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• Windows for IoT, continued

  - by Valter Minute

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products.   *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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• My first development job working at a company, what things to look out for?

  - by Kim Jong Woo

  So I've worked on my own all this time, selling software, creating a few web applications on my own. I had an Arts background I was self taught. It was a bit difficult to find a development position after endless trying, I finally landed a LAMP position. What I realized was it was all confidence issue. Before when I didn't know a few things I panicked but after spending such a long time working on my own projects and solving various problems, I felt confident enough that I could fulfill requirements on my own. I hope this helps other people applying for jobs This is the first time I will be developing with other team members in an office, are there anything I should prepare for my first day at work next week? Any tips and pointers while working as a developer at a company? I'm kinda nervous but excited.

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• How to deal with project managers who micromanage?

  - by entens

  Perhaps I'm just naive, but when I try to decipher the wall of tasks I'm targeted to do over the course of a week, I just can't help but think whoever builds the project schedule needs to get some remedial training on basic project management. For example, I am assigned 13 tasks today, the shortest lasting .13 days (default time metric in Microsoft Project), and the longest lasting .75 days. I can't help but think that it is blatant micromanagement scheduling projects in sub 10 minute intervals. The effects of management are becoming evident in slipped tasks, resource assignment exceeding capacity by a factor of two at some points in time, and spending more time clearing tasks and figuring out what comes next than actually doing work. How can I convince the project manager to create tasks with larger duration and to see the larger picture?

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• How could you model "scent trails" in a game?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  Say you want to create a 3D game, and have either players, or mobiles, be able to tract other entity by following their scent trails. Is there any known data-structure that matches this use case? If you have only few individuals going about, you can probably do something like a map of 3D coord to entity ID, but real scent works differently, because it fades over time, but slowly. And most of the time, you can only know approximately what went there, and approximately how many things of that type went there. And the approximation becomes worst with time, until it's gone. I imagine it's kind of like starting with an exact number, and slowly loosing the least significant digits, until you loose the most significant digit too. But that doesn't really help me, because entity IDs aren't normally encoded to contain the entity type, in addition to it's individual ID.

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• 24 Hours of PASS – first reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  A few days after the end of 24HOP, I find myself reflecting on it. I’m still waiting on most of the information. I want to be able to discover things like where the countries represented on each of the sessions, and things like that. So far, I have the feedback scores and the numbers of attendees. The data was provided in a PDF, so while I wait for it to appear in a more flexible format, I’ve pushed the 24 attendee numbers into Excel. This chart shows the numbers by time. Remember that we started at midnight GMT, which was 10:30am in my part of the world and 8pm in New York. It’s probably no surprise that numbers drooped a bit at the start, stayed comparatively low, and then grew as the larger populations of the English-speaking world woke up. I remember last time 24HOP ran for 24 hours straight, there were quite a few sessions with less than 100 attendees. None this time though. We got close, but even when it was 4am in New York, 8am in London and 7pm in Sydney (which would have to be the worst slot for attracting people), we still had over 100 people tuning in. As expected numbers grew as the UK woke up, and even more so as the US did, with numbers peaking at 755 for the “3pm in New York” session on SQL Server Data Tools. Kendra Little almost reached those numbers too, and certainly contributed the biggest ‘spike’ on the chart with her session five hours earlier. Of all the sessions, Kendra had the highest proportion of ‘Excellent’s for the “Overall Evaluation of the session” question, and those of you who saw her probably won’t be surprised by that. Kendra had one of the best ranked sessions from the 24HOP event this time last year (narrowly missing out on being top 3), and she has produced a lot of good video content since then. The reports indicate that there were nearly 8.5 thousand attendees across the 24 sessions, averaging over 350 at each one. I’m looking forward to seeing how many different people that was, although I do know that Wil Sisney managed to attend every single one (if you did too, please let me know). Wil even moderated one of the sessions, which made his feat even greater. Thanks Wil. I also want to send massive thanks to Dave Dustin. Dave probably would have attended all of the sessions, if it weren’t for a power outage that forced him to take a break. He was also a moderator, and it was during this session that he earned special praise. Part way into the session he was moderating, the speaker lost connectivity and couldn’t get back for about fifteen minutes. That’s an incredibly long time when you’re in a live presentation. There were over 200 people tuned in at the time, and I’m sure Dave was as stressed as I was to have a speaker disappear. I started chasing down a phone number for the speaker, while Dave spoke to the audience. And he did brilliantly. He started answering questions, and kept doing that until the speaker came back. Bear in mind that Dave hadn’t expected to give a presentation on that topic (or any other), and was simply drawing on his SQL expertise to get him through. Also consider that this was between midnight at 1am in Dave’s part of the world (Auckland, NZ). I would’ve been expecting just to welcome people, monitor questions, probably read some out, and in general, help make things run smoothly. He went far beyond the call of duty, and if I had a medal to give him, he’d definitely be getting one. On the whole, I think this 24HOP was a success. We tried a different platform, and I think for the most part it was a popular move. We didn’t ask the question “Was this better than LiveMeeting?”, but we did get a number of people telling us that they thought the platform was very good. Some people have told me I get a chance to put my feet up now that this is over. As I’m also co-ordinating a tour of SQLSaturday events across the Australia/New Zealand region, I don’t quite get to take that much of a break (plus, there’s the little thing of squeezing in seven SQL 2012 exams over the next 2.5 weeks). But I am pleased to be reflecting on this event rather than anticipating it. There were a number of factors that could have gone badly, but on the whole I’m pleased about how it went. A massive thanks to everyone involved. If you’re reading this and thinking you wish you could’ve tuned in more, don’t worry – they were all recorded and you’ll be able to watch them on demand very soon. But as well as that, PASS has a stream of content produced by the Virtual Chapters, so you can keep learning from the comfort of your desk all year round. More info on them at sqlpass.org, of course.

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• Boss solution vs Developer solution

  - by mahen23

  The problem: When we were sending newsletters to customers, there was no way to confirm if the customer already received the mail. So the boss decided to implement this idea: Boss's Idea: Each time mail was being sent, do an INSERT in a db with the title of the newsletter being sent and the email address which is receving the email address. To ensure that any email address does not receive the same email twice, do a SELECT in the table and find the title of the newsletter being sent: if (title of newsletter is found) { check to see of the email we are sending mail to is already present. if it does, do not send mail } else { send mail } MY idea: create a column called unique and mark it as UNIQUE. Each time mail was being sent, concatenate email + newsletter id and record it in the UNIQUE row. The next time we do a "mysql_affected_rows" check to see if our INSERT was successful, we send the mail, else, there is already a duplicate and no need to send it.

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• What programming language should I learn for fun?

  - by Bo Milanovich

  Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer, but I do like coding from time to time. This is strictly for fun, nothing else. I'm an economist :) I learned Delphi in the past (7 years ago, forgot 99% of it), BASIC (10 years ago). I now know a bit of PHP. So I want to learn a programming language just so I can kill some time, but it'd be awesome if it would be useful as well. I've narrowed down choices to the following: Python (heard it was easy yet useful, Google's appengine runs on python) Java (awesome because cross-platform and very popular, also I'm an Android fan so I might even develop some apps) Continue learning PHP? (awesome language, I'm a web developer somewhat so it may be useful) Something else? Thanks!

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• Ubuntu 12.10 automatic logout

  - by anthony

  I just had a new desktop constructed and installed ubuntu 12.10 which was successful for the most part but every time I open up some applications like thunderbird I get automatically logged out and all my windows are closed. System error messages also come up from time to time. Also I'm not sure if this helps but if I select the "Use system title bar and borders" in chromium I will also get logged out and from that point won't be able to use it without getting logged out in the future. If I click on particular links as well. If anyone has any tips on how I can isolate and fix the problem I would greatly appreciate it.

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• What is a good way to measure game virality?

  - by Chris Garrett

  I have added some social features to an iPhone game (Lexitect if you're curious), such as email, Twitter, and Facebook integration for sharing high scores. Along with these features, I am measuring how many times users make it to each step. The goal of these features are to make the game more viral, and I am trying to get to a measure of game virality. I would think that a game virality metric would produce a number based on 1.0, where 1.0 = zero viral growth, and 1.01 would represent 1% viral growth over some unit of time. How is virality normally measured, and in what units? How is time capped on the metric? i.e. if I gave each player a year to determine how many recommendations they make, I wouldn't get any real numbers for a year from the time I start tracking it. Are there any standards for tracking virality in a meaningful way?

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• How to get average network load instead of instant

  - by Adam Ryczkowski

  Welcome, I use conky to see network load statistics with sampling every 8 seconds in order to get somewhat more smooth history chart. Unfortunately, all values i get are not average for this 8 second period, but they are sampled from much smaller time span, so charts are the same choppy, as if they were sampled from 1 second or less. Is there any way to get conky (or at least System Monitor) display system properties averaged over specified amount of time, just like Windows' task manager does? I would like to have conky display hard drive usage from iostat, but there will be little use if it, if conky reports instant values not averaged over time.

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• Best language or tool for automating tedious manual tasks

  - by Jon Hopkins

  We all have tasks that come up from time to time that we think we'd be better off scripting or automating than doing manually. Obviously some tools or languages are better for this than others - no-one (in their right mind) is doing a one off job of cross referencing a bunch of text lists their PM has just given them in assembler for instance. What one tool or language would you recommend for the sort of general quick and dirty jobs you get asked to do where time (rather than elegance) is of the essence? Background: I'm a former programmer, now development manager PM, looking to learn a new language for fun. If I'm going to learn something for fun I'd like it to be useful and this sort of use case is the most likely to come up.

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• PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

  - by Duncan Mills

  With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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• System Slow After Uprading Ubuntu

  - by Aragon N

  i have an ubuntu network machine which has release of 10.04.1 LTS Lucid. on this system i have apache, postgresql and django. for some app. development i have to install php and php-curl... due to being on network, i have exported wmvare machine to internet and firstly i have upgraded system and then install php5 packages on it. After all replacing it with its old place, i have considered that the new system query is some slow according to another. Old system query time : 140 ms New system query time : 9.11 s i have checked /etc/network interface and it seems there is no problem. i have checked /etc/resolv.conf and it seems ok i have checked /etc/nsswitch.conf and only host section is different from old one which old system has hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 and then i have checked time host -t A services.myapp.com and i got real 0m0.355s user 0m0.010s sys 0m0.020s and now what can i have to check for boosting my system as before?

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• Resources on expected behaviour when manipulating 3D objects with the mouse

  - by sebf

  Hello, In my animation editor, I have a 3D gizmo that sits on the origin of a bone; the user drags the mesh around to rotate the bone. I've found that translating the 2D movements of the mouse into sensible 3D transforms is not near as simple as i'd hoped. For example what is intuitively 'up' or 'down'? How should the magnitude of rotations change with respect to dX/dY? How to implement this? What happens when the gizmo changes position or orientation with respect to the camera? ect. So far with trial and error i've written something (very) simple that works 70% of the time. I could probably continue to hack at it until I made something that works 99% of the time, but there must be someone who needed the same thing, and spent the time coming up with a much more elegant solution. Does anyone know of one?

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• SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only

  - by Bob Rhubart

  In my part of the world the weather has taken its seasonal turn toward the kind of cold, damp, miserable stuff that offers a major motivation to stay indoors. While I plan on spending some of that indoor time working my way through the new 50th anniversary James Bond box set, I will also devote some time to improving my mind rather than my martini-mixing skills by catching up on my reading. If you're in a similar situation, you might want to spend some of your time  with these new technical books written by community members: Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek. Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics by Mark Nelson and Tanya Williams Oracle SOA Suite 11g Developer's Cookbook by Antony Reynolds and Matt Wright (Coming in December; available for pre-order).

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• Ubuntu boot is slower than Windows 7

  - by Alex Bixel

  One of the reasons I installed Ubuntu (Wubi installer) was for a supposedly quick boot time. My boot time with Windows 7 is about 20-25 seconds, while my boot with Ubuntu is 30-40. I judged the boot times from the time after I selected the operating system on the initial selection menu and the grub menu, respectively. This is even after following all sorts of online guides to improve it. I've done driver profiling (and yes, I remembered to remove the "profile" edit in the grub file afterwards), I've cut a fair few startup programs out, and I've installed the preload package. But I'm still getting startup rates phenomenally slower than Windows 7. Any help here?

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• How to stop getting too focused on a train of thought when programming?

  - by LDM91

  I often find myself getting too focused on a train of thought when programming, which results in me having what I guess could be described as "tunnel vision". As a result of this I miss important details/clues, which means I waste a fair amount of time before finally deciding the path I'm taking to solve the task is wrong. Afterwards, I take a step back which almost always results in me discovering what I've missed in a lot less time.. It's becoming really frustrating as it feels like I'm wasting a lot of time and effort, so I was wondering if anyone else had experienced similar issues, and had some suggestions to stop going down dead ends and programming "blindly" as it were!

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• Do CDNs work with POST operations?

  - by iddqd

  I'm using a CDN (Level3) for the first time and I'm a bit confused. I'm accessing dynamic URLs such as http://cdn.mysite.com?getItem=1234 that return text data. Do CDNs work with HTTP POST operations? When i issue a HTTP POST operation, my "real" server receives this request every time, so I'm wondering if the CDN has a problem with POST operations. If i use HTTP GET it seems to work, i call the URL once (from my application), i can see my server receiving the request. If i call it a second time, the CDN delivers it directly, my server doesn't get anything. However if i open same the link manually from a second browser tab, my server is asked to deliver again, shouldn't it be cached by now? Many thanks.

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• Participating in 3 SQL events in 8 days

  - by AaronBertrand

  Well, 8 days not including lead and lag travel time. A quick summary of the three events, and the flights it took to get me to each: SQL Saturday #105 - Dublin, Ireland Flights on March 21st: Providence -> Philadelphia (236 miles) Philadelphia -> Dublin (3,260 miles) Time zone change: +4 when we got there, plus Daylight Saving Time kicked in, so +5 after the event. I spoke at this event, and manned the SQL Sentry booth with cohort Scott Fallen. This event was a fantastic SQL Saturday - very...(read more)

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• Why is the file /var/crash/_usr_lib_empathy_empathy-chat.1000.upload empty?

  - by user43816

  I just experienced an unusual crash: I tried to click on a name entry in the contact list of Empathy. A crash happened. Usually I am asked then if I'd like to report the error to Launchpad, and Launchpad opens. This time the error message was: "Excuse me. Ubuntu 12.04 noticed an internal error. If you notice further problems try to restart your computer. Send an error report to Launchpad to help removing this problem?" This time Launchpad did not open automatically. A new window opened and I could read the relevant error report. Later I found the error report in the file /var/crash/_usr_lib_empathy_empathy-chat.1000.crash. Why went the course of action this time differently from other crashes? Why is the file /var/crash/_usr_lib_empathy_empathy-chat.1000.upload empty?

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• What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

  - by Louis Davidson

  If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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• Unity poor performance after upgrading to 13.10

  - by Juzer Ali

  I upgraded recently from 13.04 to 13.10. I have Dell Inspiron 4GB RAM, Intel Core i3. Login takes a lot of time and all the graphics are very slow. Alt + Tab takes a lot of time (seconds). After reading some threads, I also removed Cinnamon desktop, but it didn't change anything. I had to ultimately fall back to Gnome Flashback (no effects). Gnome flashback works fine without any issues. Can anyone please help me get back to Unity, else I will have a very hard time running using Gnome.

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• Why does Google Analytics show false referrals?

  - by Peter Merrill

  Ever since Google revamped their Analytics interface I've been noticing a weird "bug" while viewing the "Real-Time" overview area. From this area I can obviously see live stats of visitors to my website but when I visit my website by opening a new tab (Chrome) and manually visit website the real time stats sometimes look like the image linked below. http://i.stack.imgur.com/mfniY.png Is there any reason why Google is saying that I was referred by Stack Overflow when I'm visiting my website from a new tab? Could this be something do to with how I installed the analytics on my site or could this be an issue with browser cookies? Have anyone else noticed this? I am mainly concerned about this because in the standard reporting area of my Analytics panel my referral stats are getting thrown off every time I visit my own website.

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• How to use short breaks at work effectively for self-development?

  - by Alaudo

  At the moment my daily work as a developer requires me to have short 10-20 min breaks after every 2-3 hours. It would be nice if I could use those effectively to improve my expertise in programming or CS in general. I tried several things: Reading jokes online gets boring very soon. Trying to solve some (even the most simple) tasks from different code contests requires more time, as long as I have some idea of an algorithm the time is over. Reading a randomly picked Wikipedia-article about Computer Science: depending upon the article sometimes it requires more time and is not an easy reading for a break. So, I ended up reading StackOverflow questions and answers with most votes: that is entertaining and educative. Do you have any other suggestions?

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• Retrieving snapshots of game statistics

  - by SatheeshJM

  What is a good architecture for storing game statistics, so that I can retrieve snapshots of it at various moments? Say I have a game, and the user's statistics initially are: { hours_played = 0, games_played = 0, no_of_times_killed = 0, } When the user purchases something for the first time from within the game, the stats are { hours_played = 10, games_played = 2, no_of_times_killed = 5, } And when he purchases something for the second time, the stats are { hours_played = 20, games_played = 4, no_of_times_killed = 10, } Let me name the events as "purchase1" and "purchase2" How do I model my statistics, so that at any point in the future, I will be able to retrieve the snapshot of the statistics at the time when "purchase1" was fired. Similarly for "purchase2" and any other event I will add. Hope that made sense..

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