant. I get called on to fix the problems that people have on their SQL boxes. Sometimes this involves fixing corruption. Sometimes it’s figuring out some performance problem. Sometimes it’s as straight forward as getting past a full transaction log; sometimes it’s as tricky as recovering a database that has lost its metadata, without backups. Most situations aren’t a problem, but I also have the confidence of being able to do internet searches to verify my maths (in case I forget it’s –883). In the exam, I’ll have maybe twenty minutes per scenario (but if I need longer, I’ll have to take longer – no point in stopping half way if it takes more than twenty minutes, unless I don’t see an end coming up), so I’ll have time constraints too. And of course, I won’t have any of my usual tools. I can’t take scripts in, I can’t take staff members. Hopefully I can use the coffee machine that will be in the room. I figure it’s going to feel like one of those days when I’ve gone into a client site, and found that the problems are way worse than I expected, and that the site is down, with people standing over me needing me to get things right first time... ...so it should be fine, I’ve done that before. :) If I do fail, it won’t make me any less of a consultant. It won’t make me any less able to help all of my clients (including you if you get in touch – hehe), it’ll just mean that the particular problem might’ve taken me more than the twenty minutes that the exam gave me. @rob_farley PS: Apparently the done thing is to NOT advertise that you’re sitting the exam at a particular time, only that you’re expecting to take it at some point in the future. I think it’s akin to the idea of not telling people you’re pregnant for the first few months – it’s just in case the worst happens. Personally, I’m happy to tell you all that I’m going to take this exam the day after tomorrow (which is the 19th in the US, the 20th here). If I end up failing, you can all commiserate and tell me that I’m not actually as unqualified as I feel.

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• How to Save Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars on Cell Phone Service

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Cell phone contracts are bad. You get a seemingly cheap phone up front, but you more than pay for the cost of the phone over two years. Prepaid phone plans are surging in North America for a reason. Prepaid phone plans will be cheaper and more flexible than traditional contracts with big carriers for many people. However much you use your phone, there’s a good chance you can save money with a prepaid service. No More Contracts Here’s how cell phone service typically works in North America: You get a subsidized phone for “free”, $99, or $199. You sign up for a two-year contract and more than pay back the cost of that phone over the length of the contract. This is similar to leasing something or purchasing it on a credit card and paying it back over two years — you spend less up front, but you’re paying more in the long run. But this isn’t the only option. You could opt for a cheaper prepaid service that doesn’t lock you into a contract. If you don’t use your phone much, you could just pay for what you use and avoid the hefty cell phone bills. If you use your phone a lot, you could get a cheaper plan, too. Now, this certainly isn’t for everyone. If you want the latest iPhone or Galaxy smartphone every two years and require a 4G data connection, prepaid services may not be for you. On the other hand, if you don’t need the latest phone, you can save money here. You can also save a huge amount of money if you don’t use your phone much. Phone Options When you choose your prepaid or contract-free service, you’ll often be able to purchase a phone from them. You’ll generally be able to find dirt-cheap dumbphones and the cheapest, slowest Android phones for not very much money. If you are able to buy a top-of-the-line smartphone, you’ll have to pay the full, unsubsidized price. That’s $649 for either an iPhone 5S or Samsung Galaxy S4. Whatever phones the service provider offers, you could always buy a phone elsewhere — for example, you could buy an unsubsidized iPhone direct from Apple and then take it to your cell phone service of choice. Most services will allow you to get a SIM card and pop it into your existing phone rather than purchasing a phone. If you can get a hand-me-down smartphone, you can often save quite a bit of money. For example, you may have a family member upgrading from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5S. You could take their phone to a prepaid carrier and have a nicer phone on a cheap cell phone plan. If you brought an old smartphone to a big carrier like AT&T or Verizon, they wouldn’t give you a discount on your monthly plan. You’d have to pay the same amount of money every month as if you had gotten a subsidized phone. Google’s Nexus phones are also great options for people looking to buy smartphones and pay up-front. Google’s Nexus 4 offered a modern, almost top-of-the-line Android smartphone experience at $299 or $349 when it came out last year. Google will soon be releasing the Nexus 5 and it’s expected to be priced at $349. That’s certainly a lot more than a cheap phone, but it’s a fairly high-end smartphone at almost half the price of an iPhone 5S or Galaxy S4. Nexus phones can be purchased online from Google’s Play Store. Service Options When choosing a service, you need to consider what you actually use. If you’re someone who only uses your phone rarely, you can get plans that will allow you to pay as little as a few dollars per month. If you’re someone who’s usually in range of Wi-Fi, you may not need much data at all. If you want a plan with unlimited talk, texting, and data usage, you can get it for much cheaper than you’d pay on a major carrier like AT&T. The options here range from pay-as-you-go plans, like the ones offered by T-Mobile, which allow you to put a certain amount of money in and only drain that balance when you actually use minutes, texts, or data. If you only make a few calls and send a few texts per month, you’d only pay a few bucks. On the other end, Walmart’s Straight Talk service is a popular option that offers unlimited talk, texting, and data at $45 per month. Which service is right for you depends on a lot of things, including your usage and what each network’s coverage is like in your area. You’ll want to do some research of your own before choosing a service. Prepaid services also offer you even more flexibility after you choose one. If you’re not happy or a better deal comes along, you can switch — you’re not locked into your service for two years and you won’t pay an early termination fee. Image Credit: Intel Free Press on Flickr, Jon Fingas on Flickr, John Karakatsanis on Flickr, kendalkinggroup on Flickr     

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• Design review for application facing memory issues

  - by Mr Moose

  I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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• Clean way to use mutable implementation of Immutable interfaces for encapsulation

  - by dsollen

  My code is working on some compost relationship which creates a tree structure, class A has many children of type B, which has many children of type C etc. The lowest level class, call it bar, also points to a connected bar class. This effectively makes nearly every object in my domain inter-connected. Immutable objects would be problematic due to the expense of rebuilding almost all of my domain to make a single change to one class. I chose to go with an interface approach. Every object has an Immutable interface which only publishes the getter methods. I have controller objects which constructs the domain objects and thus has reference to the full objects, thus capable of calling the setter methods; but only ever publishes the immutable interface. Any change requested will go through the controller. So something like this: public interface ImmutableFoo{ public Bar getBar(); public Location getLocation(); } public class Foo implements ImmutableFoo{ private Bar bar; private Location location; @Override public Bar getBar(){ return Bar; } public void setBar(Bar bar){ this.bar=bar; } @Override public Location getLocation(){ return Location; } } public class Controller{ Private Map<Location, Foo> fooMap; public ImmutableFoo addBar(Bar bar){ Foo foo=fooMap.get(bar.getLocation()); if(foo!=null) foo.addBar(bar); return foo; } } I felt the basic approach seems sensible, however, when I speak to others they always seem to have trouble envisioning what I'm describing, which leaves me concerned that I may have a larger design issue then I'm aware of. Is it problematic to have domain objects so tightly coupled, or to use the quasi-mutable approach to modifying them? Assuming that the design approach itself isn't inherently flawed the particular discussion which left me wondering about my approach had to do with the presence of business logic in the domain objects. Currently I have my setter methods in the mutable objects do error checking and all other logic required to verify and make a change to the object. It was suggested that this should be pulled out into a service class, which applies all the business logic, to simplify my domain objects. I understand the advantage in mocking/testing and general separation of logic into two classes. However, with a service method/object It seems I loose some of the advantage of polymorphism, I can't override a base class to add in new error checking or business logic. It seems, if my polymorphic classes were complicated enough, I would end up with a service method that has to check a dozen flags to decide what error checking and business logic applies. So, for example, if I wanted to have a childFoo which also had a size field which should be compared to bar before adding par my current approach would look something like this. public class Foo implements ImmutableFoo{ public void addBar(Bar bar){ if(!getLocation().equals(bar.getLocation()) throw new LocationException(); this.bar=bar; } } public interface ImmutableChildFoo extends ImmutableFoo{ public int getSize(); } public ChildFoo extends Foo implements ImmutableChildFoo{ private int size; @Override public int getSize(){ return size; } @Override public void addBar(Bar bar){ if(getSize()<bar.getSize()){ throw new LocationException(); super.addBar(bar); } My colleague was suggesting instead having a service object that looks something like this (over simplified, the 'service' object would likely be more complex). public interface ImmutableFoo{ ///original interface, presumably used in other methods public Location getLocation(); public boolean isChildFoo(); } public interface ImmutableSizedFoo implements ImmutableFoo{ public int getSize(); } public class Foo implements ImmutableSizedFoo{ public Bar bar; @Override public void addBar(Bar bar){ this.bar=bar; } @Override public int getSize(){ //default size if no size is known return 0; } @Override public boolean isChildFoo return false; } } public ChildFoo extends Foo{ private int size; @Override public int getSize(){ return size; } @Override public boolean isChildFoo(); return true; } } public class Controller{ Private Map<Location, Foo> fooMap; public ImmutableSizedFoo addBar(Bar bar){ Foo foo=fooMap.get(bar.getLocation()); service.addBarToFoo(foo, bar); returned foo; } public class Service{ public static void addBarToFoo(Foo foo, Bar bar){ if(foo==null) return; if(!foo.getLocation().equals(bar.getLocation())) throw new LocationException(); if(foo.isChildFoo() && foo.getSize()<bar.getSize()) throw new LocationException(); foo.setBar(bar); } } } Is the recommended approach of using services and inversion of control inherently superior, or superior in certain cases, to overriding methods directly? If so is there a good way to go with the service approach while not loosing the power of polymorphism to override some of the behavior?

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