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• Play the Microsoft Game “Are You Certifiable?”

  - by Mysticgeek

  Want to know if you have what it takes to be certified by Microsoft? Today we check out an enjoyable way to practice and test your IT knowledge of Microsoft products.  There are two modes, one where you log in with your Live account so you can save your progress, and play additional levels.   If you log in with your Live account, it’s obvious that Microsoft wants to sell you some certification courses, so just be aware of that. Or Guest Play where you can only play one episode and scores are not saved.   Playing the Game We’ll take a look at the Guest Play just so you get a sense of what the game is about. Enter in a username and pick an avatar… Then read the instructions…we won’t go over them all here, there are a lot of options and points are scored by correct answers, amount of time it takes to answer them, you get vouchers to play a question before answers are shown…etc. Once you start playing, you get certification questions, you can take as much time to read the question as you want, then hit the Answer button when you’re ready. Now you have four answers to choose from…notice the time clicking down, so you want to try to answer as quickly as possible. After selecting the answer, you’re told if it is correct or not, then given an answer explaination, along with your score. You can flag the topic so it comes up again, which is a good way to get repetition of various topics, which really helps when taking the cert tests. If you get an answer wrong, you still get an answer explanation which is cool, so you can learn and better understand the topic. Conclusion This game is definitely not for everyone, only those who are curious or want a fun way to practice for Microsoft certifications. If you are interested in a cert from Microsoft, it’s a fun way to practice up. Play Are You Certifiable? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Play Alien Arena the Free FPS GameFriday Fun: Get Your Mario OnFriday Fun: Play Bubble QuodFriday Fun: 13 Days in HellFriday Fun: Open Doors 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Free iPad Wallpapers at iPad Decor Get Your Delicious Bookmarks In Firefox’s Awesome Bar Manage Photos Across Different Social Sites With Dropico Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3

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• Moms on Mobile: Are They Way Ahead of You?

  - by Mike Stiles

  You may have no idea how much and how fast moms are embracing mobile. Of all the demographics that can be targeted by marketers, moms have always been at or near the top of the list. And why not? They’re running households, they’re all over town, they’re making buying decisions, and they’re influencing family and friends. They, out of necessity, become masters of efficiency and time management. So when a technology tool, like mobile, comes along that assists with that efficiency and time management, we would obviously expect them to take advantage of it. So if it’s obvious, why are so many big, sophisticated brands left choking on the dust of moms who have zoomed past them in the adoption of mobile, and social on mobile? Let’s break down some hard truths as presented by a Mojiava report: -Moms spend 6.1 hours per day on average on their smartphones – more than magazines, TV or radio. -46% took action after seeing a mobile ad. -51% self-identify as “addicted” to their smartphone. -Households with an income of $25K-$50K have about the same mobile penetration among moms as those with incomes of $50K-$75K. So mobile is regarded as a necessity for middle-class moms. -Even moms without smartphones spend 2.5 hours on average per day on some connected mobile device. -Of moms with such devices, 9.8% have an iPad, 9.5% a Kindle and 5.7% an iPod Touch. -Of tablet-owning moms, 97% bought something using their tablet in the last month. -31% spend over 10 hours per week on their tablet, but less than 2 hours per week on their PCs. -62% of connected moms use shopping apps. -46% want to get info on their mobile while in a store. -Half of connected moms use social on their mobile. And they’re engaged. 81% are brand fans, 86% post updates, and 84% comment. If women and moms are one of your primary targets and you find yourself with no strong social channels where content is driving engagement and relationship-building, with sites not optimized for mobile, or with no tablet or smartphone apps, you have been solidly left behind by your customers and prospects. And their adoption of mobile and social on mobile is only exponentially speeding up, not slowing down. How much sense does it make when your customer is ready to act on your mobile ad, wants to user your iPad app to buy something from you, wants to be your fan on Facebook, wants to get messages and deals from you while they’re in your store…but you’re completely absent? I’ll help you cheat on the test by giving you the answer…no sense at all. Catch up to momma.

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• StringBuffer behavior in LWJGL

  - by Michael Oberlin

  Okay, I've been programming in Java for about ten years, but am entirely new to LWJGL. I have a specific problem whilst attempting to create a text console. I have built a class meant to abstract input polling to it, which (in theory) captures key presses from the Keyboard object and appends them to a StringBuilder/StringBuffer, then retrieves the completed string after receiving the ENTER key. The problem is, after I trigger the String return (currently with ESCAPE), and attempt to print it to System.out, I consistently get a blank line. I can get an appropriate string length, and I can even sample a single character out of it and get complete accuracy, but it never prints the actual string. I could swear that LWJGL slipped some kind of thread-safety trick in while I wasn't looking. Here's my code: static volatile StringBuffer command = new StringBuffer(); @Override public void chain(InputPoller poller) { this.chain = poller; } @Override public synchronized void poll() { //basic testing for modifier keys, to be used later on boolean shift = false, alt = false, control = false, superkey = false; if(Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_LSHIFT) || Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_RSHIFT)) shift = true; if(Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_LMENU) || Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_RMENU)) alt = true; if(Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_LCONTROL) || Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_RCONTROL)) control = true; if(Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_LMETA) || Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_RMETA)) superkey = true; while(Keyboard.next()) if(Keyboard.getEventKeyState()) { command.append(Keyboard.getEventCharacter()); } if (Framework.isConsoleEnabled() && Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_ESCAPE)) { System.out.println("Escape down"); System.out.println(command.length() + " characters polled"); //works System.out.println(command.toString().length()); //works System.out.println(command.toString().charAt(4)); //works System.out.println(command.toString().toCharArray()); //blank line! System.out.println(command.toString()); //blank line! Framework.disableConsole(); } //TODO: Add command construction and console management after that } } Maybe the answer's obvious and I'm just feeling tired, but I need to walk away from this for a while. If anyone sees the issue, please let me know. This machine is running the latest release of Java 7 on Ubuntu 12.04, Mate desktop environment. Many thanks.

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• Some Problems Can't Be Outsourced

  - by mikef

  More and more companies are becoming attracted to the idea of Infrastructure as a Service (or IaaS). It would seem that you can outsource the provisioning and management of your services, encompassing everything from Email, through to your servers, workstations and software, all the way down to your LAN and internet services. This type of outsourcing can be a very attractive option for companies who have tight budgets who are short of technical skills or don't have the means to provide long-term IT support. Essentially, they can outsource your services at low short-term costs that are knowable and controllable, are quickly and easily scalable, and generate a minimum of hassle for your internal staff. If you want to get a sophisticated IT infrastructure set up in a hurry without the usual high buy-in costs, or the task of finding and hiring the right specialists. It would seem the way to go, particularly when their salesmen are hypnotizing you with oleaginous phrases such as "we are closely aligned with our client organization's core business requirements, providing agile services". It sounds too good to be true, and so it is. Whereas the costs will have initially been calculated on the annual renewal fees and service fees for ongoing support, there are other charges too which aren't so obvious. It can end up costing far more than the conventional solution once you take into account the extra costs, the fees for customization and upgrades. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) only becomes apparent when it is too late to extract the company easily from the arrangement. After a few years, these annual fees can add up to more than the initial cost of implementing a traditional in-house system. Worse than that is that you can then lose your power to determine your priorities: When you become reliant on this company, with its own schedule of priorities, to implement every change, however simple, you have effectively lost control of your technical infrastructure. This will make senior management very nervous. There is definitely a requirement for this sort of service. If you urgently need an exceptionally high class of service or more expertise than you currently possess, then outsourcing is probably for you. You and your IT colleagues will always have something to do, be it user assistance, smoothing out integrations with an external provider, or working on something entirely new. Heck, if you outsource to IBM, the SysAdmins can go along for the ride and polish their expertise. What you need to figure out is how much your time is worth, because time is ultimately all that outsourcing will buy you and your organization. Now you just need to convince your nervous CEO. Cheers, Michael

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• password incorrect 3 times + suspected failed update

  - by Cheese

  I have been lurking your site for the past few hours, and have found myself in a bit of a pickle. Visiting my parents, I discover that neither computer, nor laptop work. Long story short, I've got the laptop working, but have completely fudged up the computer. I am a n00b, but I was at least willing to give it a go. The comp originally had ubuntu 11.10 installed, later updated to 12.04. We have cds for both. I do not understand what the initial problem was for my parents, but somehow when I turned on the computer, it worked for me. Soon after, I was nagged to install the latest updates. So, I spent the next half an hour wondering why the updates kept on asking for 11.04 cdroms, until I realised that you could turn off the cdrom necessity. After doing this via console, I installed some of the smaller updates, before being told to do a partial update. This failed a few times, and ended up freezing whilst reinstalling drivers. After a hard restart I continued to type whatever I could find on the forum into the console. At some point, the console started saying that I had 3 incorrect password inputs, and sudo commands stopped altogether. I found another thread discussing this; but people kept on suggesting changing passwords (which I did to no avail) or other things that made use of sudo (which I am locked out of, although I am technically the admin) I found myself somehow on the Ctrl+Alt+F1 console, and after being utterly confused (and Ctrl+AltF5 failing for me), another hard reset occurred. Somewhere along the way I created a USB start up for 14.04, (but this does not seem to work) Now I am left with an admin (and guest) account that log in but have blank screens (with only the desktop background showing) and I can't do anything in the console because I'm locked out. Interestingly, the console now says that I am running 14.04 although all updates said they had failed. Aside from the obvious lessons I have learnt (don't fiddle about in the console when you have no idea what you're doing "Dog wearing safety glasses "I have no idea what I am doing" GIF would be inserted here ) Is there any way I can redeem this almighty muck up? A million thanks for any help!

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• Unable to boot into 11.10 in normal (get a black screen) OR recovery (get just a flashing cursor, no cli)

  - by user1092284

  Okay, so I had a dual boot of Tango Studio (based on Ubuntu 10.04) and Windows XP. Yesterday I downloaded the .iso for Ubuntu 11.10 and attempted to install from a USB (my BIOS won't normally boot from USB but I had PLOP boot manager on a CD). I booted up Ubuntu from the USB and then from there formatted the partition with Tango on and installed Ubuntu 11.10. On booting up I came into Grub rescue mode. So I booted up from the USB again and used boot-repair to reinstall Grub. After this I would see the normal Grub menu, but on choosing Ubuntu I would come to a black screen. On choosing recovery mode it would begin starting normally with no obvious errors but instead of coming to a cli I would just get a blank screen with a flashing cursor on the top left, not accepting any input. I have since reformatted and reinstalled from a CD rather than USB and had the exact same problem. I used boot-repair again and the result is the same. Output of the most recent boot-repair is at http://paste.ubuntu.com/869805/ I have also tried editing the ubuntu grub entry and replacing quiet with text nomodeset as I saw in an answer to another question. This got me a bit further - I saw the purple ubuntu loading screen but still came to a blank screen after that. Anyway, in most of the other questions in which that is brought up the user is still able to boot into recovery, while I am not. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance, let me know if there's any more info I need to provide! EDIT FOR MORE INFO: I read something saying it's quiet splash that should be replaced with nomodeset. Earlier I had left splash in the line. So i tried it this way and it froze after displaying the following text: fsck from util-linux 2.19.1 mountall: Plymouth command failed mountall: Disconnected from Plymouth /dev/sda5:clean, 139359/1741488 files, 745830/6961125 blocks From a bit of googling it doesn't look like plymouth is essential, but I've checked and I do have the most current versions of mountall and plymouth installed so I don't know why there's a problem EDIT FOR MORE INFO AGAIN: I used dkpg --reconfigure plymouth cause I saw it mentioned in another forum and it still says plymouth command failed on boot

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• Hierachies....from the Top Down

  - by Joe G

  I've been struggling with how to write on the topic of the importance of hierarchy design.  It's not so much that hierarchies haven't always been important, it's more of that with Fusion, the timing of when the hierarchies are designed should take a higher priority.    I will attempt to explain..... When I was implementing applications, back in the day, we had the list of detailed account values to enter with the obvious parent accounts. Then, after the setup was complete and things were functioning, the reporting phase started.  Users explained the elements that they want on the reports, what totals should be included, and how things should be compared.  Frequently, there was at least one calculation that became a nightmare either because it was based on very specific things that didn't relate to anything else or because it was "hardcoded" so that when something changed, someone need to "fix" the report. With Fusion, the process changes slightly.  You still want to enter all of the detailed accounts, but before you start adding parent values, you should investigate the reporting requirements from the top-down.  It's better to build hierarchies based on the reporting requirements than it is to build reports based on random hierarchies. Build reports based on hierarchies that resemble the reports themselves, and maintain the hierarchies without rework of the reports. For example, if you look at an income statement, you may have line items for Material Costs, Employee Costs, Travel & Entertainment, and Total Operating Expenses.  In your hierarchy, you have detail values that roll up to Material Costs, Employee Costs, and Travel & Entertainment which roll up to Total Operating Expenses. Balances are stored automatically in the cube for each of these.  When you define the report, you pick each of these members - no calculations required.  If a new detail value is added, you simply add it to the hierarchy, and there is no need to modify the report. I realize that there are always exceptions that require special handling, but I am confident that you will end up with much fewer exceptions if you make reporting a priority and design your hierarchies from the top-down.

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• Changing Your Design for Testability

  Sometimes I come across a way of putting something that it is pithy good, not Hallmark trite, but an impactful and concise way of clarifying a previously obscure concept. A recent one of these happy occurrences was when I was reading the excellent Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. After going through the basics of why youd want to test code and how to do it, Roy confronts a frequent objection to having unit tests, that it ends up changing how you design your components: When we write unit tests for our code, we are adding another end user (the test) to the object model. That end user is just as important as the original one, but it has different goals when using the model.  The test has specific requirements from the object model that seem to defy the basic logic behind a couple of object-oriented principles, mainly encapsulation. [emphasis added by me] When I read this, something clicked for me. I used to find it persuasive that because unit tests caused you to change your design they were more disruptive than they were worth. The counter argument I heard is that the disruption was OK, because testable design was just obviously better. That argument was not convincing as it seemed like delusional arrogance to suggest that any one of type of design was just inherently better for the particular applications I was building. What was missing was that I was not thinking of unit tests as an additional and equal end user to my design. If I accepted that proposition, than it was indeed obvious that a testable design was better because now all users of my component would be satisfied. Have I accepted that proposition? Id phrase it slightly different. I find more and more that having unit tests helps me write better, less buggy code before it gets to production or QA. As I write more unit tests, it gets easier to see how to create testable components, so I dont feel like its taking me as much extra time up front. I pick and choose components that seem most likely to benefit from automated tests and it is working out nicely. If you already implement Test Driven Development, this whole post was probably a waste of your time <g> If you hate the idea of unit tests, well, probably not a great value prop for you either. However, if you are somewhere in between, at least take a minute and check out a sample chapter from Roys book at: http://www.manning.com/osherove/.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• while(true) and loop-breaking - anti-pattern?

  - by KeithS

  Consider the following code: public void doSomething(int input) { while(true) { TransformInSomeWay(input); if(ProcessingComplete(input)) break; DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } Assume that this process involves a finite but input-dependent number of steps; the loop is designed to terminate on its own as a result of the algorithm, and is not designed to run indefinitely (until cancelled by an outside event). Because the test to see if the loop should end is in the middle of a logical set of steps, the while loop itself currently doesn't check anything meaningful; the check is instead performed at the "proper" place within the conceptual algorithm. I was told that this is bad code, because it is more bug-prone due to the ending condition not being checked by the loop structure. It's more difficult to figure out how you'd exit the loop, and could invite bugs as the breaking condition might be bypassed or omitted accidentally given future changes. Now, the code could be structured as follows: public void doSomething(int input) { TransformInSomeWay(input); while(!ProcessingComplete(input)) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); TransformInSomeWay(input); } } However, this duplicates a call to a method in code, violating DRY; if TransformInSomeWay were later replaced with some other method, both calls would have to be found and changed (and the fact that there are two may be less obvious in a more complex piece of code). You could also write it like: public void doSomething(int input) { var complete = false; while(!complete) { TransformInSomeWay(input); complete = ProcessingComplete(input); if(!complete) { DoSomethingElseTo(input); } } } ... but you now have a variable whose only purpose is to shift the condition-checking to the loop structure, and also has to be checked multiple times to provide the same behavior as the original logic. For my part, I say that given the algorithm this code implements in the real world, the original code is the most readable. If you were going through it yourself, this is the way you'd think about it, and so it would be intuitive to people familiar with the algorithm. So, which is "better"? is it better to give the responsibility of condition checking to the while loop by structuring the logic around the loop? Or is it better to structure the logic in a "natural" way as indicated by requirements or a conceptual description of the algorithm, even though that may mean bypassing the loop's built-in capabilities?

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• Tiling Problem Solutions for Various Size "Dominoes"

  - by user67081

  I've got an interesting tiling problem, I have a large square image (size 128k so 131072 squares) with dimensons 256x512... I want to fill this image with certain grain types (a 1x1 tile, a 1x2 strip, a 2x1 strip, and 2x2 square) and have no overlap, no holes, and no extension past the image boundary. Given some probability for each of these grain types, a list of the number required to be placed is generated for each. Obviously an iterative/brute force method doesn't work well here if we just randomly place the pieces, instead a certain algorithm is required. 1) all 2x2 square grains are randomly placed until exhaustion. 2) 1x2 and 2x1 grains are randomly placed alternatively until exhaustion 3) the remaining 1x1 tiles are placed to fill in all holes. It turns out this algorithm works pretty well for some cases and has no problem filling the entire image, however as you might guess, increasing the probability (and thus number) of 1x2 and 2x1 grains eventually causes the placement to stall (since there are too many holes created by the strips and not all them can be placed). My approach to this solution has been as follows: 1) Create a mini-image of size 8x8 or 16x16. 2) Fill this image randomly and following the algorithm specified above so that the desired probability of the entire image is realized in the mini-image. 3) Create N of these mini-images and then randomly successively place them in the large image. Unfortunately there are some downfalls to this simplification. 1) given the small size of the mini-images, nailing an exact probability for the entire image is not possible. Example if I want p(2x1)=P(1x2)=0.4, the mini image may only give 0.41 as the closes probability. 2) The mini-images create a pseudo boundary where no overlaps occur which isn't really descriptive of the model this is being used for. 3) There is only a fixed number of mini-images so i'm not sure how random this really is. I'm really just looking to brainstorm about possible solutions to this. My main concern is really to nail down closer probabilities, now one might suggest I just increase the mini-image size. Well I have, and it turns out that in certain cases(p(1x2)=p(2x1)=0.5) the mini-image 16x16 isn't even iteratively solvable.. So it's pretty obvious how difficult it is to randomly solve this for anything greater than 8x8 sizes.. So I'd love to hear some ideas. Thanks

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• Send raw data to USB parallel port after upgrading to 11.10 oneiric

  - by zaphod

  I have a laser cutter connected via a generic USB to parallel adapter. The laser cutter speaks HPGL, as it happens, but since this is a laser cutter and not a plotter, I usually want to generate the HPGL myself, since I care about the ordering, speed, and direction of cuts and so on. In previous versions of Ubuntu, I was able to print to the cutter by copying an HPGL file directly to the corresponding USB "lp" device. For example: cp foo.plt /dev/usblp1 Well, I just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric, and I can't find any "lp" devices in /dev anymore. D'oh! What's the preferred way to send raw data to a parallel port in Ubuntu? I've tried System Settings Printing + Add, hoping that I might be able to associate my device with some kind of "raw printer" driver and print to it with a command like lp -d LaserCutter foo.plt But my USB to parallel adapter doesn't seem to show up in the list. What I do see are my HP Color LaserJet, two USB-to-serial adapters, "Enter URI", and "Network Printer". Meanwhile, over in /dev, I do see /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 devices for the 2 USB-to-serial adapters. I don't see anything obvious corresponding to the HP printer (which was /dev/usblp0 prior to the upgrade), except for generic USB stuff. For example, sudo find /dev | grep lp produces no output. I do seem to be able to print to the HP printer just fine, though. The printer setup GUI gives it a device URI starting with "hp:" which isn't much help for the parallel adapter. The CUPS administrator's guide makes it sound like I might need to feed it a device URI of the form parallel:/dev/SOMETHING, but of course if I had a /dev/SOMETHING I'd probably just go on writing to it directly. Here's what dmesg says after I disconnect and reconnect the device from the USB port: [ 924.722906] usb 1-1.1.4: USB disconnect, device number 7 [ 959.993002] usb 1-1.1.4: new full speed USB device number 8 using ehci_hcd And here's how it shows up in lsusb -v: Bus 001 Device 008: ID 1a86:7584 QinHeng Electronics CH340S Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 1.10 bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level) bDeviceSubClass 0 bDeviceProtocol 0 bMaxPacketSize0 8 idVendor 0x1a86 QinHeng Electronics idProduct 0x7584 CH340S bcdDevice 2.52 iManufacturer 0 iProduct 2 USB2.0-Print iSerial 0 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 32 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0x80 (Bus Powered) MaxPower 96mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 2 bInterfaceClass 7 Printer bInterfaceSubClass 1 Printer bInterfaceProtocol 2 Bidirectional iInterface 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x82 EP 2 IN bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0020 1x 32 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x02 EP 2 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0020 1x 32 bytes bInterval 0 Device Status: 0x0000 (Bus Powered)

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• The term "interface" in C++

  - by Flexo

  Java makes a clear distinction between class and interface. (I believe C# does also, but I have no experience with it). When writing C++ however there is no language enforced distinction between class and interface. Consequently I've always viewed interface as a workaround for the lack of multiple inheritance in Java. Making such a distinction feels arbitrary and meaningless in C++. I've always tended to go with the "write things in the most obvious way" approach, so if in C++ I've got what might be called an interface in Java, e.g.: class Foo { public: virtual void doStuff() = 0; ~Foo() = 0; }; and I then decided that most implementers of Foo wanted to share some common functionality I would probably write: class Foo { public: virtual void doStuff() = 0; ~Foo() {} protected: // If it needs this to do its thing: int internalHelperThing(int); // Or if it doesn't need the this pointer: static int someOtherHelper(int); }; Which then makes this not an interface in the Java sense anymore. Instead C++ has two important concepts, related to the same underlying inheritance problem: virtual inhertiance Classes with no member variables can occupy no extra space when used as a base "Base class subobjects may have zero size" Reference Of those I try to avoid #1 wherever possible - it's rare to encounter a scenario where that genuinely is the "cleanest" design. #2 is however a subtle, but important difference between my understanding of the term "interface" and the C++ language features. As a result of this I currently (almost) never refer to things as "interfaces" in C++ and talk in terms of base classes and their sizes. I would say that in the context of C++ "interface" is a misnomer. It has come to my attention though that not many people make such a distinction. Do I stand to lose anything by allowing (e.g. protected) non-virtual functions to exist within an "interface" in C++? (My feeling is the exactly the opposite - a more natural location for shared code) Is the term "interface" meaningful in C++ - does it imply only pure virtual or would it be fair to call C++ classes with no member variables an interface still?

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• Testing and Validation – You Really Do Have The Time

  - by BuckWoody

  One of the great advantages in my role as a Technical Specialist here at Microsoft is that I get to work with so many great clients. I get to see their environments and how they use them, and the way they work with SQL Server. I’ve been a data professional myself for many years. Over that time I’ve worked with many database platforms, lots of client applications, and written a lot of code in many industries. For a while I was also a consultant, so I got to see how other shops did things as well. But because I now focus on a “set” base of clients (over 500 professionals in over 150 companies) I get to see them over a longer period of time. Many of them help me understand how they use the product in their projects, and I even attend some DBA regular meetings. I see the way the product succeeds, and I see when it fails. Something that has really impacted my way of thinking is the level of importance any given shop is able to place on testing and validation. I’ve always been a big proponent of setting up a test system and following a very disciplined regimen to make sure it will work in production for any new projects, and then taking the lessons learned into production as standards. I know, I know – there’s never enough time to do things right like this. Yet the shops I see that do it have the same level of work that they output as the shops that don’t. They just make the time to do the testing and validation and create a standard that they will follow in production. And what I’ve found (surprise surprise) is that they have fewer production problems. OK, that might seem obvious – but I’ve actually tracked it and those places that do the testing and best practices really do save stress, time and trouble from that effort. We all think that’s a good idea, but we just “don’t have time”. OK – but from what I’m seeing, you can gain time if you spend a little up front. You may find that you’re actually already spending the same amount of time that you would spend in doing the testing, you’re just doing it later, at night, under the gun. Food for thought.  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• How should I refactor switch statements like this (Switching on type) to be more OO?

  - by Taytay

  I'm seeing some code like this in our code base, and want to refactor it: (Typescript psuedocode follows): class EntityManager{ private findEntityForServerObject(entityType:string, serverObject:any):IEntity { var existingEntity:IEntity = null; switch(entityType) { case Types.UserSetting: existingEntity = this.getUserSettingByUserIdAndSettingName(serverObject.user_id, serverObject.setting_name); break; case Types.Bar: existingEntity = this.getBarByUserIdAndId(serverObject.user_id, serverObject.id); break; //Lots more case statements here... } return existingEntity; } } The downsides of switching on type are self-explanatory. Normally, when switching behavior based on type, I try to push the behavior into subclasses so that I can reduce this to a single method call, and let polymorphism take care of the rest. However, the following two things are giving me pause: 1) I don't want to couple the serverObject with the class that is storing all of these objects. It doesn't know where to look for entities of a certain type. And unfortunately, the identity of a type of ServerObject varies with the type of ServerObject. (So sometimes it's just an ID, other times it's a combination of an id and a uniquely identifying string, etc). And this behavior doesn't belong down there on those subclasses. It is the responsibility of the EntityManager and its delegates. 2) In this case, I can't modify the ServerObject classes since they're plain old data objects. It should be mentioned that I've got other instances of the above method that take a parameter like "IEntity" and proceed to do almost the same thing (but slightly modify the name of the methods they're calling to get the identity of the entity). So, we might have: case Types.Bar: existingEntity = this.getBarByUserIdAndId(entity.getUserId(), entity.getId()); break; So in that case, I can change the entity interface and subclasses, but this isn't behavior that belongs in that class. So, I think that points me to some sort of map. So eventually I will call: private findEntityForServerObject(entityType:string, serverObject:any):IEntity { return aMapOfSomeSort[entityType].findByServerObject(serverObject); } private findEntityForEntity(someEntity:IEntity):IEntity { return aMapOfSomeSort[someEntity.entityType].findByEntity(someEntity); } Which means I need to register some sort of strategy classes/functions at runtime with this map. And again, I darn well better remember to register one for each my my types, or I'll get a runtime exception. Is there a better way to refactor this? I feel like I'm missing something really obvious here.

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• Sql Table Refactoring Challenge

  Ive been working a bit on cleaning up a large table to make it more efficient.  I pretty much know what I need to do at this point, but I figured Id offer up a challenge for my readers, to see if they can catch everything I have as well as to see if Ive missed anything.  So to that end, I give you my table: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[lq_ActivityLog]( [ID] [bigint] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [PlacementID] [int] NOT NULL, [CreativeID] [int] NOT NULL, [PublisherID] [int] NOT NULL, [CountryCode] [nvarchar](10) NOT NULL, [RequestedZoneID] [int] NOT NULL, [AboveFold] [int] NOT NULL, [Period] [datetime] NOT NULL, [Clicks] [int] NOT NULL, [Impressions] [int] NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_lq_ActivityLog2] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [Period] ASC, [PlacementID] ASC, [CreativeID] ASC, [PublisherID] ASC, [RequestedZoneID] ASC, [AboveFold] ASC, [CountryCode] ASC)WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ON [PRIMARY]) ON [PRIMARY] And now some assumptions and additional information: The table has 200,000,000 rows currently PlacementID ranges from 1 to 5000 and should support at least 50,000 CreativeID ranges from 1 to 5000 and should support at least 50,000 PublisherID ranges from 1 to 500 and should support at least 50,000 CountryCode is a 2-character ISO standard (e.g. US) and there is a country table with an integer ID already.  There are < 300 rows. RequestedZoneID ranges from 1 to 100 and should support at least 50,000 AboveFold has values of 1, 0, or 1 only. Period is a date (no time). Clicks range from 0 to 5000. Impressions range from 0 to 5000000. The table is currently write-mostly.  Its primary purpose is to log advertising activity as quickly as possible.  Nothing in the rest of the system reads from it except for batch jobs that pull the data into summary tables. Heres the current information on the database tables size: Design Goals This table has been in use for about 5 years and has performed very well during that time.  The only complaints we have are that it is quite large and also there are occasionally timeouts for queries that reference it, particularly when batch jobs are pulling data from it.  Any changes should be made with an eye toward keeping write performance optimal  while trying to reduce space and improve read performance / eliminate timeouts during read operations. Refactor There are, I suggest to you, some glaringly obvious optimizations that can be made to this table.  And Im sure there are some ninja tweaks known to SQL gurus that would be a big help as well.  Ill post my own suggested changes in a follow-up post for now feel free to comment with your suggestions. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Where can I find comprehensive documentation on the various aspects of Linux?

  - by Fsando

  Whenever a problem pops up in my use of Linux (full time user for 6 years) I start by googling. The simplest (or most common) issues will usually be cleared right away. If it's not in one of those two categories the advise I find tend to be wrong, misguided, obsolete, and if you ask a question here on "ask" you risk being "duplicated" to some superficially similar question. Some issues have haunted me for years until I suddenly hit on the actual developer's documentation (or equivalent) which in a few lines explains how to solve my issue, the correct and consistent way. Whenever that happens I'm always kicking myself: why didn't I just go here to begin with? And the obvious answer is: "I had no idea this was what I was looking for". And for the issues that this hasn't yet happened I'm banging my head: "This ought to be either straight forward or someone tell me it's not doable" So my question is: Are there projects out there trying to collect or list this documentation in a searchable/browseable way. I know there are many very good "if you want this do that" tutorials on Ubuntu but I'm looking for actual documentation. That either are or could be collected in one place (at least conceptually) so that search for information could start in one place. I'm fully aware this is a broad question but if you approach it as: Does gnome have a comprehensive documentation project - where do I find it? Does Ubuntu have a comprehensive documentation project - where do i find it? For example: how exactly does the mime-type association work in Ubuntu and in xubuntu? How exactly are menus created (in Ubuntu: quicklists, xubuntu/gnome: the main menu) How exactly does the rendering process work for compiz/x? (I'm having this issue where windows randomly stops updating until somehow forced to resume (I guess). So for instance where do I look for logs that may indicate the problem. How may I change randr or other settings that may influence this issue. So my point is to organize exact documentation or preferably to find projects that do this already. Thanks! If answers to this question get me started I'm hoping to collect such a list.

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• Core i7-620M vs Core i5-540M

  - by Shalan

  Hi, I'm recommending a laptop to a colleague, and the specific laptop he has chosen has the above CPU chips as options. Both chips have 2-cores/4-threads. The i7-620M is a 2.66 GHz (4MB Cache) while the i5-540M is a 2.53 GHz (3MB Cache)....both Arrandale architecture. He is a .NET programmer working with SQL Server and Oracle, and occasionally uses Adobe Fireworks for web-related design elements. He also loves playing around in Adobe Premiere Pro, and does a lot of media/video work. Would you notice any significant performance difference between the 2? The laptop manufacturer claims that the battery life on both is the same irrespective of the chip used (although I find that hard to believe), but there is a major cost difference between them, with the Core i7-620M being the more expensive. According to http://ark.intel.com, the one thing that seems different (besides the obvious speeds/frequencies/etc) is a feature called "Embedded" - what is this exactly? You can see the quick comparison here - http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=43544,43560 I would sincerely appreciate any advice me on this. THANKS!

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• TortoiseSVN hangs in Windows Server 2012 Azure VM

  - by ZaijiaN

  Following @shanselman's article on remoting into an Azure VM for development, I spun up my own VS 2013 VM, and that image runs on WS 2012. Once I was able to remote in, I started installing all my dev tools, including Tortoise SVN 1.8.3 64bit. Things went south once I started attempting to check out code from my personal svn server. It would hang and freeze often, although sometimes it would work - I was able to partially check out projects, but I would get frequent connection time out errors. My personal svn server (VisualSVN 2.7.2) runs at home on a windows 7 machine, and I have a dyndns url pointing to it. I have also configured my router to passthrough all 443 traffic to the appropriate port on the server. I self-signed a cert and made sure it was imported into the VM cert store under trusted root authorities. I have no problems connecting to my svn server from 4-5 other computers & locations. From the Azure VM, in both IE and Chrome, I can access the repository web browser with no issues. There are no outbound firewall restrictions. I have installed other SVN add-ons for Visual Studio (AnkhSVN, VisualSVN) and attempted to connect with my svn server, with largely the same results - random and persistent connection issues (hangs/timeouts). I spun up a completely fresh WS 2008 Azure VM, and installed TortoiseSVN, and had the same results. So I'm at a loss as to what the problem is and how to fix it. Web searches on tortoisesvn and windows server issues doesn't yield any current or relevant information. At this point, i'm guessing that maybe some setting or configuration that MS Azure VM images is the culprit - although I should probably attempt to spin up my own local WS VM to rule out that it's a window server issue. Any thoughts? I hope I'm just missing something really obvious!

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• Windows Server 2003 Trial Activation Issue

  - by Adam Batkin

  I have a Windows Server 2003 (R2 Enterprise with SP2) VM, originally installed with a trial license. We forgot about the server, and now more than 120 days has passed, and I can't do anything with the server. I seem to be at a dead end with the existing installation. When I log in, I get: The evaluation period for this copy of Windows has ended. Windows cannot start. To continue using Windows, please purchase and install a retail copy of the product. Fine. I'll do that with my MSDN media. I should add that safe mode works, but there isn't anything obvious that I found to help me there Next up, I tried repairing my installation: Boot from Server 2003 R2 Enterprise with SP2 media, tell it I want to install (as opposed to recovery console), then let it repair the existing install. Once that completes and reboots I log in: This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can continue. You cannot log on until you activate Windows. Do you want to activate Windows now? To shut down the computer, click Cancel. Great! I click "Yes" and am left with a big blue screen. Not a blue screen of death, just a blue screen (i.e. the default windows desktop background color). No Ctrl+Alt+Del. All I can do is power cycle. I have some complex third-party software on there that I can't reinstall, which is why I haven't already built a fresh Windows VM and copied everything over. I have a backup of the VM from after trial period expired but before I installed anything. Ideas?

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• Can't Access TFS 2010 Beta 2 from Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 when domain joined

  - by Brian Sullivan

  I'm experimenting with an installation of TFS 2010 Beta 2 on a virtual machine under VirtualBox running Windows Server 2008. When I've got the server in a workgroup, I can connect to it from Visual Studio just fine, as long as I provide credentials for a local user on the server machine when prompted by the "Connect to Team Foundation Server" dialog. The desktop I'm running Visual Studio on is joined to a domain. However, when I join the server to the domain, I can no longer connect to it from Visual Studio. I get a pretty generic error message: "TF31002 - Unable to connect to team foundation server". It gives me several different possible problems, including an incorrect address or an incorrect username and password. I've already added the domain Windows identity with which I'm logged on the the desktop to the TFS Admins group on the server, so I don't think it's a username/password problem. I've also tried putting the literal IP address of the server in the dialog address box instead of the machine name, but still no dice. I made sure that network discovery was enabled on the server, too, and can navigate to "\\webserver2008" in Windows Explorer without any problems. Shouldn't be a firewall problem, since the TFS install creates the appropriate exceptions in Windows Firewall. It's all a bit confusing, since it seems to work when the server is in a workgroup. Note: I'm a dev, not an admin, so there are many subtleties of server administration with which I'm not familiar. Please make no assumptions about what I may or may not have tried; what may be obvious to you may have never occurred to me. Thanks in advance!

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• Task Scheduler not running .bat or .vbs successfully

  - by Django Reinhardt

  Hi there, got this weird problem, which will hopefully have an obvious solution for some enlightened soul: We have several daily tasks we run via a .vbs script on our server (through the Task Scheduler), and for months it has been fine, but recently we've hit a problem. The .vbs script stopped successfully executing... but oddly it worked fine when ran manually! The error given in these circumstances was always "Timeout". We thought we try a little creative thinking, and run the .vbs another way: Via a .bat file. Again we hit weird issues, but with a little more debugging information, this time around. The .bat file is nothing more than... CScript "C:\location\script.vbs" > Log.txt But the Task Scheduler fails with the following error: 0x1: An incorrect function was called or an unknown function was called. The log.txt file says: CScript Error: Initialization of the Windows Script Host failed. (Not enough storage is available to process this command. ) But get this: The .bat file executes perfectly (vbs script and all) if it's executed with a double click! There's only a problem when it's run by Task Scheduler. What the hell? We're running Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) and yes, the Task Sheduler's results are the same whether the user is logged in or not. Also, the user that can run the scripts successfully manually, is also the same user that runs the scripts in Task Scheduler. Thanks for any help for this weird problem!

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• Why does snmp fail to use its own MIBs?

  - by chrisdew

  I've done a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04LTS, and installed the snmpd and snmp packages. If I type: snmpwalk -m ALL -v2c -c public localhost 1.3 I get swathes of errors, of the form: Cannot adopt OID in SQUID-MIB: cacheClients ::= { cacheProtoAggregateStats 15 } Cannot adopt OID in NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB: nsExtendLineIndex ::= { nsExtendOutput2Entry 1 } Cannot adopt OID in NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB: nsExtendOutLine ::= { nsExtendOutput2Entry 2 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laIndex ::= { laEntry 1 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laNames ::= { laEntry 2 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laLoad ::= { laEntry 3 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laConfig ::= { laEntry 4 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laLoadInt ::= { laEntry 5 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laLoadFloat ::= { laEntry 6 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laErrorFlag ::= { laEntry 100 } Cannot adopt OID in UCD-SNMP-MIB: laErrMessage ::= { laEntry 101 } Cannot adopt OID in NET-SNMP-AGENT-MIB: nsNotifyRestart ::= { netSnmpNotifications 3 } Cannot adopt OID in NET-SNMP-AGENT-MIB: nsNotifyShutdown ::= { netSnmpNotifications 2 } Cannot adopt OID in NET-SNMP-AGENT-MIB: nsNotifyStart ::= { netSnmpNotifications 1 } There a literally hundreds of these. If snmp doesn't even like the distro-included MIBs, what chance to I have of getting my own used? (I get the same form of error with my own MIB, on a different machine, which is why I set up a clean install.) Do other distros have this issue? Is there something obvious that I am overlooking here? Thanks, Chris.

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• Windows 8 DLNA streaming of MKV files

  - by dbb

  I have a Samsung TV that is capable of playing MKV files. The Windows DLNA Play To menu that appears when you right-click a media file does not support MKV files, but a simple trick has been to change the file extension from .mkv to .avi so the Play To context menu item would appear. At that point I could successfully stream from my computer to my TV. However, this does not appear to work in Windows 8. Doing the same thing in Windows 8 causes the Play To window to open but the file does not get played. Dragging and dropping the file in the Play To window causes it to be silently ignored. Using actual AVI, MP4, etc. files works, of course. It appears Windows 8 is now doing some kind of validation on the file that Windows 7 wasn't previously. The Play To window does not show any kind of obvious error message or warning and there is nothing in the Windows event log. So, is there a way in Windows 8 to stream MKV files to a DLNA device without converting it to another container format? I would rather not use extra third-party software, but I would consider it if it's purposefully designed for this simple case rather than a more robust "media library/server" solution.

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• I cant get rid of apache2

  - by DaNieL

  It's obvious that I am a newbie with server amministration, my goal is to reach the knowledge needed to working with web services. I played with my debian server, and i messed up apache2; Now i want to completely* remove it from the server and then reinstall it as new. *for completely i really mean completely, logs, configurations, settings, everythings! I followed the steps suggested by freedom_is_chaos in this answer, and i guess apache2 is nomore installed, becose if i do apt-get remove apache2 i get this: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package apache2 is not installed, so not removed 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded. Then, i rebooted the server, and: # netstat -plant Active Internet connections (servers and established) [...] tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 3467/apache2 [...] WTF? is apache2 still here? So seem: # /etc/init.d/apache2 stop Stopping web server: apache2. But: # update-rc.d remove apache2 update-rc.d: /etc/init.d/remove: file does not exist So, what is happening to my server? How can i completely and truly remove apache2 from my server?

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• Avoiding DNS timeouts when a dns server fails

  - by user65124

  Hi there. We have a small datacenter with about a hundred hosts pointing to 3 internal dns servers (bind 9). Our problem comes when one of the internal dns servers becomes unavailable. At that point all the clients that point to that server start performing very slowly. The problem seems to be that the stock linux resolver doesn't really have the concept of "failing over" to a different dns server. You can adjust the timeout and number of retries it uses, (and set rotate so it will work through the list), but no matter what settings one uses our services perform much more slowly if a primary dns server becomes unavailable. At the moment this is one of the largest sources of service disruptions for us. My ideal answer would be something like "RTFM: tweak /etc/resolv.conf like this...", but if that's an option I haven't seen it. I was wondering how other folks handled this issue? I can see 3 possible types of solutions: Use linux-ha/Pacemaker and failover ips (so the dns IP VIPs are "always" available). Alas, we don't have a good fencing infrastructure, and without fencing pacemaker doesn't work very well (in my experience Pacemaker lowers availability without fencing). Run a local dns server on each node, and have resolv.conf point to localhost. This would work, but it would give us a lot more services to monitor and manage. Run a local cache on each node. Folks seem to consider nscd "broken", but dnrd seems to have the right feature set: it marks dns servers as up or down, and won't use 'down' dns servers. Any-casting seems to work only at the ip routing level, and depends on route updates for server failure. Multi-casting seemed like it would be a perfect answer, but bind does not support broadcasting or multi-casting, and the docs I could find seem to suggest that multicast dns is more aimed at service discovery and auto-configuration rather than regular dns resolving. Am I missing an obvious solution?

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