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• The best computer ever

  - by Jeff

  (This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!) About three years and three months ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro, and it turned out to be the best computer I've ever owned. You might think that every computer with better specs is automatically better than the last, but that hasn't been my experience. My first one was a Sony, back in the Pentium III days, and it cost an astonishing $2,500. That was even more ridiculous in 1999 dollars. It had a dial-up modem, and a CD-ROM, built-in! It may have even played DVD's. A few years later I bought an HP, and it ended up being a pile of shit. The power connector inside came loose from the board, and on occasion would even short. In 2005, I bought a Dell, and it wasn't bad. It had a really high resolution screen (complete with dead pixels, a problem in those days), and it was the first laptop I felt I could do real work on. When 2006 rolled around, Apple started making computers with Intel CPU's, and I bought the very first one the week it came out. I used Boot Camp to run Windows. I still have it in its box somewhere, and I used it for three years. The current 17" was new in 2009. The goodness was largely rooted in having a big screen with lots of dots. This computer has been the source of hundreds of blog posts, tens of thousands of lines of code, video and photo editing, and of course, a whole lot of Web surfing. It connected to corpnet at Microsoft, WiFi in Hawaii and has presented many a deck. It has traveled with me tens of thousands of miles. Last year, I put a solid state drive in it, and it was like getting a new computer. I can boot up a Windows 7 VM in about 19 seconds. Having 8 gigs of RAM has always been fantastic. Everything about it has been fast and fun. When new, the battery (when not using VM's) could get as much as 10 hours. I can still do 7 without much trouble. After 460 charge cycles, the battery health is still between 85 and 90%. The only real negative has been the size and weight. It's only an inch thick, but naturally it's pretty big with a 17" screen. You don't get battery life like that without a huge battery, either, so it's heavy. It was never a deal breaker, but sometimes a long haul across a large airport, you know you're carrying it. Today, Apple announced a new, thinner and lighter 15" laptop, with twice the RAM and CPU cores, and four times the screen resolution. It basically handles my size and weight issues while retaining the resolution, and it still costs less than my 17" did. So I ordered one. Three years is an excellent run, but I kind of budgeted for a new workhorse this year anyway. So if you're interested in a 17" MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz CPU, 8 gigs of RAM and a 320 gig hard drive (sorry, I'm keeping the SSD), I have one to sell. They've apparently discontinued the 17", which is going to piss off the video community. It's in excellent condition, with a few minor scratches, but I take care of my stuff.

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• Move on and look elsewhere, or confront the boss?

  - by Meister

  Background: I have my Associates in Applied Science (Comp/Info Tech) with a strong focus in programming, and I'm taking University classes to get my Bachelors. I was recently hired at a local company to be a Software Engineer I on a team of about 8, and I've been told they're looking to hire more. This is my first job, and I was offered what I feel to be an extremely generous starting salary ($30/hr essentially + benefits and yearly bonus). What got me hired was my passion for programming and a strong set of personal projects. Problem: I had no prior experience when I interviewed, so I didn't know exactly what to ask them about the company when I was hired. I've spotted a number of warning signs and annoyances since then, such as: Four developers when I started, with everyone talking about "Ben" or "Ryan" leaving. One engineer hired thirty days before me, one hired two weeks after me. Most of the department has been hiring a large number of people since I started. Extremely limited internet access. I understand the idea from an IT point of view, but not only is Facebook blocked, but so it Youtube, Twitter, and Pandora. I've also figured out that they block all access to non-DNS websites (http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/) and strangely enough Miranda-IM. Low cubicles. Which is fine because I like my immediate coworkers, but they put the developers with the customer service, customer training, and QA department in a huge open room. Noise, noise, noise, and people stop to chitchat all day long. Headphones only go so far. Several emails have been sent out by my boss since I started telling us programmers to not talk about non-work-related-things like Video Games at our cubicles, despite us only spending maybe five minutes every few hours doing so. Further digging tells me that this is because someone keeps complaining that the programmers are "slacking off". People are looking over my shoulder all day. I was in the Freenode webchat to get help with a programming issue, and within minutes I had an email from my boss (to all the developers) telling us that we should NOT be connected to any outside chat servers at work. Version control system from 2005 that we must access with IE and keep the Java 1.4 JRE installed to be able to use. I accidentally updated to Java 6 one day and spent the next two days fighting with my PC to undo this "problem". No source control, no comments on anything, no standards, no code review, no unit testing, no common sense. I literally found a problem in how they handle string resource translations that stems from the simple fact that they don't trim excess white spaces, leading to developers doing: getResource("Date: ") instead of: getResource("Date") + ": ", and I was told to just add the excess white spaces back to the database instead of dealing with the issue directly. Some of these things I'd like to try to understand, but I like having IRC open to talk in a few different rooms during the day and keep in touch with friends/family over IM. They don't break my concentration (not NEARLY as much as the lady from QA stopping by to talk about her son), but because people are looking over my shoulder all day as they walk by they complain when they see something that's not "programmer-looking work". I've been told by my boss and QA that I do good, fast work. I should be judged on my work output and quality, not what I have up on my screen for the five seconds you're walking by So, my question is, even though I'm just barely at my 90 days: How do you decide to move on from a job and looking elsewhere, or when you should start working with your boss to resolve these issues? Is it even possible to get the boss to work with me in many of these things? This is the only place I heard back from even though I sent out several resume's a day for several months, and this place does pay well for putting up with their many flaws, but I'm just starting to get so miserable working here already. Should I just put up with it?

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• About the K computer

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  Okay ? after getting yet another mail because of the new #1 on the Top500 list, I want to add some comments from my side: Yes, the system is using SPARC processor. And that is great news for a SPARC fan like me. It is using the SPARC VIIIfx processor from Fujitsu clocked at 2 GHz. No, it isn't the only one. Most people are saying there are two in the Top500 list using SPARC (#77 JAXA and #1 K) but in fact there are three. The Tianhe-1 (#2 on the Top500 list) super computer contains 2048 Galaxy "FT-1000" 1 GHz 8-core processors. Don't know it? The FeiTeng-1000 ? this proc is a 8 core, 8 threads per core, 1 ghz processor made in China. And it's SPARC based. By the way ? this sounds really familiar to me ? perhaps the people just took the opensourced UltraSPARC-T2 design, because some of the parameters sound just to similar. However it looks like that Tianhe-1 is using the SPARCs as input nodes and not as compute notes. No, I don't see it as the next M-series processor. Simple reason: You can't create SMP systems out of them ? it simply hasn't the functionality to do so. Even when there are multiple CPUs on a single board, they are not connected like an SMP/NUMA machine to a shared memory machine ? they are connected with the cluster interconnect (in this case the Tofu interconnect) and work like a large cluster. Yes, it has a lot of oomph in Linpack ? however I assume a lot came from the extensions to the SPARCv9 standard. No, Linpack has no relevance for any commercial workload ? Linpack is such a special load, that even some HPC people are arguing that it isn't really a good benchmark for HPC. It's embarrassingly parallel, it can work with relatively small interconnects compared to the interconnects in SMP systems (however we get in spheres SMP interconnects where a few years ago). Amdahl isn't hitting that hard when running Linpack. Yes, it's a good move to use SPARC. At some time in the last 10 years, there was an interesting twist in perception: SPARC was considered as proprietary architecture and x86 was the open architecture. However it's vice versa ? try to create a x86 clone and you have a lot of intellectual property problems, create a SPARC clone and you have to spend 100 bucks or so to get the specification from the SPARC Foundation and develop your own SPARC processor. Fujitsu is doing this for a long time now. So they had their own processor, their own know-how. So why was SPARC a good choice? Well ? essentially Fujitsu can do what they want with their core as it is their core, for example adding the extensions to the SPARCv9 chipset ? getting Intel to create extensions to x86 to help you with your product is a little bit harder. So Fujitsu could do they needed to do with their processor in order to create such a supercomputer. No, the K is really using no FPGA or GPU as accelerators. The K is really using the CPU at doing this job. Yes, it has a significantly enhanced FPU capable to execute 8 instructions in parallel. No, it doesn't run Solaris. Yes, it uses Linux. No, it doesn't hurt me ... as my colleague Roland Rambau (he knows a lot about HPC) said once to me ... it doesn't matter which OS is staying out of the way of the workload in HPC.

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• Seeking advice on tools and technology for my new game [closed]

  - by k.k. slider

  I'm a C# developer who has been programming a game in my spare time using XNA and Visual Studio. The game's logic is mostly done and I've completed a prototype that has most of the functionality of (what I envision to be) the final game. However, having heard about the uncertain future and (possibly) limited audience for XNA games, I'm looking to switch platforms... but I don't know what technology would best suit my needs. Below are some specifics about my game and what exactly I'm looking for, if you're interested: The game is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG (strategy game) for two players. It is a basic sprite and tile based game with animations and sound. 3D capabilities are not necessary. I'd like to allow players to compete with others online, and have a basic ranking/matchmaking system. I will probably need something that can interact with a server and a database (the game is turn-based and has no RNG, so cheating would be easy to detect even if most computation is done client-side and minimal data is sent to the server). Ideally, I would be able to release an early version of the game and have people give feedback as I develop additional features (similar to Minecraft). I'd prefer to have a way to release periodic updates to the game instead of releasing an absolute final product. To reach the widest possible audience, I'd prefer technology that allows me to release on PC, Android, iOS, and (maybe) Mac. This is a game with simple mouse inputs which can fit on a mobile touch screen. The game should be monetizable. If I find success with this game, then I may consider becoming a full-time indie game developer. I have several other game ideas and have learned quite a bit from my first attempt at game development. My first thought was an F2P/microtransaction model, but I'm open to other suggestions. Language isn't a primary concern of mine, since I have a decent amount of experience using several languages to program large projects. I'm willing to spend money (e.g. on a developer's license), but the more expensive it gets, the more hesitant I am to use it. I've looked into the following solutions... there are a LOT of tools out there... if anyone has experience with any of these and would like to recommend/reject any of them, it would be helpful. C#/.NET (XNA/MonoGame/SDL/SlimDX/Xamarin/ExEn/ANX?) HTML5/JS (AppMobi/PhoneGap/Marmalade/FlashCanvas/Cordova/libRocket?) Python (Pyglet/Pygame/Kivy?) Java (JavaFX/libGDX?) Unity/Construct 2/Cocos2D/NME/Corona/other game creation software? I'd like something that can do 2D and isn't limited by being too high-level. Other languages (Lua/LOVE? Moai?) Thanks for answering this rather long and tedious question...

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• Four Easy Ways to Save a Rocky CRM Relationship

  - by Divya Malik

   Today, I am pleased to introduce our guest blogger Luke Christianson. Luke is  an Application Sales rep based out of Minneapolis, MN.  You can find him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter. In any relationship, sooner or later, the excitement fades away.  The honeymoon period gives way to the old routines you had, before you committed to each other and you eventually begin doing things apart from one another.  I’m not talking about a marriage…  Well, I guess I am.Commitment to a CRM tool and building a deep and lasting relationship is not much different than the basics of a traditional love story.  After your controlled CRM pilot program, and maybe the National Sales Meeting where you couldn’t escape those three wonderful letters, CRM, you will soon find that if you haven’t designed an environment where it’s going to enable your reps to make more money, the relationship is doomed.   . If you’re currently in a dysfunctional CRM relationship, here are 4 simple tips to re-engaging users and getting that spark back. Shadow a Sales Rep:   Chances are you can find out exactly what is preventing your sales reps from using the application by simply watching how they go about their day.  Sales reps are driven by money, not by additional administrative duties.  Your system needs to be setup so that they can get the information they need quickly, facilitate making key updates and run their business out of one easy-to-use application.  Increase your sales team’s productivity by 5% automatically:    Cancel the weekly forecast calls with your reps and require them update their opportunities in CRM.  Something else that I’ve seen work extremely well, is when you do Monthly or Quarterly reviews, do not let your sales reps bring anything into the room with them; no spreadsheets, notebooks, or computers.  Everything they need to tell you should be able to be put into CRM and fully accessible by the Sales Manager at any time.  Tool time:      Make sure the tools that you have selected meet both your short-term goals and your long term goals.   You need tools that can adapt like your business does.  You probably can’t wait two months for an update to a picklist value or for the addition of a simple workflow rule.  Do you feel the tools that are in place can create the experience you want for your users? and finally, if all else fails... Keep It Simple, Stupid:     Do you really need to require 15 fields to create an Opportunity?  Do you need to clutter the interface with different reports that don’t add daily value?  Most CRM systems on the market today are flexible enough today that your admin could clean up most of the unnecessary interface ‘noise’ in a few hours.  If they're not, see #3. Every strong relationship can be tedious at times, you’ll fight and eventually make amends, you may even threaten to upgrade to a newer model…  But be patient and think about what you want to achieve and you’ll find a partner for life.

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• Some PowerShell goodness

  - by KyleBurns

  Ever work somewhere where processes dump files into folders to maintain an archive?  Me too and Windows Explorer hates it.  Very often I find myself needing to organize these files into subfolders so that I can go after files without locking up Windows Explorer and my answer used to be to write a program in something like C# to do the job.  These programs will typically enumerate the files in a folder and move each file to a subdirectory named based on a datestamp.  The last such program I wrote had to use lower-level Win32 API calls to perform the enumeration because it appears the standard .Net calls make use of the same method of enumerating the directories that Windows Explorer chokes on when dealing with a large number of entries in a particular directory, so a simple task was accomplished with a lot of code. Of course, this little utility was just something I used to make my life easier and "not a production app", so it was in my local source folder and not source control when my hard drive died.  So... I was getting ready to re-create it and thought it might be a good idea to play with PowerShell a bit - something I had been wanting to do but had not yet met a requirement to make me do it.  The resulting script was amazingly succinct and even building the flexibility for parameterization and adding line breaks for readability was only about 25 lines long.  Here's the code with discussion following: param(     [Parameter(         Mandatory = $false,         Position = 0,         HelpMessage = "Root of the folders or share to archive.  Be sure to end with appropriate path separator"     )]     [String] $folderRoot="\\fileServer\pathToFolderWithLotsOfFiles\",       [Parameter(         Mandatory = $false,         Position = 1     )]     [int] $days = 1 ) dir $folderRoot|?{(!($_.PsIsContainer)) -and ((get-date) - $_.lastwritetime).totaldays -gt $days }|%{     [string]$year=$([string]$_.lastwritetime.year)     [string]$month=$_.lastwritetime.month     [string]$day=$_.lastwritetime.day     $dir=$folderRoot+$year+"\"+$month+"\"+$day     if(!(test-path $dir)){         new-item -type container $dir     }     Write-output $_     move-item $_.fullname $dir } The script starts by declaring two parameters.  The first parameter holds the path to the folder that I am going to be sorting into subdirectories.  The path separator is intended to be included in this argument because I didn't want to mess with determining whether this was local or UNC and picking the right separator in code, but this could be easily improved upon using Path.Combine since PowerShell has access to the full framework libraries.  The second parameter holds a minimum age in days for files to be removed from the root folder.  The script then pipes the dir command through a query to include only files (by excluding containers) and of those, only entries that meet the age requirement based on the last modified datestamp.  For each of those, the datestamp is used to construct a folder name in the format YYYY\MM\DD (if you're in an environment where even a day's worth of files need further divided, you could make this more granular) and the folder is created if it does not yet exist.  Finally, the file is moved into the directory. One of the things that was really cool about using PowerShell for this task is that the new-item command is smart enough to create the entire subdirectory structure with a single call.  In previous code that I have written to do this kind of thing, I would have to test the entire tree leading down to the subfolder I want, leading to a lot of branching code that detracted from being able to quickly look at the code and understand the job it performs. Overall, I have to say I'm really pleased with what has been done making PowerShell powerful and useful.

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• Violation of the DRY Principle

  - by Onorio Catenacci

  I am sure there's a name for this anti-pattern somewhere; however I am not familiar enough with the anti-pattern literature to know it. Consider the following scenario: or0 is a member function in a class. For better or worse, it's heavily dependent on class member variables. Programmer A comes along and needs functionality like or0 but rather than calling or0, Programmer A copies and renames the entire class. I'm guessing that she doesn't call or0 because, as I say, it's heavily dependent on member variables for its functionality. Or maybe she's a junior programmer and doesn't know how to call it from other code. So now we've got or0 and c0 (c for copy). I can't completely fault Programmer A for this approach--we all get under tight deadlines and we hack code to get work done. Several programmers maintain or0 so it's now version orN. c0 is now version cN. Unfortunately most of the programmers that maintained the class containing or0 seemed to be completely unaware of c0--which is one of the strongest arguments I can think of for the wisdom of the DRY principle. And there may also have been independent maintainance of the code in c. Either way it appears that or0 and c0 were maintained independent of each other. And, joy and happiness, an error is occurring in cN that does not occur in orN. So I have a few questions: 1.) Is there a name for this anti-pattern? I've seen this happen so often I'd find it hard to believe this is not a named anti-pattern. 2.) I can see a few alternatives: a.) Fix orN to take a parameter that specifies the values of all the member variables it needs. Then modify cN to call orN with all of the needed parameters passed in. b.) Try to manually port fixes from orN to cN. (Mind you I don't want to do this but it is a realistic possibility.) c.) Recopy orN to cN--again, yuck but I list it for sake of completeness. d.) Try to figure out where cN is broken and then repair it independently of orN. Alternative a seems like the best fix in the long term but I doubt the customer will let me implement it. Never time or money to fix things right but always time and money to repair the same problem 40 or 50 times, right? Can anyone suggest other approaches I may not have considered? If you were in my place, which approach would you take? If there are other questions and answers here along these lines, please post links to them. I don't mind removing this question if it's a dupe but my searching hasn't turned up anything that addresses this question yet. EDIT: Thanks everyone for all the thoughtful responses. I asked about a name for the anti-pattern so I could research it further on my own. I'm surprised this particular bad coding practice doesn't seem to have a "canonical" name for it.

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• The five steps of business intelligence adoption: where are you?

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  When I was in Orlando and New York last month, I spoke to a lot of business intelligence users. What they told me suggested a path of BI adoption. The user’s place on the path depends on the size and sophistication of their organisation. Step 1: A company with a database of customer transactions will often want to examine particular data, like revenue and unit sales over the last period for each product and territory. To do this, they probably use simple SQL queries or stored procedures to produce data on demand. Step 2: The results from step one are saved in an Excel document, so business users can analyse them with filters or pivot tables. Alternatively, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) might be used to generate a report of the SQL query for display on an intranet page. Step 3: If these queries are run frequently, or business users want to explore data from multiple sources more freely, it may become necessary to create a new database structured for analysis rather than CRUD (create, retrieve, update, and delete). For example, data from more than one system — plus external information — may be incorporated into a data warehouse. This can become ‘one source of truth’ for the business’s operational activities. The warehouse will probably have a simple ‘star’ schema, with fact tables representing the measures to be analysed (e.g. unit sales, revenue) and dimension tables defining how this data is aggregated (e.g. by time, region or product). Reports can be generated from the warehouse with Excel, SSRS or other tools. Step 4: Not too long ago, Microsoft introduced an Excel plug-in, PowerPivot, which allows users to bring larger volumes of data into Excel documents and create links between multiple tables.  These BISM Tabular documents can be created by the database owners or other expert Excel users and viewed by anyone with Excel PowerPivot. Sometimes, business users may use PowerPivot to create reports directly from the primary database, bypassing the need for a data warehouse. This can introduce problems when there are misunderstandings of the database structure or no single ‘source of truth’ for key data. Step 5: Steps three or four are often enough to satisfy business intelligence needs, especially if users are sophisticated enough to work with the warehouse in Excel or SSRS. However, sometimes the relationships between data are too complex or the queries which aggregate across periods, regions etc are too slow. In these cases, it can be necessary to formalise how the data is analysed and pre-build some of the aggregations. To do this, a business intelligence professional will typically use SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create a multidimensional model — or “cube” — that more simply represents key measures and aggregates them across specified dimensions. Step five is where our tool, SSAS Compare, becomes useful, as it helps review and deploy changes from development to production. For us at Red Gate, the primary value of SSAS Compare is to establish a dialog with BI users, so we can develop a portfolio of products that support creation and deployment across a range of report and model types. For example, PowerPivot and the new BISM Tabular model create a potential customer base for tools that extend beyond BI professionals. We’re interested in learning where people are in this story, so we’ve created a six-question survey to find out. Whether you’re at step one or step five, we’d love to know how you use BI so we can decide how to build tools that solve your problems. So if you have a sixty seconds to spare, tell us on the survey!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Is the Internet Making us Smarter or Not?

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been reading recently about an exchange among some very bright folks, some who posit that the Internet with its instant-on, sometimes-right, big-statement-wins mentality is making people think in a more shallow way, teaching us to rely on others as experts and diluting our logical thought process. Others state that it broadens our perspective and extends our mental reach. Whenever I see this kind of exchange on two ends of a spectrum, I begin to wonder if both sides might be correct.   I can certainly say that I have changed my way of learning, reading, and social interactions because of the Internet. And my tolerance for reading long missives has indeed gone down. I tend to (mentally and literally) “bookmark” things I never seem to have time to get back to. But I also agree that I’ve been exposed to thoughts, ideas and people I never would have encountered any other way. So how to deal with this dichotomy?   Well, I’m going to go off and think about it. No, I’m really going to go off for a full week to a cabin I’ve rented in a National Forest in the Midwest. It has no indoor plumbing, phones, Internet connections or anything else – only a bed to sleep in and a place to cook a little. I’m taking one book, some paper, and a guitar with me and that’s it. I plan to spend my days walking, reading a little, playing a little on the guitar, but mostly just thinking. Those of you who know me might find this unusual. I’m an always-on, hyper-caffeinated, overly-busy, connected person. I haven’t taken a vacation in five years, at least for more than two or three days at a time. Even then, I keep us on the move constantly – our vacations aren’t cruises or anything like that. I check e-mail, post and all that. When I’m not on vacation, I live with and leverage lots of technology, and work with those that do the same. This, however, is a really “unplugged” event, and I’m hoping that it will let me unpack the things I’ve been stuffing in my head. I plan to spend a lot of time on a single subject, writing notes, thinking, and writing more notes.   So after I post tomorrow's “quote of the day” I’ll be “going dark” for a week. No twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, e-mail, chat, none of my five blogs will get updated, and I’ll have to turn in my two articles for InformIT.com early. I won’t have access to my college class portal, so my students will be without me for a week. I will really be offline. I’ll see you in a week – hopefully a little more educated. See you then.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it. I already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts you can use: Win-C shows the Charms bar (same as swiping from the right bevel towards the center of the screen). Win-Q open the Search fly out with Apps preselected. Win-W open the Search fly out with Settings preselected. Win-F open the Search fly out with Files preselected. Searching in Metro apps In addition to these three search domains, you can also search a Metro app, as long as it supports the Search contract (check this Build video to learn more about the Search contract). These apps show up in the Search flyout as shown here: Notice the list of apps below the Files button? That’s what we are talking about. First of all, the list order changes when you search in some applications. For instance, in the image above, I had used the Store with the Search charm. This is why the store shows up as the first app. I am not 100% what algorithm is used here (sorting according to number of searches is my guess), but try it out and try to figure it out Applications that have never been searched are sorted alphabetically. Does it mean we will see cool app names like ___AAA_MyCoolApp? I certainly hope not!! Pinning You can also pin often used apps to the Search flyout. To pin an app with the mouse, right click on it in the Search flyout and select Pin from the context menu. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to go down to the selected app, and then open the context menu. With the finger, simply tap and hold until you see a semi transparent rectangle indicating that the context menu will be shown, then release. The context menu opens up and you can select Pin. Pin context menu Pinned apps Unpinning, Hiding Using the same technique as for pinning here above, you can also unpin a pinned application. Finally, you can also choose to hide an app from the Search flyout altogether. This is a convenient way to clean up and make it easy to find stuff. Note: At this point, I am not sure how to re-add a hidden app to the Search flyout. If anyone knows, please mention it in the comments, thanks! Reordering You can also reorder pinned apps. To do this, with the finger, tap, hold and pull the app to the side, then pull it vertically to reorder it. You can also reorder with the mouse, simply by clicking on an app and pulling it vertically to the place you want to put it. I don’t think there is a way to do that with the keyboard though. That’s it for now More gestures will follow in a next installment! Have fun with Windows 8   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Shrinking a Linux OEL 6 virtual Box image (vdi) hosted on Windows 7

  - by AndyBaker

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Recently for a customer demonstration there was a requirement to build a virtual box image with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. This meant installing OEL Linux 6 as well as creating an 11gr2 database and Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c on a single virtual box. Storage was sized at 300Gb using dynamically allocated storage for the virtual box and about 10Gb was used for Linux and the initial build. After copying over all the binaries and performing all the installations the virtual box became in the region of 80Gb used size on the host operating system, however internally it only really needed around 20Gb. This meant 60Gb had been used when copying over all the binaries and although now free was not returned to the host operating system due to the growth of the virtual box storage '.vdi' file.  Once the ‘vdi’ storage had grown it is not shrunk automatically afterwards. Space is always tight on the laptop so it was desirable to shrink the virtual box back to a minimal size and here is the process that was followed. Install 'zerofree' Linux package into the OEL6 virtual box The RPM was downloaded and installed from a site similar to below; http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/12548724/com/zerofree-1.0.1-5.el5.i386.rpm.html A simple internet search for ’zerofree Linux rpm’ was easy to perform and find the required rpm. Execute 'zerofree' package on the desired Linux file system To execute this package the desired file system needs to be mounted read only. The following steps outline this process. As root: # umount /u01 As root:# mount –o ro –t ext4 /u01 NOTE: The –o is options and the –t is the file system type found in the /etc/fstab. Next run zerofree against the required storage, this is located by a simple ‘df –h’ command to see the device associated with the mount. As root:# zerofree –v /dev/sda11   NOTE: This takes a while to run but the ‘-v’ option gives feedback on the process. What does Zerofree do? Zerofree’s purpose is to go through the file system and zero out any unused sectors on the volume so that the later stages can shrink the virtual box storage obtaining the free space back. When zerofree has completed the virtual box can be shutdown as the last stage is performed on the physical host where the virtual box vdi files are located. Compact the virtual box ‘.vdi’ files The final stage is to get virtual box to shrink back the storage that has been correctly flagged as free space after executing zerofree. On the physical host in this case a windows 7 laptop a DOS window was opened. At the prompt the first step is to put the virtual box binaries onto the PATH. C:\ >echo %PATH%   The above shows the current value of the PATH environment variable. C:\ >set PATH=%PATH%;c:\program files\Oracle\Virtual Box;   The above adds onto the existing path the virtual box binary location. C:\>cd c:\Users\xxxx\OEL6.1   The above changes directory to where the VDI files are located for the required virtual box machine. C:\Users\xxxxx\OEL6.1>VBoxManage.exe modifyhd zzzzzz.vdi compact  NOTE: The zzzzzz.vdi is the name of the required vdi file to shrink. Finally the above command is executed to perform the compact operation on the ‘.vdi’ file(s). This also takes a long time to complete but shrinks the VDI file back to a minimum size. In the case of the demonstration virtual box OEM12c this reduced the virtual box to 20Gb from 80Gb which was a great outcome to achieve.

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• Free Advanced ADF eCourse, part II

  - by Frank Nimphius

  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A second part of the advanced Oracle ADF online training is available for free. Lynn Munsinger and her team worked hard to deliver this second part of the training as close to the release of the first installment as possible. This two part advanced ADF training provides you with a wealth of advanced ADF know-how and insight for you to adopt in a self-paced manner. Part 1 (though I am sure you have this bookmarked): http://tinyurl.com/advadf-part1 Part 2 (the new material): http://tinyurl.com/advadf-part2 Quoting Lynn: "This second installment provides you with all you need to know about regions, including best practices for implementing contextual events and other region communication patterns. It also covers the nitty-gritty details of building great looking user interfaces, such as how to work with (not against!) the ADF Faces layout components, how to build page templates and declarative components, and how to skin the application to your organization’s needs. It wraps up with an in-depth look at layout components, and a second helping of additional region considerations if you just can’t get enough. Like the first installment, the content for this course comes from Product Management. This 2nd eCourse compilation is a bit of a “Swan Song” for Patrice Daux, a long-time JDeveloper and ADF curriculum developer, who is retiring the end of this month. Thanks for your efforts, Patrice, and bon voyage!" 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Indeed: Great job Patrice! (and all others involved)

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• What Counts For a DBA – Depth

  - by Louis Davidson

  SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace (even using the newfangled Extended Events!). However, appearances can be deceptive, and often times it is really important that a DBA understands not just the basics of how to perform a task, but why we do a task, and how that task works. As an analogy, consider a child walking into a darkened room. Most would know that they need to turn on the light, and how to do it, so they flick the switch. But what happens if light fails to shine forth. Most would immediately tell you that you need to consider changing the light bulb. So you hop in the car and take them to the local home store and instruct them to buy a replacement. Confronted with a 40 foot display of light bulbs, how will they decide which of the hundreds of types of bulbs, of different types, fittings, shapes, colors, power and efficiency ratings, is the right choice? Obviously the main lesson the child is going to learn this day is how to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they don’t have to ask for help the next time. Likewise, when the metaphorical toddlers who use your database server have issues, they will instinctively know something is wrong, and may even have some idea what caused it, but will have no depth of knowledge to figure out the right solution. That is where the DBA comes in and attempts to save the day. However, when one looks beneath the shiny UI, SQL Server has its own “40 foot display of light bulbs”, in the form of the tremendous number of tools and the often-bewildering amount of information they can present to the DBA, to help us find issues. Unfortunately, resorting to guesswork, to trying different “bulbs” over and over, hoping to stumble on the answer. This is where the right depth of knowledge goes a long way. If we need to write a SELECT statement, then knowing the syntax and where to find the data is not enough. Knowledge of indexes and query plans is essential. Without it, we might hit on a query that “works”, but we are basically still a user, not a programmer, because we have no real control over our platform. Is that level of knowledge deep enough? Probably not, since knowledge of the underlying metadata and structures would be very useful in helping us make sense of any query plan. Understanding the structure of an index makes the “key lookup” operator not sound like what you do when someone tapes your car key to the ceiling. So is even this level of understanding deep enough? Do we need to understand the memory architecture used to process the query? It might be a comforting level of knowledge, and will doubtless come in handy at some point, but is not strictly necessary in most cases. Beyond that lies (more or less) full knowledge of SQL language and the intricacies of every step the SQL Server engine takes to process our query. My personal theory is that, as a professional, our knowledge of a given task should extend, at a minimum, one level deeper than is strictly necessary to perform the task. Anything deeper can be left to the ridiculously smart, or obsessive, or both. As an example. tasked with storing an integer value between 0 and 99999999, it’s essential that I know that choosing an Integer over Decimal(8,0) will likely offer performance benefits. It is then useful that I also understand the value of adding a CHECK constraint, to make sure the values are valid to the desired range; and comforting that I know a little about the underlying processors, registers and computer math. Anything further, I leave to the likes of Joe Chang, whose recent blog post on the topic offers depth by the bucketful!  

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• No Wireless Networks, BCM4313 [duplicate]

  - by TalonPlz

  This question already has an answer here: How to Install Broadcom Wireless Drivers (BCM43xx) 38 answers Just bought this little Asus 10 inch laptop that came with Ubuntu 12.04. Everything at my home was fine: Wireless identified and connected. As soon as I went to my girlfriend's house the trouble started. I couldn't connect to wireless (authentication... times out and asks for authentication) I started doing internet searching, tried a few solutions posted on line using terminal commands. No solutions. I decided to upgraded to 12.10-13.04 and that left me with a worse problem: I can no longer see ANY networks what so ever. Wireless card is ON, with out a doubt. Wired connection works. I have been fumbling with driver versions to no .avail, and have no idea which driver I am currently running I have a vague idea of what terminal lines to run: lshw: resources: irq:17 memory:f7d00000-f7dfffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth2 version: 01 serial: dc:85:de:56:c4:ea width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.20.155.1 (r326264) latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:17 memory:f7d00000-f7d03fff iwconfig: eth1 no wireless extensions. eth2 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off lo no wireless extensions. I am new and excited to start my Ubuntu and Linux life and this is only the first of my few hic cups i am sure! :) Thanks all UPDATE: Report from 2nd answer talon@Black1015E:~$ sudo apt-get remove --purge bcmwl-kernel-source [sudo] password for talon: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package 'bcmwl-kernel-source' is not installed, so not removed 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. talon@Black1015E:~$ wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/b/bcmwl/bcmwl-kernel-source_5.100.82.112+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb --2013-10-22 18:50:32-- http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/b/bcmwl/bcmwl-kernel-source_5.100.82.112+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb Resolving us.archive.ubuntu.com (us.archive.ubuntu.com)... 2001:67c:1562::15, 2001:67c:1562::13, 2001:67c:1562::14, ... Connecting to us.archive.ubuntu.com (us.archive.ubuntu.com)|2001:67c:1562::15|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1181334 (1.1M) [application/x-debian-package] Saving to: ‘bcmwl-kernel-source_5.100.82.112+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb’ 100%[======================================>] 1,181,334 3.37MB/s in 0.3s 2013-10-22 18:50:33 (3.37 MB/s) - ‘bcmwl-kernel-source_5.100.82.112+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb’ saved [1181334/1181334] talon@Black1015E:~$ arvh No command 'arvh' found, did you mean: Command 'arch' from package 'coreutils' (main) arvh: command not found talon@Black1015E:~$ arch x86_64 talon@Black1015E:~$ sudo dpkg -i bcmwl*.deb Selecting previously unselected package bcmwl-kernel-source. (Reading database ... 171895 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking bcmwl-kernel-source (from bcmwl-kernel-source_5.100.82.112+bdcom-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb) ... Setting up bcmwl-kernel-source (5.100.82.112+bdcom-0ubuntu3) ... Loading new bcmwl-5.100.82.112+bdcom DKMS files... First Installation: checking all kernels... Building only for 3.8.0-32-generic Building for architecture x86_64 Building initial module for 3.8.0-32-generic Done. wl: Running module version sanity check. - Original module - No original module exists within this kernel - Installation - Installing to /lib/modules/3.8.0-32-generic/updates/dkms/ depmod........ DKMS: install completed. Error: Module b43 is not currently loaded Error: Module b43legacy is not currently loaded Error: Module ssb is not currently loaded Error: Module bcm43xx is not currently loaded Error: Module brcm80211 is not currently loaded Error: Module brcmfmac is not currently loaded update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-32-generic rebooting now

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• Why Are We Here?

  - by Jonathan Mills

  Back in the early 2000s, Toyota had a vision of building the number one best selling minivan in North America. Their current minivan, the Sienna, was small, underpowered, and badly needed help.  Yuji Yokoya was given the job of re-engineering the Sienna. There was just one problem, Yuji, lived in Japan. He did not know the people or places that he would be engineering for. Believe it or not, Japan is nothing like North America. So, what does a chief engineer do in a situation like that? He packed up his team and flew halfway around the world. He made a commitment to drive through every state in the US, every province in Canada, and Mexico. He met the people and drove the roads that the Sienna would be driving. And guess what, what he learned on that trip revolutionized the Sienna. The innovations he made, sent the Sienna to number one. Why? Because he knew who he was building his product for. He knew, why he was there.Let me ask you this, do you know why you are building what you are building? As a member of a product team, can you tell me how your product will be used in the real world? As you are writing code, building test plans, writing stories, or any of the other project tasks, can you picture the face of a person who will be using what you are building? All to often, the answer to those questions is, no. Why is it important? Because, every day, project team members make assumptions. Over a given project, it is safe to say project team members will make thousands of assumptions about what they are doing. And all to often, those assumptions are not quite right. Its not that they are not good at their job, its just that they don’t really know why they are there.So, what to do? First and foremost, stop doing what you are doing. Yes, really. Schedule some time to go visit the people who will be using your product. Don’t invite them to you, go to them. Watch them work. Interact with them. Ask them questions. Maybe even try it out yourself. This serves two purposes. One, It shows them that you care about them. They will be far more engaged in your project if they feel like you care. And nothing says you care more that spending some time. Second, if gives you the proper frame of reference for you work. It gives you something tangible to go back to as you are building your product. As you make the thousands of assumptions that you will make over the life of your project, it gives you something to see in your mind that makes it real to you.Ultimately, setting a proper frame of reference is critical to the overall success of a project. The funny thing is, it really does not even take that long. In most cases, a 2-3 hour session will give you most of what you need to get the right insight. For the project, it will be the best 2 hours you could spend.

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• Procedual level generation for a platformer game (tilebased) using player physics

  - by Notbad

  I have been searching for information about how to build a 2d world generator (tilebased) for a platformer game I am developing. The levels should look like dungeons with a ceiling and a floor and they will have a high probability of being just made of horizontal rooms but sometimes they can have exits to a top/down room. Here is an example of what I would like to achieve. I'm refering only to the caves part. I know level design won't be that great when generated but I think it is possible to have something good enough for people to enjoy the procedural maps (Note: Supermetrod Spoiler!): http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/SuperMetroid/SuperMetroidMapNorfair.html Well, after spending some time thinking about this I have some ideas to create the maps that I would like to share with you: 1) I have read about celular automatas and I would like to use them to carve the rooms but instead of carving just a tile at once I would like to carve full columns of tiles. Of course this carving system will have some restrictions like how many tiles must be left for the roof and the ceiling, etc... This way I could get much cleaner rooms than using the ussual automata. 2) I want some branching into the rooms. It will have little probability to happen but I definitely want it. Thinking about carving I came to the conclusion that I could be using some sort of path creation algorithm that the carving system would follow to create a path in the rooms. This could be more noticiable if we make the carving system to carve columns with the height of a corridor or with the height of a wide room (this will be added to the system as a param). This way at some point I could spawn a new automa beside the main one to create braches. This new automata should play side by side with the first one to create dead ends, islands (both paths created by the automatas meet at some point or lead to the same room. It would be too long to explain here all the tests I have done, etc... just will try to summarize the problems to see if anyone could bring some light to solve them (I don't mind sharing my successes but I think they aren't too relevant): 1) Zone reachability: How can I make sure that the player will be able to reach all zones I created (mainly when branches happen or vertical rooms are created). When branches are created I have to make sure that there will be a way to get onto the new created branch. I mean a bifurcation that the player could follow. Player will follow the main path or jump to a platform to get onto the other way). On the other hand if an island is created by the meeting of both branches I need to make sure the player will be able to get onto the island too. 2) When a branch is created and corridors are generated for each branch how can I make then both merge or repel to create an island or just make them separated corridors. 3) When I create a branch and an island is created becasue both corridors merge at somepoint or they lead to the same room, is there any way to detect this and randomize where to create the needed platforms to get onto the created isle? This platforms could be created at the start of the island or at the end. I guess part of the problem could be solved using some sort of graph following the created paths but I'm a bit lost in this sea of precedural content creation :). On the other hand I don't expect a solution to the problem but some information to get me moving forward again. Thanks in advance.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists

  - by Argenis

    Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company - and your employer trusts you with keeping them safe. Probably one of the most important of these assets are passwords. As you well know, the can be used anywhere: for service accounts, credentials, proxies, linked servers, DTS/SSIS packages, symmetrical keys, private keys, etc., etc. Have you given some thought to what you're doing to keep these passwords safe? Are you backing them up somewhere? Who else besides you can access them? Good-Ol’ Post-It Notes Under Your Keyboard If you have a password-protected Excel sheet for your passwords, I have bad news for you: Excel's level of encryption is good for your grandma's budget spreadsheet, not for a list of enterprise passwords. I will try to summarize the main point of this best practice in one sentence: You should keep your passwords on an encrypted, access and version-controlled, backed-up, well-known shared location that every DBA on your team is aware of, and maintain copies of this password "database" on your DBA's workstations. Now I have to break down that statement to you: - Encrypted: what’s the point of saving your passwords on a file that any Windows admin with enough privileges can read? - Access controlled: This one is pretty much self-explanatory. - Version controlled: Passwords change (and I’m really hoping you do change them) and version control would allow you to track what a previous password was if the utility you’ve chosen doesn’t handle that for you. - Backed-up: You want a safe copy of the password list to be kept offline, preferably in long term storage, with relative ease of restoring. - Well-known shared location: This is critical for teams: what good is a password list if only one person in the team knows where it is? I have seen multiple examples of this that work well. They all start with an encrypted database. Certainly you could leverage SQL Server's native encryption solutions like cell encryption for this. I have found such implementations to be impractical, for the most part. Enter The World Of Utilities There are a myriad of open source/free software solutions to help you here. One of my favorites is KeePass, which creates encrypted files that can be saved to a network share, Sharepoint, etc. KeePass has UIs for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Other solutions I've used before worth mentioning include PasswordSafe and 1Password, with the latter one being a paid solution – but wildly popular in mobile devices. There are, of course, even more "enterprise-level" solutions available from 3rd party vendors. The truth is that most of the customers that I work with don't need that level of protection of their digital assets, and something like a KeePass database on Sharepoint suits them very well. What are you doing to safeguard your passwords? Leave a comment below, and join the discussion! Cheers, -Argenis

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• Does *every* project benefit from written specifications?

  - by nikie

  I know this is holy war territory, so please read the question to the end before answering. There are many cases where written specifications make a lot of sense. For example, if you're a contractor and you want to get paid, you need written specs. If you're working in a team with 20 persons, you need written specs. If you're writing a programming language compiler or interpreter (and it's not perl), you'll usually write a formal specification. I don't doubt that there are many more cases where written specifications are a really good idea. I just think that there are cases where there's so little benefit in written specs, that it doesn't outweigh the costs of writing and maintaining them. EDIT: The close votes say that "it is difficult to say what is asked here", so let me clarify: The usefulness of written, detailed specifications is often claimed like a dogma. (If you want examples, look at the comments.) But I don't see the use of them for the kind of development I'm doing. So what is asked here is: How would written specifications help me? Background information: I work for a small company that's developing vertical market software. If our product is easier to use and has better performance than the competition, it sells. If it's harder to use, even if it behaves 100% as the specification says, it doesn't sell. So there are no "external forces" for having written specs. The advantage would have to be somewhere in the development process. Now, I can see how frozen specifications would make a developer's life easier. But we'll never have frozen specs. If we see in the middle of development that feature X is not intuitive to use the way it's specified, then we can only choose between changing the specification or developing a product that won't sell. You'll probably ask by now: How do you know when you're done? Well, we're continually improving our product. The competition does the same. So (hopefully) we're never done. We keep improving the software, and when we reach a point when the benefits of the improvements we've added since the last release outweigh the costs of an update, we create a new release that is then tested, localized, documented and deployed. This also means that there's rarely any schedule pressure. Nobody has to do overtime to make a deadline. If the feature isn't done by the time we want to release the next version, it'll simply go into the next version. The next question might be: How do your developers know what they're supposed to implement? The answer is: They have a lot of domain knowledge. They know the customers business well enough, so a high-level description of the feature (or even just the problem that the customer needs solved) is enough to implement it. If it's not clear, the developer creates a few fake screens to get feedback from marketing/management or customers, but this is nowhere near the level of detail of actual specifications. This might be inefficient for larger teams, but for a small team with low turnover it works quite well. It has the additional benefit that the developer in question often comes up with a better solution than the person writing the specs might have. This question is already getting very long, but let me address one last point: Testing. Like I said in the beginning, if our software behaves 100% like the spec says, it still can be crap. In fact, if it's so unintuitive that you need a spec to know how to test it, it probably is crap. It makes sense to have fixed, written tests for some core functionality and for regression bugs, but again, this is nowhere near a full written spec of how the software should behave when. The main test is: hand the software to a user who doesn't know it yet and tell him to use the new feature X. If she can figure out how to use it and it works, it works.

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• Introducing the Metro User Interface on Windows 2012

  - by andywe

  Although I am a big fan of using PowerShell to do many of my server operations, that aspect is well covered by those far more knowledgeable than I, and there is vast information around the web already on that. The new Metro interface, and getting around both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 though is relatively new, even for those whop ran the previews. What is this? A blank Desktop!   Where did the start button go? Well, it is still there...sort of. It is hidden, and acts like an auto hidden component that appear only when the mouse is hovered over the lower left corner of the screen. Those familiar with Gnome or OSX can relate this to the "Hot Corners" functions. To get to the start button, hover your mouse in the very left corner of the task bar. Let it sit there a moment, and a small blue square with colored tiles in it called start will appear. Click it. I clicked it and now I have all the tiles..What is this?   Welcome to the Metro interface. This is a much more modern look, and although at first seems weird and cumbersome, I have actually found that it is a bit more extensible, allowing greater organization and customization than the older explorer desktop. If you look closely, you'll see each box represents either a program, or program group. First, a few basics about using the start view. First and foremost, a right mouse click will bring up a bar on the bottom, with an icon towards the right. Notice it is titled “All Apps”. An even easier way in many places is to hover your mouse in the exact opposite corner, in the upper right. A sidebar will open and expose what used to be a widget bar (remember Vista?), and there are options for Search, Start, and Settings.   Ok Great, but where is everything? It’s all there…Click the All Apps icon.   Look better? Notice the scroll bar at the bottom. Move it right..your desktop is sized to your content..so you can have a smaller, or larger amount of programs exposed. Each icon can be secondary clicked (right mouse click for most of us, and an options bar at the bottom, rather than the old small context menu, is opened with some very familiar options.   Notice the top of the Windows Explorer window has some new features. You still have your right mouse click functions, but since the shortcuts for these items already exist..just copy them. There are many ways, but here is a long way to show you more of the interface. 1. Right mouse click a program icon, and select the Open File Location option. 2. Trusty file manager opens…but if you look closely up at top edge of the window, you’ll see a nifty enhancement. An orange colored box that is titled Shortcut Tools and another lavender box Title Application tools. Each of these adds options at the top of the file manager window to make selection easy. Of course, you can still secondary click an item in the listing window too. 3. Click shortcut tools, right click your app shortcut and copy it. Then simply paste it into the desktop outside the File Explorer window Also note some of the newer features. The large icons up top below the menu that has many common operations. The options change as you select each menu item. Well, that’s it for this installment. I hope this helps you out.

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• When things go awry

  - by Phil Factor

  The moment the Entrepreneur opened his mouth on prime-time national TV, spelled out the URL and waxed big on how exciting ‘his’ new website was, I knew I was in for a busy night. I’d designed and built it. All at once, half a million people tried to log into the website. Although all my stress-testing paid off, I have to admit that the network locked up tight long before there was any danger of a database or website problem. Soon afterwards, the Entrepreneur and the Big Boss were there in the autopsy meeting. We picked through all our systems in detail to see how they’d borne the unexpected strain. Mercifully, in view of the sour mood of the Big Boss, it turned out that the only thing we could have done better was buy a bigger pipe to and from the internet. We’d specified that ‘big pipe’ when designing the system. The Big Boss had then railed at the cost and so we’d subsequently compromised. I felt that my design decisions were vindicated. The Big Boss brooded for a while. Then he made the significant comment: “What really ****** me off is the fact that, for ten minutes, we couldn’t take people’s money.” At that point I stopped feeling smug. Had the internet connection been better, the system would have reached its limit and failed rather precipitously, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Then it occurred to me that what had gummed up the connection was all those images on the site, that had made it so impressive for the visitors. If there had been a way to automatically pare down the site to the bare essentials under stress… Hmm. I began to consider disaster-recovery in the broadest sense – maintaining a service in spite of unusual or unexpected events. What he said makes a lot of sense: sacrifice whatever isn’t essential to keep the core service running when we approach the capacity limits. Maybe in IT we should borrow (or revive) the business concept of the ‘Skeleton service’, maintaining only the priority parts under stress, using a process that is well-prepared and carefully rehearsed. How might this work? Whatever the event we have to prepare for, it is all about understanding the priorities; knowing what one can dispense with when the going gets tough. In the event of database disaster, it’s much faster to deploy a skeletal system with only the essential data than to restore the entire system, though there would have to be a reconciliation process to update the revived database retrospectively, once the emergency was over. It isn’t just the database that could be designed for resilience. One could prepare for unusually high traffic in a website by designing a system that degraded gradually to a ‘skeletal’ site, one that maintained the commercial essentials without fat images, JavaScript libraries and razzmatazz. This is all what the Big Boss scathingly called ‘a mere technicality’. It seems to me that what is needed first is a culture of application and database design which acknowledges that we live in a very imperfect world, and react accordingly when things go awry.

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• Auto-organized / smart inventory system?

  - by VeXe

  for the past week I've been working on an inventory system with Unity3D. At first I got help from the guys at Design3 but it wasn't too long till we split path, because I really didn't like the way they did their code, it didn't have any smell of OOP whatsoever. I took it further steps ahead - items take more than one slot, advanced placement system (items tries their best to find the best close fit), local mouse system (mouse gets trapped in active bag area), etc. Here's a demo of my work. What we would like to have in our game, is an auto-organizing feature - not auto-sort. We want this feature because our inventory's going to be in 'real-time' - not like in Resident Evil 1,2,3 etc where you would pause the game and do things in your inventory. Now imagine your self in a sticky situation surrounded by zombies, and you don't have bullets, you look around, you see that there are bullets nearby on the ground, so you go for them and try to pick them up, but they don't fit! you look at your inventory and find out that if you reorganize some of the items, it will fit! - now the player - in that situation doesn't have time to reorganize because he's surrounded with zombies and will die if he stops and organizes the inventory to make space (remember inventory in real-time, no pausing) - wouldn't it be nice for that to happen automatically? - Yes! (I believe this has been implemented in some games like Dungeon siege or something, so sure it's doable) take a look at this picture for example: Yes, so if you auto-sort the issue you will get your spaces but it's bad because: 1- Expensive: it doesn't need a whole sort operation to free those spaces, in the first picture, just slide the red item at the bottom to the very left, and you get the same spaces that you got from the auto-sort. 2- It's annoying to the player: "Who the F told you to re-order my stuff?" I'm not asking for "How to write the code" for this, I'm just asking for some guidance, where to look, what algorithms are involved? Is this something related to graphs and shortest path stuff? I hope not cuz I didn't manage to continue my college studies :/ But even if it is, just tell me and I will learn the stuff related. Notice there could be more than just one solution. So I guess the first thing I have to do is figure out if the situation is 'solvable' - if I know how to determine if a situation is solvable or not, then I can 'solve' it. I just need to know the conditions that makes it 'solvable'. And I believe there must be some algorithm/data structure for this. Here's a pic for more than one solution of trying to fit a 1x3 item: The arrows show just one of the solutions, but if you look you will find more than one. This is what I ultimately not auto-sorting but find a solution and applying it. Note that if I spend time on it I will come up with a way to solve it, but it wouldn't be the best way, it's like, holding a car wheel with your feet instead of your hands! XD Or just like trying to solve an issue that requires arrays, but you're not yet aware of their existence! So what is the right approach to this? Hope somebody helps, thanks a lot in advance :)

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• There are 2 jobs available - which one sounds better all round [closed]

  - by Steve Gates

  I am currently employed at a company where we scrape by each year breaking even, sometimes having a little profit. The development environment is very relaxed and we have a laugh. My colleagues are not interested in improving their knowledge unless they have to, so trying to get them to adopt things like TDD is a non-starter. My development manager is stuck in .Net 2 land and refuses to use things like LINQ. He over complicates architecture and writes very unreadable code, heres an example SortedList<int,<SortedList<int,SortedList<int, MyClass>>>> The MD of the company has no drive and lets the one sales guy bring in the contracts. We are not busy all the time and this allows me time to look at new technology and learn. In terms of using things like TDD, my development manager has no problem with it and can kind of see the purpose of it, he just wont use it himself. This means I am alone in learning new things and am often resorting to StackOverflow to make sure I get things right. The company has a lot of flexibility, I can work from home if needs be and when my daughter was born they let me work from home 1 day a week however they expect this flexibility in return often asking me to travel occasionally on a Friday afternoon for the following week. Sometimes its abroad. We are also pretty much on call 24/5 as we have engineers in various countries. Also we have no testers so most of the testing is done by us developers and some testing by engineers. Either way no-one likes testing! I have been offered a role at a company I worked at 5 years ago. They were quite Victorian in their working practices but it appears to have relaxed now although I suspect still reasonably formal. There is a new team of developers I don't know and they are about to move to new offices. The team lead is a guy that was there when I was and I get the impression he takes his role seriously and likes his formal procedures and documentation. I think some of the Victorian practices may have rubbed off on him. However he did say if things crop up then as long as I can trust the person they can work at home although he prefers people in the office. The team uses SCRUM, TDD and SOLID design principles so they are quite up to date in technology. They are reasonably Microsoft focused. It appears the Technical Director might be the R&D man and research new technology on his own not allowing developers to play with new technology. He possibly might be a super developer and makes all the decisions that no can argue with. They are currently moving to Entity Framework away from NHibernate based on issues that their queries seem to fail sometimes and they feel NHibernate is stagnant. They have analysts and a QA team. The MD is focused and they are an expanding company making profit each year. I'm not sure what the team morale is and whether they have a laugh. When I had a tour around the office they were there in dead silence. I'm really unsure which role is the best for me and going with my gut instinct is useless as I'm not sure what my gut is telling me. Based on the information above which role would you choose and why?

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• Managing software projects - advice needed

  - by Callum

  I work for a large government department as part of an IT team that manages and develops websites as well as stand alone web applications. We’re running in to problems somewhere in the SDLC that don’t rear their ugly head until time and budget are starting to run out. We try to be “Agile” (software specifications are not as thorough as possible, clients have direct access to the developers any time they want) and we are also in a reasonably peculiar position in that we are not allowed to make profit from the services we provide. We only service the divisions within our government department, and can only charge for the time and effort we actually put in to a project. So if we deliver a project that we have over-quoted on, we will only invoice for the actual time spent. Our software specifications are not as thorough as they could be, but they always include at a minimum: Wireframe mockups for every form view A data dictionary of all field inputs Descriptions of any business rules that affect the system Descriptions of the outputs I’m new to software management, but I’ve overseen enough software projects now to know that as soon as users start observing demos of the system, they start making a huge amount of requests like “Can we add a few more fields to this report.. can we redesign the look of this interface.. can we send an email at this part of the workflow.. can we take this button off this view.. can we make this function redirect to a different screen.. can we change some text on this screen… can we create a special account where someone can log in and get access to X… this report takes too long to run can it be optimised.. can we remove this step in the workflow… there’s got to be a better image we can put here…” etc etc etc. Some changes are tiny and can be implemented reasonably quickly.. but there could be up to 50-100 or so of such requests during the course of the SDLC. Other change requests are what clients claim they “just assumed would be part of the system” even if not explicitly spelled out in the spec. We are having a lot of difficulty managing this process. With no experienced software project managers in our team, we need to come up with a better way to both internally identify whether work being requested is “out of spec”, and be able to communicate this to a client in such a manner that they can understand why what they are asking for is “extra” work. We need a way to track this work and be transparent with it. In the spirit of Agile development where we are not spec'ing software systems in to the ground and back again before development begins, and bearing in mind that clients have access to any developer any time they want it, I am looking for some tips and pointers from experienced software project managers on how to handle this sort of "scope creep" problem, in tracking it, being transparent with it, and communicating it to clients such that they understand it. Happy to clarify anything as needed. I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to offer some advice. Thanks.

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• SQL Saturday 27 (Portland, Oregon)

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These are not Microsoft-sponsored events – it’s truly the community at work. Think of a big user-group meeting – I mean REALLY big – held in a central location, like at a college (as ours was) or some larger, inexpensive venue like that. Everyone there is volunteering – it’s my own money and time to drive several hours to a hotel for the night, feed myself and present. It’s their own time and money for the folks that organize the event – unless a vendor or two steps in to help. It’s their own time and money for the attendees to drive a long way, spend the night and their Saturday to listen to the speakers. Why do all this?   Because everybody benefits. Every speaker learns something new, meets new people, and reaches a new audience. Every volunteer does the same. And the attendees? Well, it’s pretty obvious what they get. A 7Am to 10PM extravaganza of knowledge from every corner of the product. In fact, this year the Portland group hooked up with the CodeCamp folks and held a combined event. We had over 850 people, and I had everyone from data professionals to developers in my sessions.   So I’ll take this opportunity to do two things: to say “thank you” to all of the folks who attended, from those who spoke to those who worked and those who came to listen, and to challenge you to attend the next SQL Saturday anywhere near you. You can find the list here: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/. Don’t see anything in your area? Start one! The PASS folks have a package that will show you how. Sure, it’s a big job, but the key is to get as many people helping you as possible. Even if you have only a few dozen folks show up the first time, no worries. The first events I presented at had about 20 in the room. But not this week.   See you at the Launch Event if you’re near the San Francisco area tomorrow, and see you at the Redmond SQL Saturday and TechEd if not.   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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