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• What is the best way to build a database from a MS Word document?

  - by Jayron Soares

  Please advise me on how to approach this problem: I have a sequential list of metadata in a document in MS Word. The basic idea is to create a Python algorithm to iterate over the information, retrieving just the name of the PROCESS, when is made a queue, from a database. Example metadata: Process: Process Walker (1965) Exact reference: Walker Process Equipment., Inc. v. Food Machinery Corp. Link: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=382&invol= Type of procedure: Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Parties: Walker Process Equipment, Inc. Sector: Systems is ... Start Date: October 12-13 Arguedas, 1965 Summary: Food Machinery Company has initiated a process to stop or slow the entry of competitors through the use of a patent obtained by fraud. The case concerned a patent on "knee action swing diffusers" used in aeration equipment for sewage treatment systems, and the question was whether "the maintenance and enforcement of a patent obtained by fraud before the patent office" may be a basis for antitrust punishment. Report of the evolution process: petitioner, in answer to respond... Importance: a) First case which established an analysis for the diagnosis of dispute… There are about 200 pages containing the information above. I have in mind the idea of implementing an algorithm in Python to be able to break this information sequence and try to store it in a web database (an open source application that I’m looking for) in order to allow for free consultations.

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• Why does display:table-cell not center content without display:table?

  - by Samuel

  I'm looking for the most efficient (or elegant) way to vertically and horizontally center content of variable height. I've come up with this: http://cssdeck.com/t/2veysdkg/16, which uses css tables to vertically center the main content. My demands for writing this particular piece of code were: Must be able to center variable and fixed width content vertically and horizontally Centered content must be inside the normal document flow (so no overlapping) Sticky footer and normal header of 100% width As few hacks, ugly code or non-semantic html as possible I didn't care about support for IE6, IE7 (I'll use a different stylesheet for them) The weird thing is that the demands above are only met when the header and footer are set to table-row, and the body-tag to display:table. Which is weird because as I understand it the css will generate anonymous table elements when parent table elements are missing. So table-cell should work without all the surrounding elements, but yet I've not been able to make it work. If it were up to me I would prefer to not mess with the display mode for the body tag, and leave the header and footer on display:block. But I've not been able to make it work. Does anyone understand why this doesn't work?

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• How to create art assets for a 3d avatar editor

  - by Andrew Garrison

  I am currently prototyping an idea for an iPhone game. I'd like to create an avatar editor inside the game so that the player can create a 3d avatar face and modify certain features (using slider controls), such as nose shape, eye color, mouth size, etc. This has been done in several games, but what I'm looking to do would be fairly cartoon-ish/caricature-ish, similar to the Mii editor on the Nintendo Wii (http://www.myavatareditor.com/). I'd also like the final result to have the ability to use some canned animations, such as simple speech animations, smiling, frowning, etc. I am not an artist, so I would be unable to create these assets, but what kind of effort is required for an artist to create the 3d models necessary for this type of game? Also what mechanism would be required to tweak the face's characteristics? Would you use bones or morph targets? How would the final result be animated? Would facial animation use bones or morph targets? I've seen several tools that do this sort of thing too, such as FacialStudio. Are there any facial generation tools out there you'd recommend for generating some base content for this game, or should I just hire an artist to do this type of work. Thanks!

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• How do you deal with translating theory into practice?

  - by Mr. Shickadance

  Hello all! Being a computer scientist in a research field I am often tasked with working alongside professionals outside of the software domain (think math people, electrical engineer etc), and then translating their theories and ideas into real-world implementations. I often find it difficult when they present a theoretical problem which appears to be somewhat disconnected from reality. I am not saying that the theory is bogus, only that it is difficult to translate into real-world situations. For example, recently I have been working with software defined radios. We are exploring many different areas, but often the math specialists in my group would present a problem which is heavily grounded in theory (signal processing, physics, whatever). I often struggle at times where it is hard to draw direct parallels between the theory and the real-world implementation that I need to develop. Say we are working on an energy detector, the theory person in my group would say "you need to measure the noise variance with no signal present." This leads me to think "how the hell do I isolate noise from a signal in reality?" There are many examples, but I hope you see where I am going. So, my question is how does one deal with implementation of theoretical concepts when the theory seems detached from reality? Or at least when the connections are not so clear. Or perhaps, the person with the 'theory' may be ignorant of real restrictions? Note: I found this to be a hard question to ask - hopefully you are following me. If you have suggestions on how I could improve it, by all means let me know! Thanks for looking! EDIT: To be a bit more clear, I understand in situations like this that I must learn that specific domain myself to an extent (i.e. signal processing), but I am more concerned with when those theoretical concepts do not appear to be as grounded in practice as one would like.

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• Free Windows Azure event next Monday in London (29th March)

  - by Eric Nelson

  I just heard that we still have spaces for this event happening next week (29th March 2010). Whilst the event is designed for start-ups, I’m sure nobody would notice if you snuck in :-) Just keep it to yourself ;-) Register using invitation code: 79F2AB. Hope to see you there. The agenda is looking pretty swish: 09:00 – 09:30 Registration 09:30 - 10:15 Keynote  ‘I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now....’– John Taysom, Active Seed Investor 10:15 - 10:45   The Microsoft Vision for Cloud Computing – Steve Clayton, Director Software + Services, EMEA 10:45 - 11:00   Break 11:00 - 12:30 “Windows Azure in Real World” – hear from startups that have built their business around the Azure platform, moderated by Alistair Beagley, Azure UK Developer and Platform Lead 12:30 - 13:15 Lunch and networking  13:15 - 14:15  Breakout Tracks, moderated by our Azure Experts 1. Windows Azure Technical Overview - David Gristwood, Application Architect, Microsoft 2. SQL Azure Technical Overview – Eric Nelson, Application Architect, Microsoft 3. Commercial insight into Windows Azure and what this means for BizSpark Start-ups - Simon Karn, Commercial Lead, UK Windows Azure Incubation Team, Microsoft 14:15 - 14:30 Session change over 14:30 - 15:30   Breakout Tracks, moderated by our Azure Experts 1. SQL Azure Technical Overview (repeat) - Eric Nelson, Application Architect, Microsoft 2. Deep dive into Windows Azure – Neil Kidd, Architect, Microsoft Technology Centre 3. Lessons Learnt - Windows Azure in the Real World interactive session – Two customers hosted by Matt Deacon, Enterprise Architect, Microsoft 15:30 - 16:00 Break & Session change over 16:00 - 17:00 Breakout Tracks, moderated by our Azure Experts 1. PHP / Ruby on Azure Simon Davies, Architect, UK Windows Azure Incubation Team, Microsoft 2. Commercial insight into Windows Azure and what this means for BizSpark Start-ups (repeat) - Simon Karn, Commercial Lead, UK Windows Azure Incubation Team, Microsoft 3. Lessons Learnt - Windows Azure in the Real World interactive session #2 Two customers hosted by Matt Deacon, Enterprise Architect, Microsoft 17:00 - 18:00 Pitches and Judging 18:15 Wrap-up and close 18:15 - 20:00 Drinks & Networking

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• Understanding node.js: some real-life examples

  - by steweb

  Hi all! As a curious web developer I've been hearing about node.js for several months and (just) now I'd like to learn it and, most of all, understand its "engine". So, as a real newbie about node.js I'm going to follow some tutorials. And as every new technology over the internet, find a very good and exhaustive tutorial is like looking for a needle in a haystack :) My "big question" can be split into this 3 sub-questions: I know node.js can be very useful to build web-chats. But, apart from this example (and from helloworld one :D), how could I use it? Which are the real-life examples that let me think i.e. "oh, it's fantastic, I could really integrate it for my daily projects"? I also know it implements some JS specifications. It is required to deeply know other programming languages apart from JS? Where can I find a good reference (basically, I don't want to search "node.js reference" on google hoping to be lucky enough to get some good websites)? Thanks everyone!

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• Are You Using Windows Live Mesh?

  - by Ben Griswold

  Most of the time, I’m the guy who authors the show notes for the Herding Code Podcast.  The workflow is relatively straight-forward: Jon shares the pre-production audio with me, I compete my write up and then ship the notes back to Jon for publishing with the edited audio.  All file sharing is all done with shared folders in the Windows Live Mesh. The director of my kid’s preschool was looking for a way to access her work computer from her home office.  VPN connection?  Remote desktop?  FTP?  Nope. I installed Windows Live Mesh in a matter of minutes, synchronized a number of folders and she was off and running.  (The neat thing is she’s running a PC in the office and a Mac at home.) I was using Dropbox before discovering Mesh. Dropbox is still very cool but I’m in and out of Mesh enough that it’s taken over.  Actually I still have a Dropbox folder – it’s just being synched by Mesh now. If you’re interested in giving Live Mesh a whirl, here’ are the notable links as found on the product’s site: What you need Create your mesh Sync folders Share folders Use your Live Desktop Connect to a remote computer Use a mobile phone Good luck!

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• 3 Key Trends For Mobile Commerce – Location, Location, Location

  - by Michael Hylton

  This past weekend I was at a major bookstore chain and looking for a particular book.  Rather than ask the clerk, I went to my smartphone and went online to find the book title, author, and competing price.  I know I’m not alone in this effort and more and more individuals (and businesses) will use the power of mobility to tilt the scale in their favor. Armed with a mobile device – smartphone or tablet – folks will use them to research, compare, and ultimately purchase.  A recent PayPal survey found that 46% of respondents plan to use a mobile device this holiday season to make a purchase.   An astounding 27% of consumers in an e-tailing group survey commissioned by Oracle, use a tablet device daily or several times a week to research products and services. Beyond researching or making purchases, 35% of consumers use their smartphone to receive offers and coupons, and 32% access coupons and redeem them at their local retail store.  And with GPS capabilities in smartphones and tablet (and with user’s approval), retailers will start pushing coupons and offers directly to phone users based on their proximity to their store (or their competitors). Security is one concern that both shoppers, companies and phone manufacturers will have to deal with in the coming years.  In that same Oracle-sponsored e-tailing group consumer survey, 32% of consumers were concerned about giving their credit card information via a smartphone. You can gain further insight into the mind of today’s consumer by reading the e-tailing group white paper, titled “the connected consumer”.

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• 3 Key Trends For Mobile Commerce – Location, Location, Location

  - by Michael Hylton

  This past weekend I was at a major bookstore chain and looking for a particular book.  Rather than ask the clerk, I went to my smartphone and went online to find the book title, author, and competing price.  I know I’m not alone in this effort and more and more individuals (and businesses) will use the power of mobility to tilt the scale in their favor. Armed with a mobile device – smartphone or tablet – folks will use them to research, compare, and ultimately purchase.  A recent PayPal survey found that 46% of respondents plan to use a mobile device this holiday season to make a purchase.   An astounding 27% of consumers in an e-tailing group survey commissioned by Oracle, use a tablet device daily or several times a week to research products and services. Beyond researching or making purchases, 35% of consumers use their smartphone to receive offers and coupons, and 32% access coupons and redeem them at their local retail store.  And with GPS capabilities in smartphones and tablet (and with user’s approval), retailers will start pushing coupons and offers directly to phone users based on their proximity to their store (or their competitors). Security is one concern that both shoppers, companies and phone manufacturers will have to deal with in the coming years.  In that same Oracle-sponsored e-tailing group consumer survey, 32% of consumers were concerned about giving their credit card information via a smartphone. You can gain further insight into the mind of today’s consumer by reading the e-tailing group white paper, titled “the connected consumer”.

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• Multiple possible jsp views for a request

  - by Karl Walsh

  I'm looking to offer the user some way of changing how a single page looks based on some pre-defined jsps. i.e. Two or more jsp's contain similar information, and would be backed by a single controller method. The controller would decide which view to return. Is there a common way of achieving this? At the moment I have some administration screens where I control a list of possible views. The user can then choose which one to see from a drop-down. My current issue is that I don't know how to confirm (at the admin screen) that the view is valid. Is there a way of asking spring for all possible views so I can filter them and resent a drop-down on the admin screen rather than a free text field? If not is there a way of asking spring if a single view is valid? All these views will reside under a common directory, so it would probably be possible to scan recursively from that point and build a list of possible views. This goes beyond simply changing the css, since the page content might be different despite being backed by the same model.

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• Tuning Red Gate: #5 of Multiple

  - by Grant Fritchey

  In the Tuning Red Gate series I've shown you how to look at a current load on the system and how to drill down to look at historical analysis of the system. I've also shown how you can see the top queries and other information from the current status of the system. I have one more thing I can show you before we need to start fixing things and showing how that affects the data collected, historical moments in time. For example, back in Post #3 I was looking at some spikes in some of the monitored resources that were taking place a couple of weeks back in time. Once I identify a moment in time that I'm interested in, I can go back to the first page of Monitor, Global Overview, and click on the icon: From this you can select the date and time you're interested in. For example, I saw some serious CPU queues last week: This then rolls back the time for all the information that's available to the Global Overview and the drill down to the server and the SQL Server instance there. This then allows me to look at the Top Queries running at this point, sort them by CPU and identify what was potentially the query that was causing the problem right when I saw the CPU queuing This ability to correlate a moment in time with the information available to you in the Analysis window makes for an excellent tool to investigate your systems going backwards in time. It really makes a huge difference in your knowledge. It's not enough to know that something happened at a particular time. You need to know what it was that was occurring. Remember, the key to tuning your systems is having enough knowledge about them. I'll post more on Tuning Red Gate as soon as I can get some queries rewritten. I'm working on that.

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• UX Design Principles Pluralsight course review

  - by pluginbaby

  I've just finished the "Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles" course on Pluralsight, I am glad I took it, and here is why you should. The course is held by Billy Hollis, an internationally known author and speaker focused on user experience design. It was published in May 2012, so it is quite fresh (You’ll hear some reference to XAML, even if the content is not focused on any particular technology). I think what I liked the most about this course is the fact that Billy is not just imposing design ideas and pushing them in your throat (which would be too confronting for us developers, even if he was right), he spends a fair share amount of time explaining each topics, and illustrate them with great metaphors. If you are a minimum open minded you should get great value out of this course. Billy makes you think outside the box, he encourages you to use your right side brain, and understand design principles by simply looking at what’s around us (physical objects, nature, …). During the course he refers several time to "don't make me think" a book on UX design, which is about giving confidence to users, by making it easier for them to achieve their goals when using your app. Billy thinks that every developer can participate in elaborating good design when building software, not only designers should be involved. Get away of the easy path "let's build functional stuff for now and we will hire a designer later if we have time and budget". The course is also live and interactive as the author suggests that you do some live exercises during each module. He actually makes you realize and understand by yourself the need for change. We’re in a new era of software and devices, where grids and menus aren't enough. You can’t remain satisfied by just making things possible, you need to make them easier for your users. Understanding some fundamental design principles will help. This course can definitely be followed by any developers who wants to improve user experience of software they are working on, and I definitely recommend it.

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• Keyboard locking up in Visual Studio 2010

  - by Jim Wang

  One of the initiatives I’m involved with on the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams is the Tactical Test Team (TTT), which is a group of testers who dedicate a portion of their time to roaming around and testing different parts of the product.  What this generally translates to is a day and a bit a week helping out with areas of the product that have been flagged as risky, or tackling problems that span both ASP.NET and Visual Studio.  There is also a separate component of this effort outside of TTT which is to help with customer scenarios and design. I enjoy being on TTT because it allows me the opportunity to look at the entire product and gain expertise in a wide range of areas.  This week, I’m looking at Visual Studio 2010 performance problems, and this gem with the keyboard in Visual Studio locking up ended up catching my attention. First of all, here’s a link to one of the many Connect bugs describing the problem: Microsoft Connect I like this problem because it really highlights the challenges of reproducing customer bugs.  There aren’t any clear steps provided here, and I don’t know a lot about your environment: not just the basics like our OS version, but also what third party plug-ins or antivirus software you might be running that might contribute to the problem.  In this case, my gut tells me that there is more than one bug here, just by the sheer volume of reports.  Here’s another thread where users talk about it: Microsoft Connect The volume and different configurations are staggering.  From a customer perspective, this is a very clear cut case of basic functionality not working in the product, but from our perspective, it’s hard to find something reproducible: even customers don’t quite agree on what causes the problem (installing ReSharper seems to cause a problem…or does it?). So this then, is the start of a QA investigation. If anybody has isolated repro steps (just comment on this post) that they can provide this will immensely help us nail down the issue(s), but I’ll be doing a multi-part series on my progress and methodologies as I look into the problem.

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• Java - System design with distributed Queues and Locks

  - by sunny

  Looking for inputs to evaluate a design for a system (java) which would have a distributed queue serving several (but not too many) nodes. These nodes would process objects present in the distributed queue and on occasion require a distributed lock across the cluster on an arbitrary (distributed) data structures. These (distributed) data structures could potentially lie in a distributed cache. Eliminating Terracotta (DSO),Hazelcast and Akka what could be alternative choices. Currently considering zookeeper as a distributed locking mechanism. Since the recommendation of a znode is not to exceed the 1M size , the understanding is that zookeeper should not be used a distributed queue. And also from Netflix curator tech note 4. So should a distributed cache, say like memcached, or redis be used to emulate a distributed queue ? i.e. The distributed queue will be stored in the caches and will be locked cluster-wide via zookeeper. Are there potential pitfalls with this high-level approach. The objects don't need to be taken off the queue. The object will pass through a lifecycle which will determine its removal from the queue. There would be about 10k+ objects in a queue at a given time changing states and any node could service one stage of the object's lifecycle. (Although not strictly necessary .. i.e. one node could serve the entire lifecycle if that is more efficient.) Any suggestions/alternatives ? sidenote: new to zookeeper ; redis etc.

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• PHP Browser Game Question - Pretty General Language Suitability and Approach Question

  - by JimBadger

  I'm developing a browser game, using PHP, but I'm unsure if the way I'm going about doing it is to be encouraged anymore. It's basically one of those MMOs where you level up various buildings and what have you, but, you then commit some abstract fighting entity that the game gives you, to an automated battle with another player (producing a textual, but hopefully amusing and varied combat report). Basically, as soon as two players agree to fight, PHP functions on the "fight.php" page run queries against a huge MySQL database, looking up all sorts of complicated fight moves and outcomes. There are about three hundred thousand combinations of combat stance, attack, move and defensive stances, so obviously this is quite a resource hungry process, and, on the super cheapo hosted server I'm using for development, it rapidly runs out of memory. The PHP script for the fight logic currently has about a thousand lines of code in it, and I'd say it's about half-finished as I try to add a bit of AI into the fight script. Is there a better way to do something this massive than simply having some functions in a PHP file calling the MySQL Database? I taught myself a modicum of PHP a while ago, and most of the stuff I read online (ages ago) about similar games was all PHP-based. but a) am I right to be using PHP at all, and b) am I missing some clever way of doing things that will somehow reduce server resource requirements? I'd consider non PHP alternatives but, if PHP is suitable, I'd rather stick to that, so there's no overhead of learning something new. I think I'd bite that bullet if it's the best option for a better game, though.

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• Add a Search Box to the Drop-Down Tab List in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  Do you have a lot of tabs open no matter what time of day it is and find sorting through the tabs list frustrating? Then get control back with the List All Tabs Menu extension for Firefox. Before If you have a large number of tabs open using the “Tab List Menu” can start to become a little awkward. You can use your mouse’s middle button to scroll through the list or the tiny arrow button at the bottom but there needs to be a better way to deal with this. After Once you have installed the extension you will notice two differences in the “Tab List Menu”. There will be a search box available and a nice scrollbar for those really long lists. A closer look at the search box and scrollbar setup… Depending on your style you can use the scrollbar to look for a particular page or enter a search term and watch that list become extremely manageable. A closer look at our much shorter list after conducting a search. Definitely not hard to find what we were looking for at all. Conclusion If you are someone who has lots of tabs open at once throughout the day then the List All Tabs Menu extension might be the perfect tool to help you sort and manage those tabs. Links Download the List All Tabs Menu extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Organize Your Firefox Search Engines Into FoldersAdd Search Forms to the Firefox Search BarGain Access to a Search Box in Google ChromeWhy Doesn’t Tab Work for Drop-down Controls in Firefox on OS X?Quick Tip: Spell Check Firefox Text Input Fields TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper Live PDF Searches PDF Files and Ebooks Converting Mp4 to Mp3 Easily Use Quick Translator to Translate Text in 50 Languages (Firefox)

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• Podcasting vs Stack Overflow vs Geekswithblogs

  - by MarkPearl

  For a few years now I have been looking for effective ways to be involved in the “community”. While there are a few community programming events in my area (Johannesberg), there isn’t too much face to face stuff – which has caused me to turn to the internet. My internet attempts have been varied – at first I took the passive approach of listening to tech podcasts. This was great for a while, but soon the content became semi-repetitive and a little boring. It seemed that the podcasts I was listening to all went round the same themes and speakers and while I am still a keen listener to several tech podcasts – it didn’t quench my thirst. So I began to be a bit more active – starting with stack overflow – where I would scan the site for questions that were in the realm of my ability to answer. It worked for a while but soon it began to be discouraging – there seems to be so many people that know so much more than me and are quicker at typing that I felt fairly ineffective. So while I still use Stack Overflow when I am in a pickle and need some help – it feels more like me taking from the community than giving anything. Which brought me to Geeks with blogs. Till I found GWB I hadn’t felt like I was an active part of a community. I had blogged before on Blogspot and Wordpress but hadn’t felt associated to the community. Now when I get a comment from someone on one of my GWB posts either thanking me or adding a bit more or correcting me, it makes me feel like I am contributing to a community. So well done GWB. Thanks for making a spot that makes me feel at home!

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• Design and Print Your Own Christmas Cards in MS Word, Part 1

  - by Eric Z Goodnight

  Looking for a  little DIY fun this holiday season? Open up familiar tool MS Word and create simple, beautiful Christmas and Holiday cards, and impress your family with your crafting skills. This is the first part of a two part article. In this first section, we’ll tackle design in MS Word. In our second, we’ll cover supplies and proper printing methods to get a great look out of your dusty old inkjet. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Get the Complete Android Guide eBook for Only 99 Cents [Update: Expired] Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography How to Choose What to Back Up on Your Linux Home Server How To Harmonize Your Dual-Boot Setup for Windows and Ubuntu Hang in There Scrat! – Ice Age Wallpaper How Do You Know When You’ve Passed Geek and Headed to Nerd? On The Tip – A Lamborghini Theme for Chrome and Iron What if Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner were Human? [Video] Peaceful Winter Cabin Wallpaper Store Tabs for Later Viewing in Opera with Tab Vault

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• UPK Professional Customer Success Story: Medtronic

  - by [email protected]

  In case you missed the live event, be sure to listen to last week's UPK Customer iSeminar featuring Medtronic. This was the first iSeminar in our quarterly series to showcase UPK Professional (UPK and Knowledge Pathways). Donna Miller and Staci Gilbert gave viewers an inside look at samples of Medtronic's content as they shared their experiences, methodology and best practices for use of the solution. Here are some highlights of the call: • Medtronic initially purchased UPK Professional to support a multi-year, global SAP rollout for 9,000 end users located in 24 countries. • As time went on, they expanded their use of UPK Professional to include several of their other enterprise applications: PeopleSoft, Siebel CRM, Hyperion Financial Management, a number of SAP bolt-ons, Documentum, TrackWise, and many others. • In combination with their Saba LMS, UPK Professional has allowed Medtronic to create, deploy, track and certify consistent end user training for critical transactions and processes across their organization worldwide - essential for a company in a heavily regulated industry. • For key pieces of content or certain end user populations, some Medtronic business units localize/translate the global UPK content. Staci demonstrated examples of their SAP content which has been translated into Japanese. • In the live SAP environment, end users rely on UPK's context sensitive in-application performance support. Medtronic has found this to be very helpful post go-live, giving just-in-time support so end users are confident in a new system or when performing tasks they don't often touch (at quarter or year end). UPK also serves as Medtronic's internal Google. • Medtronic has realized savings on many fronts: reduction in support calls due to in-application performance support, elimination of their training clients, and speedier training (1.5 days rather than 5-7 days) of temporary workers by moving from ILT to a blended solution that includes UPK simulations for eLearning. Thanks again to Donna and Staci for an exceptional presentation. They offered so many great examples for anyone who's looking for ways to get more out of UPK or interested in learning about UPK Professional: Knowledge Pathways. - Karen Rihs, Oracle UPK Outbound Product Management

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• Upcoming MySQL Events in Europe

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h2 { margin: 12pt 0cm 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: italic; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }span.Heading2Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; }span.apple-style-span { }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Oracle’s European MySQL team is active running many events during the upcoming couple of months. We hope to see you there - Register Now! Scale with MySQL Are you looking to scale with MySQL? On-premise or in the cloud? Leveraging SQL and NoSQL Access? Join us for a free Oracle seminar focusing on best practices for MySQL performance and scalability. April 25: London May 22: Berlin MySQL Enterprise Edition Workshop In this hands-on seminar we will present the MySQL Enterprise Edition management tools under guidance of Oracle’s MySQL experts providing hints and tips. May 8: Düsseldorf High Availability Solutions for MySQL Web-based and business critical applications must typically be available 24/7. In addition to being very costly due to lost revenue opportunities, downtime can be extremely detrimental to customer loyalty, and present regulatory issues if data is compromised. Join us for this seminar to better understand how to achieve high availability with MySQL. May 10: Helsinki May 23: Munich May 24: Baden-Dättwil (near Zürich)

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• What are the pros and cons of using “Sign in with Twitter/Facebook” for a new website?

  - by Paul D. Waite

  Myself and a friend are looking to launch a little forum site. I’m considering using the “Sign in with Facebook/Twitter” APIs, possibly exclusively, for user login.I haven’t used either of these before, nor run a site with user logins at all. What are the pros and cons of these APIs? Specifically: Is the idea of using them, and/or using them exclusively (i.e. having no login system other than one or both of these), any good? What benefits do I get as a developer from using them? Do end users actually like/dislike them? Have you experienced any technical/logistical issues with these APIs specifically? Here are the pros and cons I’ve got so far: Pros More convenient for the user (“register” with two clicks, sign in with one) Possibly no need to maintain our own login system  Cons No control over our login process Exclude non-Facebook/non-Twitter users (if we don’t maintain our own login system) Exclude Facebook/Twitter users who are worried about us having some sort of access to their accounts Users’ accounts on our site are compromised if their Facebook/Twitter accounts are compromised.

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• Master Data Management and Cloud Computing

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. There are many reasons why this is so. But like its predecessor, Service Oriented Architecture, it can fall on hard times if the underlying data is left unmanaged. Master Data Management is the perfect Cloud companion. It can materially increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives. In this blog, I'll review the nature of the Cloud and show how MDM fits in.   Here's the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cloud definition: •          Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.   Cloud architectures have three main layers: applications or Software as a Service (SaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS generally refers to applications that are delivered to end-users over the Internet. Oracle CRM On Demand is an example of a SaaS application. Today there are hundreds of SaaS providers covering a wide variety of applications including Salesforce.com, Workday, and Netsuite. Oracle MDM applications are located in this layer of Oracle's On Demand enterprise Cloud platform. We call it Master Data as a Service (MDaaS). PaaS generally refers to an application deployment platform delivered as a service. They are often built on a grid computing architecture and include database and middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware is in this category and includes the SOA and Data Integration products used to connect SaaS applications including MDM. Finally, IaaS generally refers to computing hardware (servers, storage and network) delivered as a service.  This typically includes the associated software as well: operating systems, virtualization, clustering, etc.    Cloud Computing benefits are compelling for a large number of organizations. These include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments. Cost advantages include paying for just what you use. This is especially critical for organizations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don't have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs are also more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments.   While Cloud Computing is certainly very alluring with a clear value proposition, it is not without its challenges. An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues:   Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted.  There are others, but I singled out these four top issues because Master Data Management, properly incorporated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly ameliorate all of these problems. Cloud Computing can literally rain raw data across the enterprise.   According to fellow blogger, Mike Ferguson, "the fracturing of data caused by the adoption of cloud computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized."   David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs blogs that "the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems."    Left unmanaged, non-standard, inconsistent, ungoverned data with questionable quality can pollute analytical systems, increase operational costs, and reduce the ROI in Cloud and On-Premise applications. As cloud computing becomes more relevant, and more data, applications, services, and processes are moved out to cloud computing platforms, the need for MDM becomes ever more important. Oracle's MDM suite is designed to deal with all four of the above Cloud issues listed in the IDC survey.   Security - MDM manages all master data attribute privacy and resource access control issues. Integration - MDM pre-integrates Cloud Apps with each other and with On Premise applications at the data level. Operational Costs - MDM significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. Compliance - MDM, with its built in Data Governance capabilities, insures that the data is governed according to organizational standards. This facilitates rapid and accurate reporting for compliance purposes. Oracle MDM creates governed high quality master data. A unified cleansed and standardized data view is produced. The Oracle Customer Hub creates a single view of the customer. The Oracle Product Hub creates high quality product data designed to support all go-to-market processes. Oracle Supplier Hub dramatically reduces the chances of 'supplier exceptions'. Oracle Site Hub masters locations. And Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management masters financial reference data and manages enterprise hierarchies across operational areas from ERP to EPM and CRM to SCM. Oracle Fusion Middleware connects Cloud and On Premise applications to MDM Hubs and brings high quality master data to your enterprise business processes.   An independent analyst once said "Poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything."  Cloud Computing has the potential to significantly degrade data quality across the enterprise over time. Deploying a Master Data Management solution prior to or in conjunction with a move to the Cloud can insure that the data flowing into the enterprise from the Cloud is clean and governed. This will in turn insure that expected returns on the investment in Cloud Computing will be realized.       Oracle MDM has proven its metal in this area and has the customers to back that up. In fact, I will be hosting a webcast on Tuesday, April 10th at 10 am PT with one of our top Cloud customers, the Church Pension Group. They have moved all mainline applications to a hosted model and use Oracle MDM to insure the master data is managed and cleansed before it is propagated to other cloud and internal systems. I invite you join Martin Hossfeld, VP, IT Operations, and Danette Patterson, Enterprise Data Manager as they review business drivers for MDM and hosted applications, how they did it, the benefits achieved, and lessons learned. You can register for this free webcast here.  Hope to see you there.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 24, 2010 -- #846

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Timmy Kokke, Pete Brown, Paul Yanez, Emil Stoychev, Jeremy Likness, and Pavan Podila. Shoutouts: If you've got some time to spend, the User Experience Kit is packed with info: User Experience Kit, and just plain fun to navigate ... thanks Scott Barnes for reminding me about it! Jesse Liberty is looking for some help organizing and cataloging posts for a new project he's got going: Help Wanted Emil Stoychev posted Slides and demos from my talk on Silverlight 4 From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4 Drag and Drop File Manager Michael Washington has a post up about a Silverlight Drag and Drop File Manager in MVVM, but a secondary important point about the post is that he and Alan Beasley followed strict Designer/Developer rules on this... you recognized Alan's ListBox didn't you? Changing CSS with jQuery syntax in Silverlight using jLight Timmy Kokke is using jLight as introduced in a prior post to interact with the DOM from Silverlight. Essential Silverlight and WPF Skills: The UI Thread, Dispatchers, Background Workers and Async Network Programming Pete Brown has a great backrounder up for WPF and Silverlight devs on threading and networking, good comments too so far. Fluid layout and Fullscreen in Silverlight Paul Yanez has a quick post and demo up on forcing full-screen with a fluid layout, all code included -- and it doesn't take much Data Binding in Silverlight Emil Stoychev has a great long tutorial up on DataBinding in Silverlight ... he hits all the major points with text, samples, and code... definitely one to read! Yet Another MVVM Locator Pattern Another not-necessarily Silverlight post from Jeremy Likness -- but definitely a good one on MVVM and locator patterns. The SpiderWebControl for Silverlight Pavan Podila has a 'SpiderWebControl' for Silverlight 4 up... this is a great network graph control with any sort of feature I can think of... check out the demo, then grab the code... or the other way around, your choice :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Declarative programming vs. Imperative programming

  - by EpsilonVector

  I feel very comfortable with Imperative programming. I never have trouble expressing algorithmically what I want the computer to do once I figured out what is it that I want it to do. But when it comes to languages like SQL or Relational Algebra I often get stuck because my head is too used to Imperative programming. For example, suppose you have the relations band(bandName, bandCountry), venue(venueName, venueCountry), plays(bandName, venueName), and I want to write a query that says: all venueNames such that for every bandCountry there's a band from that country that plays in venue of that name. In my mind I immediately go "for each venueName iterate over all the bandCountries and for each bandCountry get the list of bands that come from it. If none of them play in venueName, go to next venueName. Else, at the end of the bandCountries iteration add venueName to the set of good venueNames". ...but you can't talk like that in SQL and I actually need to think about how to formulate this, with the intuitive Imperative solution constantly nagging in the back of my head. Did anybody else had this problem? How did you overcome this? Did you figured out a paradigm shift? Made a map from Imperative concepts to SQL concepts to translate Imperative solutions into Declarative ones? Read a good book? PS I'm not looking for a solution to the above query, I did solve it.

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