How-To Tutorials

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Tudor-style house In this recipe, we'll be building a Tudor-style house. We'll be employing some manual building methods, and we'll also introduce some WorldEdit CUI commands and VoxelSniper actions into our workflow. Getting ready Once you have installed the recommended mods, you will need to have Equip an Arrow tools equipped on your action bar. This is used by VoxelSniper to perform its functions. You will also need to equip a Wooden Axe as this item becomes the WorldEdit tool and will be used for making selections. Don't try and use them to break blocks especially if you have made a selection that you don't want to lose. Not only will they not break the block, they will also wreck your selection or worse. How to do it... Let's get started with building our Tudor-style house by performing the following steps: Find a nice area or clear one with roughly 40 x 40 squares of flat land. Mark out a selection of 37 x 13 blocks by left-clicking with the Wooden Axe to set the first point and then right-clicking for the second point. Hit your T key and type the //set 5:1 command. This will make all of the blocks in the selected area turn into Spruce Wood Planks. If you make a mistake, you can do //undo. The //undo command does not alter the selection itself, only the changes made to blocks. Now create a selection 20 x 13 that will complete the L shape of the mansion's bottom floor. Remember to left-click and right-click with the Wooden Axe tool. Now type //set 5:1. In the corner that will be at the end of the outside wall of the longest wing, place a stack of three Spruce Wood blocks on top of each other. Right beside this, place two stacked Wool blocks and one Spruce Wood block on top of them, as shown in the inset of the following screenshot: With the selection in place, we will now stack these six blocks horizontally along the 37 block wall. The stack command works in the direction you face. So face directly down the length of the floor and type //stack 17. If you make a mistake, do //undo. Go to the opposite end of the wall you just made and place a stack of three Spruce Wood blocks in the missing spot at the end. Then just like before, put two blocks of White Wool on the side of the corner Spruce Wood pole with one Spruce Wood block on top. Select these six blocks and facing along the short end wall, type //stack 5. Go to the end of this wall and complete it with the three Spruce Logs and two blocks of Wool with one Spruce block on top where the next wall will go. Select these six blocks. Remember! Wooden Axe, left-click, right-click. Facing down the inside wall, type //stack 11. Place another three Spruce Wood blocks upright in the corner and two Wool blocks with one Spruce block on top for the adjacent inner wall. Make a selection, face in the correct direction, and then type //stack 9. Repeat this same process of placing the six blocks, selecting them, facing in correct direction for the next wall, and typing //stack 5. Finally, type //stack 15 and your base should now be complete. On the corner section, we're going to make some bay windows. So let's create the reinforcing structure for those: Inset by two blocks from the corner place five of these reinforcement structures. They consist of one Spruce Wood upright and two upside down Nether Brick steps, each aligned to the Spruce Wood uprights behind them. Now we'll place the wall sections of the bay windows. You should be able to create these by referring to the right-hand section of the following screenshot: Now comes the use of VoxelSniper GUI. So let's add some windows using it. Hit your V key to bring up the VoxelSniper GUI. We're going to "snipe" some windows into place. The first section, Place, in the top left-hand side represents the block you wish to place. For this we will select Glass. The section directly below Place is the Replace panel. As the name suggests, this is the block you wish to replace. We wish to replace White Wool, so we'll select that. Scroll through and locate the Wool block. In the right-hand side, under the Ink panel scroll box, select the White Wool block. Make sure the No-Physics checkbox is not selected. In the right-hand panel, we will select the tool we wish to use. If it's not already selected, click on the Sized tab and choose Snipe. If you get lost, just follow the preceding screenshot. Choose your Arrow tool and right-click on the White Wool blocks you wish to change to Glass. VoxelSniper works from a distance hence the "Sniper" part of the name, so be careful when experimenting with this tool. If you make a mistake in VoxelSniper, use /u to undo. You can also do /u 5, or /u 7, or /u 22, and so on and so on if you wish to undo multiple actions. The upcoming screenshots should illustrate the sort of pattern we will implement along each of the walls. The VoxelSniper GUI tool retains the last settings used so you can just fill in all the Glass sections of the wall with Wool initially, and then replace them using VoxelSniper once you are done. For now, just do it for the two longest outer walls. The following screenshot shows the 37 and 33 block length walls: On the short wing end wall, we'll fill the whole area with White Wool. So let's type //set 35. On the short side, make a 21 x 4 selection like the one shown in the following screenshot (top-left section), and stand directly on the block as indicated by the player in the top-left section of the screenshot. Do //copy and then move to the pole on the opposite side. Once you are on the corner column like in the bottom-left section of the preceding screenshot, do //paste. To be sure that you are standing exactly on the right block, turn off flying (double-click Space bar), knock the block out below your feet, and make sure you fall down to the block below. Then jump up and replace the block. Do the same for the other wing. Select the wall section with the windows, repeat the process like you did for the previous wall, and then fill in the end wall with Wool blocks for now. Add a wooden floor that is level with the three Wool blocks below the Spruce Window frames. You can use the //set 5:1 command to fill in the large rectangular areas.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) The message queue A message queue, or technically a FIFO (First In First Out) queue is a fundamental and well-studied data structure. There are different queue implementations such as priority queues or double-ended queues that have different features, but the general idea is that the data is added in a queue and fetched when the data or the caller is ready. Imagine we are using a basic in-memory queue. In case of an issue, such as power outage or a hardware failure, the entire queue could be lost. Hence, another program that expects to receive a message will not receive any messages. However, adopting a message queue guarantees that messages will be delivered to the destination no matter what happens. Message queuing enables asynchronous communication between loosely-coupled components and also provides solid queuing consistency. In case of insufficient resources, which prevent you from immediately processing the data that is sent, you can queue them up in the message queue server that would store the data until the destination is ready to accept the messages. Message queuing has an important role in large-scaled distributed systems and enables asynchronous communication. Let's have a quick overview on the difference between synchronous and asynchronous systems. In ordinary synchronous systems, tasks are processed one at a time. A task is not processed until the task in-process is finished. This is the simplest way to get the job done. Synchronous system We could also implement this system with threads. In this case threads process each task in parallel. Threaded synchronous system In the threading model, threads are managed by the operating system itself on a single processor or multiple processors/cores. Asynchronous Input/Output (AIO) allows a program to continue its execution while processing input/output requests. AIO is mandatory in real-time applications. By using AIO, we could map several tasks to a single thread. Asynchronous system The traditional way of programming is to start a process and wait for it to complete. The downside of this approach is that it blocks the execution of the program while there is a task in progress. However, AIO has a different approach. In AIO, a task that does not depend on the process can still continue. You may wonder why you would use message queue instead of handling all processes with a single-threaded queue approach or multi-threaded queue approach. Let's consider a scenario where you have a web application similar to Google Images in which you let users type some URLs. Once they submit the form, your application fetches all the images from the given URLs. However: If you use a single-threaded queue, your application would not be able to process all the given URLs if there are too many users If you use a multi-threaded queue approach, your application would be vulnerable to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) You would lose all the given URLs in case of a hardware failure In this scenario, you know that you need to add the given URLs into a queue and process them. So, you would need a message queuing system. Introduction to ZeroMQ Until now we have covered what a message queue is, which brings us to the purpose of this article, that is, ZeroMQ. The community identifies ZeroMQ as "sockets on steroids". The formal definition of ZeroMQ is it is a messaging library that helps developers to design distributed and concurrent applications. The first thing we need to know about ZeroMQ is that it is not a traditional message queuing system, such as ActiveMQ, WebSphereMQ, or RabbitMQ. ZeroMQ is different. It gives us the tools to build our own message queuing system. It is a library. It runs on different architectures from ARM to Itanium, and has support for more than 20 programming languages. Simplicity ZeroMQ is simple. We can do some asynchronous I/O operations and ZeroMQ could queue the message in an I/O thread. ZeroMQ I/O threads are asynchronous when handling network traffic, so it can do the rest of the job for us. If you have worked on sockets before, you will know that it is quite painful to work on. However, ZeroMQ makes it easy to work on sockets. Performance ZeroMQ is fast. The website Second Life managed to get 13.4 microseconds end-to-end latencies and up to 4,100,000 messages per second. ZeroMQ can use multicast transport protocol, which is an efficient method to transmit data to multiple destinations. The brokerless design Unlike other traditional message queuing systems, ZeroMQ is brokerless. In traditional message queuing systems, there is a central message server (broker) in the middle of the network and every node is connected to this central node, and each node communicates with other nodes via the central broker. They do not directly communicate with each other. However, ZeroMQ is brokerless. In a brokerless design, applications can directly communicate with each other without any broker in the middle. ZeroMQ does not store messages on disk. Please do not even think about it. However, it is possible to use a local swap file to store messages if you set zmq.SWAP. Summary This article explained what a message queuing system is, discussed the importance of message queuing, and introduced ZeroMQ to the reader. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: RESTful Web Service Implementation with RESTEasy [Article] BizTalk Server: Standard Message Exchange Patterns and Types of Service [Article] AJAX Chat Implementation: Part 1 [Article]  

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Getting ready For this recipe you will need to have a PowerPoint presentation on your computer that you can use. If you choose a PowerPoint you are currently using to teach with, this may be of more value, but any PowerPoint will help you complete the steps. How to do it... Make sure you have logged into your Prezi account. There should be a box that says +New prezi. Click on this to start a new prezi. You will need to give your prezi a title. This should be something short but descriptive of the content of the prezi. You can always add a more detailed description or extra information about the prezi in the description box (although the description box is optional). You will then be presented with a list of templates. Choose Blank template. If a help box appears (usually it appears only if something has changed recently in Prezi or if this is your first time using the system), click on OK. You can always review this help material at a later date. At the top of the screen there should be several options, one of which is PowerPoint. Click on this option. This will present you with a browse window, allowing you to search for files on your computer. Navigate to and select a PowerPoint file that you can upload. Once you have selected a PowerPoint and clicked open the presentation, the slides should load in Prezi on the right-hand side. From here you can choose Insert All... . However, for the purposes of this recipe, we will select individual slides. Hover your mouse cursor over the first slide. Your mouse cursor should change into the directional cursor (a cross with arrows at each of the four ends). Click-and-drag the slide onto the center of the screen: You will then see three icons on top of the slide. At the center of the slide is a hand. You can click on this to move the slide around. To the right of the slide there are two icons, a green tick and a red cross. Click on the red cross to remove the slide from the center screen (note: it will still be available on the right-hand side list). Click on the green tick to place the slide into your prezi. Please do the latter at this stage. Move your mouse over the slide so that it is highlighted by a blue box. Then click on it and move it around the screen. Now try inserting another slide following the previous steps. To save and exit your prezi, click on the icon in the top right-hand corner, the one furthest to the right, the cross next to the word Exit: How it works... You can now add PowerPoint slides to your prezi. Editing the slides once they are in Prezi is the same as editing the frames added via a prezi template or by scratch. We will look at how to start prezis in those different ways before we learn how to edit the content of frames. When you add your PowerPoint slides to Prezi, it turns each slide into a separate frame. A frame is the way Prezi groups together different content, just like you would group content onto one slide in PowerPoint. When the slide is converted into a frame, Prezi identifies each individual element of content that went into making that slide, such as images, title text, and body text. This means you can still edit and remove these elements individually, just as you would be able to in PowerPoint. In Prezi it is possible to have frames within a frame (whereas it is not possible to have a slide within a slide when using PowerPoint); this allows you to create subframes. This could be a great way to include any additional detail that you are not sure you will need in a lesson. You can add the slide as a subframe and simply zoom into it if you need it, or skip past it if you don't. This is much more subtle than having to skip past the slide in a PowerPoint. We will learn more about this as we develop our Prezi skills. Please also note that while we have learned how to save and exit in the recipe, you can also save while you are creating and editing your prezi at any stage by clicking the floppy disk icon at the top left-hand corner of the screen. There's more... Now that you have the basics of adding PowerPoint slides to a Prezi, here are some of the other ways in which you can do it. Insert All... In this recipe we went through adding each slide one by one, which can be valuable as it allows you to pick out the slides you want. This is particularly useful if you have a lot of slides in your PowerPoint as this could be a good time to review which ones are the key slides. It is best to only include important information in a prezi, so narrowing it down is a valuable exercise. However, if you do want to include all of the slides, simply click on Insert All... , located at the top of the slide list on the right-hand side of the screen. This will then give you a list of layout options; select one and click on Insert. If you do not want any of those layouts, don't worry. Once all the slides have been placed into the prezi, you can then move them around by hovering over a slide and clicking-and-dragging it to your desired location, so just choose any layout. Finding the Prezi help If you had to close the Welcome to Prezi video to perform this recipe, do not worry, you can access this and the other Prezi help at any time. While in a prezi, you will notice a series of icons in the top right-hand corner of the screen; these include the save and exit icon and a print icon. Click on the first icon on the right-hand side. A series of lines with a drop-down arrow will produce a menu, which lists all the available help. If you click on the "Welcome to Prezi" video option, this will open in a new window and should start playing automatically. Moving content out of frames If you hover over any of the content within a frame (slide), it should get selected and there will a blue line around its edges. You then click-and-drag this content out of one frame (slide) into another, or just leave it elsewhere on the page. This means you can edit your slides once they are in prezi Summary This article has helped us upload the slides into Prezi if you already have the content you want in a PowerPoint presentation; you can then rearrange, edit, or delete them as desired. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: A Quick Tour Of Ephesoft [Article] Getting Started with Impressive Presentations [Article] Mastering the Newer Prezi Features [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Why Is It Awesome? While it's fairly common for someone to say that they use jQuery in every site they build (this is usually the case for me), I would expect it much rarer for someone to say that they use the exact same jQuery methods in every project, or that they use a very large selection of the available methods and functionality that it offers. The need to reduce file size as aggressively as possible to cater for the mobile space, and the rise of micro-frameworks such as Zepto for example, which delivers a lot of jQuery functionality at a much-reduced size, have pushed jQuery to provide a way of slimming down. As of jQuery 1.8, we can now use the official jQuery build tool to build our own custom version of the library, allowing us to minimize the size of the library by choosing only the functionality we require. For more information on Zepto, see http://zeptojs.com/. Your Hotshot Objectives To successfully conclude this project we'll need to complete the following tasks: Installing Git and Make Installing Node.js Installing Grunt.js Configuring the environment Building a custom jQuery Running unit tests with QUnit Mission Checklist We'll be using Node.js to run the build tool, so you should download a copy of this now. The Node website (http://nodejs.org/download/) has an installer for both 64 and 32-bit versions of Windows, as well as a Mac OS X installer. It also features binaries for Mac OS X, Linux, and SunOS. Download and install the appropriate version for your operating system. The official build tool for jQuery (although it can do much more besides build jQuery) is Grunt.js, written by Ben Alman. We don't need to download this as it's installed via the Node Package Manager (NPM). We'll look at this process in detail later in the project. For more information on Grunt.js, visit the official site at http://gruntjs.com. First of all we need to set up a local working area. We can create a folder in our root project folder called jquery-source. This is where we'll store the jQuery source when we clone the jQuery Github repository, and also where Grunt will build the final version of jQuery. Installing Git and Make The first thing we need to install is Git, which we'll need in order to clone the jQuery source from the Github repository to our own computer so that we can work with the source files. We also need something called Make, but we only need to actually install this on Mac platforms because it gets installed automatically on Windows when Git is installed. As the file we'll create will be for our own use only and we don't want to contribute to jQuery by pushing code back to the repository, we don't need to worry about having an account set up on Github. Prepare for Lift Off First we'll need to download the relevant installers for both Git and Make. Different applications are required depending on whether you are developing on Mac or Windows platforms. Mac developers Mac users can visit http://git-scm.com/download/mac for Git. Next we can install Make. Mac developers can get this by installing XCode. This can be downloaded from https://developer.apple.com/xcode/. Windows developers Windows users can install msysgit, which can be obtained by visiting https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/detail?name=msysGit-fullinstall-1.8.0-preview20121022.exe. Engage Thrusters Once the installers have downloaded, run them to install the applications. The defaults selected by the installers should be fine for the purposes of this mission. First we should install Git (or msysgit on Windows). Mac developers Mac developers simply need to run the installer for Git to install it to the system. Once this is complete we can then install XCode. All we need to do is run the installer and Make, along with some other tools, will be installed and ready. Windows developers Once the full installer for msysgit has finished, you should be left with a Command Line Interface (CLI) window (entitled MINGW32) indicating that everything is ready for you to hack. However, before we can hack, we need to compile Git. To do this we need to run a file called initialize.sh. In the MINGW32 window, cd into the msysgit directory. If you allowed this to install to the default location, you can use the following command: cd C:msysgitmsysgitsharemsysGit Once we are in the correct directory, we can then run initialize.sh in the CLI. Like the installation, this process can take some time, so be patient and wait for the CLI to return a flashing cursor at the $ character. An Internet connection is required to compile Git in this way. Windows developers will need to ensure that the Git.exe and MINGW resources can be reached via the system's PATH variable. This can be updated by going to Control Panel | System | Advanced system settings | Environment variables. In the bottom section of the dialog box, double-click on Path and add the following two paths to the git.exe file in the bin folder, which is itself in a directory inside the msysgit folder wherever you chose to install it: ;C:msysgitmsysgitbin; C:msysgitmsysgitmingwbin; Update the path with caution! You must ensure that the path to Git.exe is separated from the rest of the Path variables with a semicolon. If the path does not end with a semicolon before adding the path to Git.exe, make sure you add one. Incorrectly updating your path variables can result in system instability and/or loss of data. I have shown a semicolon at the start of the previous code sample to illustrate this. Once the path has been updated, we should then be able to use a regular command prompt to run Git commands. Post-installation tasks In a terminal or Windows Command Prompt (I'll refer to both simply as the CLI from this point on for conciseness) window, we should first cd into the jquery-source folder we created at the start of the project. Depending on where your local development folder is, this command will look something like the following: cd c:jquery-hotshotsjquery-source To clone the jQuery repository, enter the following command in the CLI: git clone git://github.com/jquery/jquery.git Again, we should see some activity on the CLI before it returns to a flashing cursor to indicate that the process is complete. Depending on the platform you are developing on, you should see something like the following screenshot: Objective Complete — Mini Debriefing We installed Git and then used it to clone the jQuery Github repository in to this directory in order to get a fresh version of the jQuery source. If you're used to SVN, cloning a repository is conceptually the same as checking out a repository. Again, the syntax of these commands is very similar on Mac and Windows systems, but notice how we need to escape the backslashes in the path when using Windows. Once this is complete, we should end up with a new directory inside our jquery-source directory called jquery. If we go into this directory, there are some more directories including: build: This directory is used by the build tool to build jQuery speed: This directory contains benchmarking tests src: This directory contains all of the individual source files that are compiled together to make jQuery Test: This directory contains all of the unit tests for jQuery It also has a range of various files, including: Licensing and documentation, including jQuery's authors and a guide to contributing to the project Git-specific files such as .gitignore and .gitmodules Grunt-specific files such as Gruntfile.js JSHint for testing and code-quality purposes Make is not something we need to use directly, but Grunt will use it when we build the jQuery source, so it needs to be present on our system. Installing Node.js Node.js is a platform for running server-side applications built with JavaScript. It is trivial to create a web-server instance, for example, that receives and responds to HTTP requests using callback functions. Server-side JS isn't exactly the same as its more familiar client-side counterpart, but you'll find a lot of similarities in the same comfortable syntax that you know and love. We won't actually be writing any server-side JavaScript in this project – all we need Node for is to run the Grunt.js build tool. Prepare for Lift Off To get the appropriate installer for your platform, visit the Node.js website at http://nodejs.org and hit the download button. The correct installer for your platform, if supported, should be auto-detected. Engage Thrusters Installing Node is a straightforward procedure on either the Windows or Mac platforms as there are installers for both. This task will include running the installer, which is obviously simple, and testing the installation using a CLI. Installing Node is a straightforward procedure on either the Windows or Mac platforms as there are installers for both. This task will include running the installer, which is obviously simple, and testing the installation using a CLI. On Windows or Mac platforms, run the installer and it will guide you through the installation process. I have found that the default options are fine in most cases. As before, we also need to update the Path variable to include Node and Node's package manager NPM. The paths to these directories will differ between platforms. Mac Mac developers should check that the $PATH variable contains a reference to usr/local/bin. I found that this was already in my $PATH, but if you do find that it's not present, you should add it. For more information on updating your $PATH variable, see http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2621/os_x_change_path_environment_variable/. Windows Windows developers will need to update the Path variable, in the same way as before, with the following paths: C:Program Filesnodejs; C:UsersDesktopAppDataRoamingnpm; Windows developers may find that the Path variable already contains an entry for Node so may just need to add the path to NPM. Objective Complete — Mini Debriefing Once Node is installed, we will need to use a CLI to interact with it. To verify Node has installed correctly, type the following command into the CLI: node -v The CLI should report the version in use, as follows: We can test NPM in the same way by running the following command: npm -v

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Creating your first Retina image (Must know) Apple's Retina Display is a brand name for their high pixel density screens. These screens have so many pixels within a small space that the human eye cannot see pixelation, making images and text appear smoother. To compete with Apple's display, other manufacturers are also releasing devices using high-density displays. These types of displays are becoming standard in high quality devices. When you first start browsing the Web using a Retina Display, you'll notice that many images on your favorite sites are blurry. This is a result of low-resolution images being stretched to fill the screen. The effect can make an otherwise beautiful website look unattractive. The key to making your website look exceptional on Retina Displays is the quality of the images that you are using. In this recipe, we will cover the basics of creating high-resolution images and suggestions on how to name your files. Then we'll use some simple HTML to display the image on a web page. Getting ready Creating a Retina-ready site doesn't require any special software beyond what you're already using to build web pages. You'll need a graphics editor (such as Photoshop or GIMP) and your preferred code/text editor. To test the code on Retina Display you'll also need a web server that you can reach from a browser, if you aren't coding directly on the Retina device. The primary consideration in getting started is the quality of your images. A Retina image needs to be at least two times as large as it will be displayed on screen. If you have a photo you'd like to add to your page that is 500 pixels wide, you'll want to start out with an image that is at least 1000 pixels wide. Trying to increase the size of a small image won't work because the extra pixels are what make your image sharp. When designing your own graphics, such as icons and buttons, it's best to create them using a vector graphics program so they will be easy to resize without affecting the quality. Once you have your high-resolution artwork gathered, we're ready to start creating Retina images. How to do it... To get started, let's create a folder on your computer called retina. Inside that folder, create another folder called images. We'll use this as the directory for building our test website. To create your first Retina image, first open a high-resolution image in your graphics editor. You'll want to set the image size to be double the size of what you want to display on the page. For example, if you wanted to display a 700 x 400 pixel image, you would start with an image that is 1400 x 800 pixels. Make sure you aren't increasing the size of the original image or it won't work correctly. Next, save this image as a .jpg file with the filename myImage@2x.jpg inside of the /images/ folder within the /retina/ folder that we created. Then resize the image to 50 percent and save it as myImage.jpg to the same location. Now we're ready to add our new images to a web page. Create an HTML document called retinaTest.html inside the /retina/ folder. Inside of the basic HTML structure add the two images we created and set the dimensions for both images to the size of the smaller image. <body> <img src = "images/myImage@2x.jpg" width="700" height="400" /> <img src = "images/myImage.jpg" width="700" height="400" /> </body> If you are working on a Retina device you should be able to open this page locally; if not, upload the folder to your web server and open the page on your device. You will notice how much sharper the first image is than the second image. On a device without a Retina Display, both images will look the same. Congratulations! you've just built your first Retina-optimized web page. How it works... Retina Displays have a higher amount of pixels per inch (PPI) than a normal display. In Apple's devices they have double the PPI of older devices, which is why we created an image that was two times as large as the final image we wanted to display. When that large image is added to the code and then resized to 50 percent, it has more data than what is being shown on a normal display. A Retina device will see that extra pixel data and use it to fill the extra PPI that its screen, contains. Without the added pixel data, the device will use the data available to fill the screen creating a blurry image. You'll notice that this effect is most obvious on large photos and computer graphics like icons. Keep in mind this technique will work with any image format such as .jpg, .png, or .gif. There's more... As an alternative to using the image width and height attributes in HTML, like the previous code, you can also give the image a CSS class with width and height attributes. This is only recommended if you will be using many images that are of the same size and you want to be able to change them easily. <style> .imgHeader { width: 700px; height: 400px; } </style> <img src = "images/myImage@2x.jpg" class="imgHeader" /> Tips for creating images We created both a Retina and a normal image. It's always a good idea to create both images because the Retina image will be quite a bit larger than the normal one. Then you'll have the option of which image you'd like to have displayed so users without a Retina device don't have to download the larger file. You'll also notice that we added @2x to the filename of the larger image. It's a good practice to create consistent filenames to differentiate the images that are high-resolution. It'll make our coding work much easier going forward. Pixels per inch and dots per inch When designers with a print background first look into creating graphics for Retina Displays there can be some confusion regarding dots per inch (DPI). Keep in mind that computer displays are only concerned with the number of pixels in an image. An 800 x 600 pixel image at 300 DPI will display the same as an 800 x 600 pixel image at 72 DPI.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) What can you do with Google Drive? Working with files in the cloud is a little bit different from what you may be used to, but it is much more convenient. You can edit your files from anywhere and you can share and collaborate on files with other people. Importantly, your files in the cloud are safe if there is ever a problem with your hard drive. Here are some examples to give you an idea of the things you can do with Google Drive: Create a presentation: Let's say you need to make a presentation. You create a new Google Slides presentation in Google Drive, get a rough draft of the slides in a reasonable shape, and share it with your co-worker. (With Google Drive, there is no need to e-mail versions of files around.) Your co-worker makes a few comments on your slides, and you make the recommended changes. Once you've given the presentation, you share it publicly so everyone has access to the slides afterwards. Write a report as a group project: Your teacher or boss has tasked you with creating a report for a work or school project. The data is collected in a Google Sheets spreadsheet, with each person in the team adding their own data. They can even enter data using their phone or tablet, and with Google Drive, everyone can edit the spreadsheet at the same time—there is only one copy of the spreadsheet to keep up to date. Next, the entire team collaborates on the report, using Google Docs, with each person writing a section. And when you're done, you can convert it to a PDF file and share it with your boss or teacher for their review. Work with Microsoft Office documents: Let's say a company that you work with uses Microsoft Office, and sends you a Microsoft Word document. You upload the document to a shared folder on Google Drive, where you and a co-worker review it and make a few changes to the shared copy. When done, you e-mail the revised version back to the person who sent it to you as an attachment, all directly from Google Drive. Upload and share vacation videos: You just got back from vacation, and are eager to share videos of you learning to ski with your family. The videos are too large to e-mail. So instead you upload the videos from your camera's memory card into a new folder in Google Drive, and then share that folder with a few of your family members. They get an e-mail notification, click on the link in the folder, and are able to enjoy the moment when you got up on two skis for the first time. They can view the videos and photos right on their phone or tablet. Keep a backup of your important files: You have several years of irreplaceable family photos, school projects, and home business records stored on your computer's hard drive. Because hard drives can fail, you want to back these files up. So you download and install the Google Drive sync program, which then automatically uploads and syncs files and folders of your choice to the cloud. If something ever happens to your computer, your cloud backup is there for you in Google Drive. As you can see, with Google Drive, you aren't limited to just built-in document types (such as Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). You can open, view, share, and comment on almost every type of file such as PDFs, Microsoft Office files, photos, and videos. And with third-party add-on programs, you can go beyond viewing and actually edit special types of files such as Microsoft Office documents, all online from any web browser, phone, or tablet computer. First steps for using Google Drive Getting started with Google Drive is easy and free. All you need is a Google account and an Internet connection. You may already have a Google account (for example, an e-mail address ending in gmail.com), and if not, creating one is easy. Note that you can use any e-mail address, not just those ending with gmail.com for your Google account. To get started, simply visit Google Drive on the Web with your web browser at https://drive.google.com/.From there, you can log in with your existing Google account or create a new one. You don't have to make the switch to the cloud all at once. You can start using Google Drive for creating new documents here and there, or you can upload files one at a time as you need them in the cloud. Alternatively, download the sync program to automatically keep large amounts of folders and files in sync between your computer and Google Drive. Whether a little or a lot, it's up to you how much you use Google Drive. Using Google Drive on your phone or tablet You can access your files on the go from your mobile device using the Google Drive app for Android (phone and tablet) or for iOS (iPhone and iPad). Using these free apps, you can download, view, and even edit your files right on your device. You can even upload photos you take with your phone right into Google Drive. All the other features you're used to using on the Web work just as you'd expect on your phone or tablet including searching, sorting, sharing, and organizing. Installing the Google Drive app for Android The Google Drive app for Android is available for free from the Google Play Store, and it supports both phones and tablets. To install the app, visit the Google Play Store by tapping the Play Store icon on your Android device. Find the application called Google Drive (you can search for it), and then install the app. Note you can also install the app by visiting Google's Play Store on the Web at https://play.google.com.Once installed, launch the app by tapping the Google Drive app icon in your device's apps screen. Installing the Google Drive App for iPhone or iPad The Google Drive app for iPhone and iPad is available for free from Apple's App Store, and it supports both phones and tablets. To install the app, visit the App Store by taping on the App Store icon on your iPhone or iPad. Find the application called Google Drive (you can search for it), and then install the app. Once installed, launch the app by tapping on the Google Drive app icon in your device's apps screen. Using the Mobile App For Android, iPhone, and iPad, the various flavors of the mobile Google Drive app all have the same basic functionality and work in similar ways. In fact, you'll recognize many of the basic user interface pieces from earlier in this book. Navigation panel This corresponds to the Navigation panel on Google Drive for the Web, and functions in the exact same way. Tapping an item in this panel will update the files shown in the Files list on your mobile device. The labels correspond to those found in the Navigation panel on Google Drive for the Web: My Drive is where all files that you've created appear. Note that, unlike on the Web, your hierarchy of folders is not shown; instead, folders will be shown in the Files list and you can "drill down" into them as needed. Shared with me is where all files that other people have shared with you appear. Clicking on this will filter your Files list to only those items. Starred will show only those files that you have previously starred. Recent shows a list of files sorted by modification date; use this to quickly find files that have most recently been created or edited by you or someone else. Offline will show a list of files that are available for viewing offline, that is, while not connected to the Internet. Files can be marked to be kept offline in the Preview panel, discussed later. Files list The Files list appears when you tap on any of the items in the Navigation panel; for tablet devices that have a larger screen, the list will simply always be present to the right-hand side of the Navigation panel. In this example, we are in the Family folder. For each file in this list, you can: See the file's title, icon, and the date that the file was last modified. Tap on the star to toggle whether the file is starred. Tap on the arrow on the right-hand side to get additional details about the file via the Preview panel. Tap on a file to open it. Google types can be previewed and even edited on the device. If you have an app installed on your device that can open the file, such as a PDF viewer or image editor, you'll have the opportunity to use that app to view the file. Preview panel The Preview panel shows a visual preview and additional details about the file, and also permits you to take additional actions on the file. From the Preview panel, you can: See the icon and title of the file See a thumbnail (small image) preview of the file Open the file by tapping on the Open button or the file thumbnail See with whom a file is shared and their level of access (view or edit) Share the file with other people Mark the file as Available offline which means it will be copied onto your device and is viewable on the device even when you don't have an Internet connection Return to the Files list by closing the Preview panel Actions menu The Actions menu lets you perform certain operations on the selected file. It is very similar to the Context menu that appears in Google Drive for the Web. To pop open the Actions menu in Android, long-press (tap-and-hold) a file in the Files list. For iPhone/iPad, click on the "Actions" icon in the upper-right corner of the Preview panel. Here are some of the things you can do in the Actions menu: Share the file with one or more people Rename the file Move the file to a different folder in Google Drive Remove the file, placing it in the Trash Print the file to any printer using Google Cloud Print Send the file via e-mail Depending on the application version, certain other advanced options, such as printing, may be supported. Create menu The Create menu (or Add menu on iPhone/iPad) lets you create new items in Google Drive directly from your phone. This menu appears by clicking on the menu icon in the toolbar and selecting New, or by clicking on the + icon in the toolbar on iPhone/iPad. From the Create menu, you can create a new Google Docs document, a new folder, or you can upload a photo or video from your phone directly into Google Drive. Searching for files Just like with Google Drive on the Web, you can quickly search all of your files in Google Drive. On Android, click on the search icon in the toolbar which will display the search box (this is always visible on iPhone/iPad), and type in your query. Files matching your search will appear in the Files list. From here, you can work with a matching search result like any other file: open, preview, star, share, and more. Access your files and create new ones, wherever you are! You can see that the mobile experience for Google Drive is robust and full-featured. With the Google Drive mobile app, you can do the majority of the same things you can with a web browser on your desktop—viewing, editing, and sharing on the go. Summary In this article, we learnt about cloud-based storage, how to access our files from anywhere, and why it's so much more convenient than being tied down to using files on just one computer. We also learnt about how we can use Google Drive on your phone or tablet computer. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Getting Started with XenApp 6 [Article] Designing a XenApp 6 Farm [Article] Managing Citrix Policies [Article]

These components allow you to develop native 32-bit Windows applications without any proprietary third-party software. All components of MinGW software are produced under GNU General Public License and therefore this is a free software that you can download, use, and change as you want. You can develop applications in C, C++, Java, Objective C, Fortran, and Ada programming languages with MinGW software. C++ application development is more typical for MinGW usage. Besides developing new applications, you can import existing Visual C++ projects to MinGW software. It is easy to integrate MinGW with well-known third-party libraries such as DirectX, Boost, Qt, GTK, OpenGL, and SDL. If you are using any of these libraries, you can compile your application with MinGW. MinGW software is very useful for importing Unix and Mac applications to Windows native code. It provides the same instruments that Unix and Mac developers have used in most cases. Also, you can import your MinGW-based applications to any computing platform supported by the GNU toolchain. Therefore, MinGW software is a great instruments' set for developing cross-platform applications. Another benefit of MinGW software is modular organization. You can replace most components of the GNU toolchain with your favorite instruments (for example, debugger, profiler, or build automation system). These instruments will be integrated with existing components without any problems. Usage of the MinGW software is the first step to collecting your own developer's instruments' set for comfortable work. The compiler efficiency is one of most important parameters for software developers. There are a lot of C++ compilers' benchmarks that are available on the Internet. Unfortunately for us, developers of proprietary compilers are not interested in objective researches of this kind. Fair comparison of available compilers is impossible because of this. The MinGW compiler efficiency is abreast to proprietary compiler efficiency today according to benchmarks of independent software developers. You can find one of them at the following website: http://www.willus.com/ccomp_benchmark.shtml?p9+s6 The MinGW software releases are more frequent than the proprietary compilers' releases. This means that MinGW is developed and improved more dynamically. For example, the standard features of C++11 have been supported by the GCC compiler earlier than the Visual Studio one. You can find these features at the following website: http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/C++0xCompilerSupport Notice that the GNU toolchain is a product of Unix culture. This culture is earlier than GUI applications with access to any function through menus, dialogs, and icons. Unix software has been developed as a suite of little stand alone utilities. Each of these performs only one task, but this execution is optimized very well. Therefore, all these utilities have a text-based interface. This provides the simplest intercommunication mechanism with a command line shell and saves the system resources. If the idea of a text-based interface scares you, be relieved because there are a lot of Integrated Development Environments ( IDE ) that support MinGW. Developing with cross-platform libraries MinGW software allows you to develop applications based on any library compiled with the MinGW C++ compiler. Open source libraries are often supplied in Visual C++ and MinGW compilation variants. Moreover, you can always get the source code of these libraries and build them with your MinGW software. Several well-known open source cross-platform frameworks and toolkits are described as follows: Qt framework Gtk+ widget toolkit wxWidgets framework The same functionality example application will be developed with each of these libraries. The goal of these examples is to show the first steps to deploy and to start working with these libraries. Our example application consists of a window with two buttons. A click on the first button leads to the display of a message and a click on the second button leads to the application termination. The Qt framework The Qt framework provides not only a cross-platform widget toolkit for GUI development but also contains features for SQL database access, XML parsing, thread management, interaction over a network, and internalization support. The Qt framework has its own container classes such as Qstring or QVector and a set of well-known algorithms such as sorting, searching, and copying to process data in these containers that allow you to substitute the capabilities of STL and Boost libraries by the Qt ones. This kind of Qt framework self-sufficiency is of great advantage to develop cross-platform applications. All you need to do to import your Qt application to a new platform is building a Qt framework for this one. There are a lot of platforms that are supported by Qt framework developers: Windows Mac OS X Linux Solaris Symbian Android (unofficial framework port with the name Ministro) Let's begin our work with the Qt framework. It is important to note that Qt libraries have been compiled with the specific MinGW software version. Your application must be compiled with the same MinGW version and therefore you must install it. The alternative way is the compilation of Qt libraries sources with your already installed MinGW software. You can find some helpful instructions to do this at the following website: http://www.formortals.com/build-qt-static-small-microsoft-intel-gcc-compiler All other toolkits described here don't need a specific MinGW software version. The following are instructions to install Qt libraries version 4.6.4 and some necessary software to start developing with it: Download the MinGW version of the Qt libraries for Windows from the following official website: http://qt-project.org/downloads Note that this library has been compiled with a specific (equal in our case to 4.4) MinGW software version. Install the downloaded Qt libraries with the setup wizard. Run the downloaded exe file to do it. Download the MinGW software of version 4.4 from the following official download page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/gcc/Version4/Previous%20Release%20gcc-4.4.0/ You need the file to be named gcc-full-4.4.0-mingw32-bin-2.tar.lzma. This is an archive with the MinGW compilers' executable files and necessary core libraries. Extract the downloaded MinGW software archive to the directory without spaces in the path (for example, C:MinGW4.4). You can use the 7-Zip application to extract the LZMA archive type. This application is available at the following official website: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html Download the GNU Binutils for MinGW software from the following official download page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/binutils/binutils-2.19 You need the archive to be named binutils-2.19-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz. Extract the downloaded GNU Binutils archive to the same directory as the MinGW software. This is C:MinGW4.4 in our case. Download the GNU Make utility from the following web page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Extension/make/mingw32-make-3.80-3 You need to download the mingw32-make-3.80.0-3.exe file. Install GNU Make utility to the MinGW software directory (C:MinGW4.4). Run the downloaded exe file and use the setup wizard to do it. Add the installation MinGW software path to the PATH Windows environment variable. Remove the existing paths of other MinGW software installations from there. The C:MinGW4.4bin path must be added in our example. Now you have the necessary libraries and specific MinGW software version to start developing an application based on the Qt framework. Our example application is implemented in the main.cpp source file. The following is the main function definition: int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { QApplication application(argc, argv); QMainWindow* window = CreateWindow(); CreateMsgButton(window); CreateQuitButton(window, application); return application.exec(); } First of all, the object of the QApplication class named application is created here. This object is used to manage the application's control flow and main settings. After that, the window of the QMainWindow class named window is created by the CreateWindow function. Two window buttons are created by the CreateMsgButton and CreateQuitButton functions. The exec method of the application object is called to enter the main event loop when all user interface objects have been created. Now the application starts processing events such as button pressing. The following is the CreateWindow function that encapsulates the main application window creation: QMainWindow* CreateWindow() { QMainWindow* window = new QMainWindow(0, Qt::Window); window->resize(250, 150); window->setWindowTitle("Qt Application"); window->show(); return window; } The main application window is an object of the QMainWindow class named window . It is created by a constructor that has two input parameters. The first parameter is of the QWidget* type. This is a pointer to the window's parent widget. It equals to zero in our case which means that there is no parent widget. The second parameter is of the Qt::WindowFlags type and defines the window style. It equals to Qt::Window that matches the standard window appearance with the system frame and title bar. After the main window creation its size is set with the resize method of the window object. Then the window title is set with the setWindowTitle method of the window object. The next action is to make the main window visible by using the show method of the window object. The function returns the pointer to the created window object. The following code shows the CreateMsgButton function that encapsulates the creation of button with message showing action: void CreateMsgButton(QMainWindow* window) { QMessageBox* message = new QMessageBox(window); message->setText("Message text"); QPushButton* button = new QPushButton("Message", window); button->move(85, 40); button->resize(80, 25); button->show(); QObject::connect(button, SIGNAL(released()), message, SLOT(exec())); } At first, we need to create a message window to display it when we click on the button. This message window is an object of the QMessageBox class named message. It is created by a constructor with one input parameter of the QWidget* type. This is a pointer to the parent widget. The text displayed in the message window is set by the setText method of the message object. Now we need a button that will be placed at the main window. This button is the object of the QPushButton class named button. The constructor with two input parameters is used here to create this object. The first parameter is a string with the button text of the QString class. The second parameter is the parent widget pointer. The position and size of the button object are set by the move and resize methods. After configuring the button we make it visible by using the show method. Now we need to bind the button press event and message window displaying. The connect static method of the QObject class is used here for this goal. It allows to create a connection between the button object's release signal and the exec method of the message object. The exec method causes the displaying of window with message. The following code shows the CreateQuitButton function that encapsulates the creation of the close application button: void CreateQuitButton(QMainWindow* window, QApplication& application) { QPushButton* quit_button = new QPushButton("Quit", window); quit_button->move(85, 85); quit_button->resize(80, 25); quit_button->show(); QObject::connect(quit_button, SIGNAL(released()), &application, SLOT(quit())); } This function is similar the CreateMsgButton function. But the message window isn't created here. The close application button is an object of the QPushButton class named quit_button. The release signal of the quit_button button is connected to the quit method of the application object. This method leads to the application closing with successful code. Now you are ready to build an example application. You need to perform the following instructions: Create a Qt project file with the following command: $ qmake -project You will get a file with the pro extension and name of the current directory. $ qmake Create Makefile , service files, and subdirectories with the following command: Compile the project with the GNU Make utility: $ mingw32-make The GNU Make utility executable name is mingw32-make in the official distribution. This one has been installed with the MinGW software of version 4.4. You will get the qt.exe executable file in the debug subdirectory after compilation. This is the debugging version of our example application. Type the following command to build the release version: $ mingw32-make release The qt.exe executable file will be created in the release subdirectory after this compilation. Summary We learned how to develop applications based on Qt framework with the help of the libraries and the MinGW software mentioned in this article. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Installation of Ogre 3D [Article] How to Create an OpenSceneGraph Application [Article] Writing a Package in Python [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) So you are using Lotus Notes 8.5.3 for e-mail, calendar, and collaboration, and you want to know how to go from just using Lotus Notes, to letting Lotus Notes work for you. Lotus Notes is highly customizable, adapting to the way you want to work. We will show you how to make Lotus Notes look and behave in the manner you choose. Getting ready Your IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 client should be installed and connected to your home mail server to receive mail. How to do it... Let's start with the Home page. The Home page is the first page you will see when setting up a new client. You can also access it in many different ways if your client is already set up. One way to get to it is from the Open list as shown in the following screenshot: Here is what the default Home page looks like after you open it: How it works... To customize the Home page, click on Click here for Home Page options. Then click on Create a new Home Page. This will bring up the Home Page wizard. Give your new Home page a name, and then you can choose how you want your important data to be displayed via your new Home page. As you can see, there are many ways to customize your Home page to display exactly what you need on your screen. There's more... Now we will look at more ways to customize your IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 experience. Open list By clicking on the Open button in the upper left corner of the Notes client, you can access the Open list. The Open list is a convenient place to launch your mail, calendar, contacts, to-dos, websites, and applications. You can also access your workspace and Home page from the Open list. Applications added to your workspace are dynamically added to the Open list. The contextual search feature will help you efficiently find exactly what you are looking for. One option when using the Open list is to dock it. When the Open list is docked, it will appear permanently on the left-hand side of the Lotus Notes client. To dock it, right-click on the Open list and select Dock the Open list. To undock it, right-click in an empty area of the docked list and uncheck the Dock the Open list. Windows and Themes You can choose how you want your windows in Lotus Notes 8.5.3 to look. In the Windows and Themes preference panel, you can control how you want Notes to behave. First, decide if you want your open documents to appear as tabs or windows. Then decide if you want the tabs that you had left open when you exit the client to be retained when you open it again. The option to Group documents from each application on a tab will group any documents or views opened from one application. You can see these options in the following screenshot: New mail notification By checking the preference setting called Sending and Receiving under Preferences | Mail, you can display a pop-up alert when a new mail arrives. The pop up displays the sender and the subject of the message. You can then open the e-mail from the pop up. You can also drag the pop up to pin it open. To turn this off, uncheck the preference setting. Workspace The workspace has been around for a long time, and this is where icons representing Domino applications are found. You can choose to stack icons or have them un-stacked. Stacking the icons places replicas of the same applications on top of each other. The icon on the top of the stack dictates which replica is opened. For example, for a mail if the server is on top, then the local replica will be ignored causing potential slowness. If you would like to make your workspace look more three-dimensional and add texture to the background select this setting in the Basic Notes Client preference. You can also add new pages, change the color of pages and name them, by right clicking on the workspace. Summary This article has provided a brief gist about Lotus Notes 8.5.3. It also explains how you can customize your Lotus Notes client, and make it look and behave in the manner you choose. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Feeds in IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 [Article] Lotus Notes 8 — Productivity Tools [Article] IBM Lotus Quickr Services Overview [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) We have seen how the provisioning capabilities of the Oracle Enterprise Manager's Database Lifecycle Management (DBLM) Pack enable you to deploy fully patched Oracle Database homes and databases, as replicas of the gold copy in the Software Library of Enterprise Manager. However, nothing placed in production should be treated as static. Software changes in development cycles, enhancements take place, or security/functional issues are found. For almost anything in the IT world, new patches are bound to be released. These will also need to be applied to production, testing, reporting, staging, and development environments in the data center on an ongoing basis. For the database side of things, Oracle releases quarterly a combination of security fixes known as the Critical Patch Update (CPU). Other patches are bundled together and released every quarter in the form of a Patch Set Update (PSU), and this also includes the CPU for that quarter. Oracle strongly recommends applying either the PSU or the CPU every calendar quarter. If you prefer to apply the CPU, continue doing so. If you wish to move to the PSU, you can do so, but in that case continue only with the PSU. The quarterly patching requirement, as a direct recommendation from Oracle, is followed by many companies that prefer to have their databases secured with the latest security fixes. This underscores the importance of patching. However, if there are hundreds of development, testing, staging, and production databases in the data center to be patched, the situation quickly turns into a major manual exercise every three months. DBAs and their managers start planning for the patch exercise in advance, and a lot of resources are allocated to make it happen—with the administrators working on each database serially, at times overnight and at times over the weekend. There are a number of steps involved in patching each database, such as locating the appropriate patch in My Oracle Support (MOS), downloading the patch, transferring it to each of the target servers, upgrading the OPATCH facility in each Oracle home, shutting down the databases and listeners running from that home, applying the patch, starting each of the databases in restricted mode, applying any supplied SQL scripts, restarting the databases in normal mode, and checking the patch inventory. These steps have to be manually repeated on every database home on every server, and on every database in that home. Dull repetition of these steps in patching the hundreds of servers in a data center is a very monotonous task, and it can lead to an increase in human errors. To avoid these issues inherent in manual patching, some companies decide not to apply the quarterly patches on their databases. They wait for a year, or a couple of years before they consider patching, and some even prefer to apply year-old patches instead of the latest patches. This is counter-productive and leads to their databases being insecure and vulnerable to attacks, since the latest recommended CPUs from Oracle have not been applied. What then is the solution, to convince these companies to apply patches regularly? If the patching process can be mostly automated (but still under the control of the DBAs), it would reduce the quarterly patching effort to a great extent. Companies would then have the confidence that their existing team of DBAs would be able to manage the patching of hundreds of databases in a controlled and automated manner, keeping human error to a minimum. The Database Lifecycle Management Pack of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is able to achieve this by using its Patch Automation capability. We will now look into Patch Automation and the close integration of Enterprise Manager with My Oracle Support. Recommended patches By navigating to Enterprise | Summary, a Patch Recommendations section will be visible in the lower left-hand corner, as shown in the following screenshot: The graph displays either the Classification output of the recommended patches, or the Target Type output. Currently for this system, more than five security patches are recommended as can be seen in this graph. This recommendation has been derived via a connection to My Oracle Support (the OMS can be connected either directly to the Internet, or by using a proxy server). Target configuration information is collected by the Enterprise Manager Agent and is stored in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) within the repository. This configuration information is collated regularly by the Enterprise Manager's Harvester process and pushed to My Oracle Support. Thus, configuration information about your targets is known to My Oracle Support, and it is able to recommend appropriate patches as and when they are released. However, the recommended patch engine also runs within Enterprise Manager 12c at your site, working off the configuration data in the CMDB in Enterprise Manager, so recommendations can in fact be achieved without the configuration having been uploaded on MOS by the Harvester (this upload is more useful now for other purposes, such as attaching configuration details during SR creation). It is also possible to get metadata about the latest available patches from My Oracle Support in offline mode, but more manual steps are involved in this case, so Internet connectivity is recommended to get the full benefits of Enterprise Manager's integration with My Oracle Support. To view the details about the patches, click on the All Recommendations link or on the graph itself. This connects to My Oracle Support (you may be asked to log in to your company-specific MOS account) and brings up the list of the patches in the Patch Recommendations section. The database (and other types of) targets managed by the Enterprise Manager system are displayed on the screen, along with the recommended CPU (or other) patches. We select the CPU July patch for our saiprod database. This displays the details about the patch in the section in the lower part of the screen. We can see the list Bugs Resolved by This Patch, the Last Updated date and Size of the patch and also Read Me—which has important information about the patch. The number of total downloads for this patch is visible, as is the Community Discussion on this patch in the Oracle forums. You can add your own comment for this patch, if required, by selecting Reply to the Discussion. Thus, at a glance, you can find out how popular the patch is (number of downloads) and any experience of other Oracle DBAs regarding this patch—whether positive or negative. Patch plan You can view the information about the patch by clicking on the Full Screen button. You can download the patch either to the Software Library in Enterprise Manager or to your desktop. Finally, you can directly add this patch to a new or existing patch plan, which we will do next. Go to Add to Plan | Add to New, and enter Plan Name as Sainath_patchplan. Then click on Create Plan. If you would like to add multiple patches to the plan, select both the patches first and then add to the plan. (You can also add patches later to the plan). After the plan is created, click on View Plan. This brings up the following screen: A patch plan is nothing but a collection of patches that can be applied as a group to one or more targets. On the Create Plan page that appears, there are five steps that can be seen in the left-hand pane. By default, the second step appears first. In this step, you can see all the patches that have been added to the plan. It is possible to include more patches by clicking on the Add Patch... button. Besides the ability to manually add a patch to this list, the analysis process may also result in additional patches being added to the plan. If you click on the first step, Plan Information, you can put in a description for this plan. You can also change the plan permissions, either Full or View, for various Enterprise Manager roles. Note that the Full permission allows the role to validate the plan, however, the View permission does not allow validation. Move to step 3, Deployment Options. The following screen appears. Out-of-place patching A new mechanism for patching has been provided in the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c version, known as out-of-place patching. This is now the recommended method and creates a new Oracle home which is then patched while the previous home is still operational. All this is done using an out of the box deployment procedure in Enterprise Manager. Using this mechanism means that the only downtime will take place when the databases from the previous home are switched to run from the new home. If there is any issue with the database patch, you can switch back to the previous unpatched home since it is still available. So, patch rollback is a lot faster. Also, if there are multiple databases running in the previous home, you can decide which ones to switch to the new patched home. This is obviously an advantage, otherwise you would be forced to simultaneously patch all the databases in a home. A disadvantage of this method would be the space requirements for a duplicate home. Also, if proper housekeeping is not carried out later on, it can lead to a proliferation of Oracle homes on a server where patches are being applied regularly using this mechanism. This kind of selective patching and minimal downtime is not possible if you use the previously available method of in-place patching, which uses a separate deployment procedure to shut down all databases running from an Oracle home before applying the patches on the same home. The databases can only be restarted normally after the patching process is over, and this obviously takes more downtime and affects all databases in a home. Depending on the method you choose, the appropriate deployment procedure will be automatically selected and used. We will now use the out-of-place method in this patch plan. On the Step 3: Deployment Options page, make sure the Out of Place (Recommended) option is selected. Then click on Create New Location. Type in the name and location of the new Oracle home, and click on the Validate button. This checks the Oracle home path on the Target server. After this is done, click on the Create button. The deployment options of the patch plan are successfully updated, and the new home appears on the Step 3 page. Click on the Credentials tab. Here you need to select or enter the normal and privileged credentials for the Oracle home. Click on the Next button. This moves us to step 4, the Validation step. Pre-patching analysis Click on the Analyze button. A job to perform prepatching analysis is started in the background. This will compare the installed software and patches on the targets with the new patches you have selected in your plan, and attempt to validate them. This validation may take a few minutes to complete, since it also checks the Oracle home for readiness, computes the space requirements for the home, and conducts other checks such as cluster node connectivity (if you are patching a RAC database). If you drill down to the analysis job itself by clicking on Show Detailed Progress here, you can see that it does a number of checks to validate if the targets are supported for patching, verifies the normal and super user credentials of the Oracle home, verifies the target tools, commands, and permissions, upgrades OPATCH to the latest version, stages the selected patches to Oracle homes, and then runs the prerequisite checks including those for cloning an Oracle home. If the prerequisite checks succeed, the analysis job skips the remaining steps and stops at this point with a successful status. The patch is seen as Ready for Deployment. If there are any issues, they will show up at this point. For example, if there is a conflict with any of the patches, a replacement patch or a merge patch may be suggested. If there is no replacement or merge patch and you want to request such a patch, it will allow you to make the request directly from the screen. If you are applying a PSU and the CPU for that same release is already applied to the Oracle home, for example, July 2011 CPU, then because the PSU is a superset of the CPU, the MOS analysis will stop and mention that the existing patch fixes the issues. Such a message can be seen in the Informational Messages section of the Validation page. Deployment In our case, the patch is Ready for Deployment. At this point, you can move directly to step 5, Review & Deploy, by clicking on it in the left-hand side pane. On the Review & Deploy page, the patch plan is described in detail along with Impacted Targets. Along with the database that is in the patch plan, a new impacted target has been found by the analysis process and added to the list of impacted targets. This is the listener that is running from the home that is to be cloned and patched. The patches that are to be applied are also listed on this review page, in our case the CPUJUL2011 patch is shown with the status Conflict Free. The deployment procedure that will be used is Clone and Patch Oracle Database, since out-of-place patching is being used, and all instances and listeners running in the previous Oracle home are being switched to the new home. Click on the Prepare button. The status on the screen changes to Preparation in Progress. A job for preparation of the out-of-place patching starts, including cloning of the original Oracle home and applying the patches to the cloned home. No downtime is required while this job is running; it can happen in the background. This preparation phase is like a pre-deploy and is only possible in the case of out-of-place patching, whereas in the case of in-place patching, there is no Prepare button and you deploy straightaway. Clicking on Show Detailed Progress here opens a new window showing the job details. When the preparation job has successfully completed (after about two hours in our virtual machine), we can see that it performs the cloning of the Oracle home, applies the patches on the new home, validates the patches, runs the post patch scripts, and then skips all the remaining steps. It also collects target properties for the Oracle home in order to refresh the configurations in Enterprise Manager. The Review & Deploy page now shows Preparation Successful!. The plan is now ready to be deployed. Click on the Deploy button. The status on the screen changes to Deployment in Progress. A job for deployment of the out-of-place patching starts. At this time, downtime will be required since the database instances using the previous Oracle home will be shut down and switched across. The deploy job successfully completes (after about 21 minutes in our virtual machine); we can see that it works iteratively over the list of hosts and Oracle homes in the patch plan. It starts a blackout for the database instances in the Oracle home (so that no alerts are raised), stops the instances, migrates them to the cloned Oracle home, starts them in upgrade mode, applies SQL scripts to patch the instance, applies post-SQL scripts, and then restarts the database in normal mode. The deploy job applies other SQL scripts and recompiles invalid objects (except in the case of patch sets). It then migrates the listener from the previous Oracle home using the Network Configuration Assistant (NetCA), updates the Target properties, stops the blackout, and detaches the previous Oracle home. Finally, the configuration information of the cloned Oracle home is refreshed. The Review & Deploy page of the patch plan now shows the status of Deployment Successful!, as can be seen in the following screenshot: Plan template On the Deployment Successful page, it is possible to click on Save as Template at the bottom of the screen in order to save a patch plan as a plan template. The patch plan should be successfully analyzed and deployable, or successfully deployed, before it can be saved as a template. The plan template, when thus created, will not have any targets included, and such a template can then be used to apply the successful patch plan to multiple other targets. Inside the plan template, the Create Plan button is used to create a new plan based on this template, and this can be done repeatedly for multiple targets. Go to Enterprise | Provisioning and Patching | Patches & Updates; this screen displays a list of all the patch plans and plan templates that have been created. The successfully deployed Sainath_patchplan and the new patch plan template also shows up here. To see a list of the saved patches in the Software Library, go to Enterprise | Provisioning and Patching | Saved Patches. This brings up the following screen: This page also allows you to manually upload patches to the Software Library. This scenario is mostly used when there is no connection to the Internet (either direct or via a proxy server) from the Enterprise Manager OMS servers, and consequently you need to download the patches manually. For more details on setting up the offline mode and downloading the patch recommendations and latest patch information in the form of XML files from My Oracle Support, please refer to Oracle Enterprise Manager Lifecycle Management Administrator's Guide 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) at the following URL: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/em.121/e27046/pat_mosem_new. htm#BABBIEAI Patching roles The new version of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c supplies out of the box administrator roles specifically for patching. These roles are EM_PATCH_ ADMINISTRATOR, EM_PATCH_DESIGNER, and EM_PATCH_OPERATOR. You need to grant these roles to appropriate administrators. Move to Setup | Security | Roles. On this page, search for the roles specifically meant for patching. The three roles appear as follows: The EM_PATCH_ADMINISTRATOR role can create, edit, deploy, or delete any patch plan and can also grant privileges to other administrators after creating them. This role has full privileges on any patch plan or patch template in the Enterprise Manager system and maintains the patching infrastructure. The EM_PATCH_DESIGNER role normally identifies patches to be used in the patching cycle across development, testing, and production. This role would be the one of the senior DBA in real life. The patch designer creates patch plans and plan templates, and grants privileges for these plan templates to the EM_PATCH_ OPERATOR role. As an example, the patch designer will select a set of recommended and other manually selected patches for an Oracle 11g database and create a patch plan. This role will then test the patching process in a development environment, and save the successfully analyzed or deployed patch plan as a plan template. The patch designer will then publish the Oracle 11g database patching plan template to the patch operator—probably the junior DBA or application DBA in real life. Next, the patch operator creates new patch plans using the template (but cannot create a template), and adds a different list of targets, such as other Oracle 11g databases in the test, staging, or production environment. This role then schedules the deployment of the patches to all these environments—using the same template again and again. Summary: Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12 c allows automation of the tedious patching procedure used in many organizations today, to patch their Oracle databases and servers. This is achieved via the Database Lifecycle Management Pack, which is one of the main licensable packs of Enterprise Manager. Sophisticated Deployment Procedures are provided out of the box to fulfill many different types of patching tasks, and this helps you to achieve mass patching of multiple targets with multiple patches in a fully automated manner, thus making tremendous savings in administrative time and effort. Some companies have estimated savings of up to 98 percent in patching tasks in their data centers. Different types of patches can be applied in this manner, including CPUs, PSUs, Patch sets and other one-off patches. Different versions of databases are supported, such as 9i, 10 g and 11 g. For the first time, the upgrade of single-instance databases is also possible via Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. There is full integration of the patching capabilities of Enterprise Manager with My Oracle Support (MOS). The support site retains the configuration of all the components managed by Enterprise Manager inside the company. Since the current version and patch information of the components is known, My Oracle Support is able to provide appropriate patch recommendations for many targets, including the latest security fixes. This ensures that the company is up to date with regards to security protection. A full division of roles is available, such as Patch Administrator, Designer, and Operator. It is possible to take the My Oracle Support recommendations, select patches for targets, put them into a patch plan, deploy the patch plan and then create a plan template from it. The template can then be published to any operator who can then create their own patch plans for other targets. In this way patching can be tested, verified, and then pushed to production. In all, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12 c offers valuable automation methods for Mass Patching, allowing Administrators to ensure that their systems have the latest security patches, and enabling them to control the application of patches on development, test, and production servers from the centralized location of the Software Library. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Author Podcast - Bob Griesemer on Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g [Article] Managing Oracle Business Intelligence [Article] Author Podcast - Ronald Rood discusses the birth of Oracle Scheduler [Article]

How to do it... Imports: First we will import the required Pygame modules. If Pygame is installed properly, we should get no errors: import pygame, sys from pygame.locals import * Initialization: We will initialize Pygame by creating a display of 400 by 300 pixels and setting the window title to Hello world: pygame.init() screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300)) pygame.display.set_caption('Hello World!') The main game loop: Games usually have a game loop, which runs forever until, for instance, a quit event occurs. In this example, we will only set a label with the text Hello world at coordinates (100, 100). The text has a font size of 19, red color, and falls back to the default font: while True: sys_font = pygame.font.SysFont("None", 19) rendered = sys_font.render('Hello World', 0, (255, 100, 100)) screen.blit(rendered, (100, 100)) for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == QUIT: pygame.quit() sys.exit() pygame.display.update() We get the following screenshot as the end result: The following is the complete code for the Hello World example: import pygame, sys from pygame.locals import * pygame.init() screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300)) pygame.display.set_caption('Hello World!') while True: sysFont = pygame.font.SysFont("None", 19) rendered = sysFont.render('Hello World', 0, (255, 100, 100)) screen.blit(rendered, (100, 100)) for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == QUIT: pygame.quit() sys.exit() pygame.display.update() How it works... It might not seem like much, but we learned a lot in this recipe. The functions that passed the review are summarized in the following table: Function Description pygame.init() This function performs the initialization and needs to be called before any other Pygame functions are called. pygame.display.set_mode((400, 300)) This function creates a so-called   Surface object to draw on. We give this function a tuple representing the width and height of the surface. pygame.display.set_caption('Hello World!') This function sets the window title to a specified string value. pygame.font.SysFont("None", 19) This function creates a system font from a comma-separated list of fonts (in this case none) and a font size parameter. sysFont.render('Hello World', 0, (255, 100, 100)) This function draws text on a surface. The second parameter indicates whether anti-aliasing is used. The last parameter is a tuple representing the RGB values of a color. screen.blit(rendered, (100, 100)) This function draws on a surface. pygame.event.get() This function gets a list of Event objects. Events represent some special occurrence in the system, such as a user quitting the game. pygame.quit() This function cleans up resources used by Pygame. Call this function before exiting the game. pygame.display.update() This function refreshes the surface.   Drawing with Pygame Before we start creating cool games, we need an introduction to the drawing functionality of Pygame. As we noticed in the previous section, in Pygame we draw on the Surface objects. There is a myriad of drawing options—different colors, rectangles, polygons, lines, circles, ellipses, animation, and different fonts. How to do it... The following steps will help you diverge into the different drawing options you can use with Pygame: Imports: We will need the NumPy library to randomly generate RGB values for the colors, so we will add an extra import for that: import numpy Initializing colors: Generate four tuples containing three RGB values each with NumPy: colors = numpy.random.randint(0, 255, size=(4, 3)) Then define the white color as a variable: WHITE = (255, 255, 255) Set the background color: We can make the whole screen white with the following code: screen.fill(WHITE) Drawing a circle: Draw a circle in the center with the window using the first color we generated: pygame.draw.circle(screen, colors[0], (200, 200), 25, 0) Drawing a line: To draw a line we need a start point and an end point. We will use the second random color and give the line a thickness of 3: pygame.draw.line(screen, colors[1], (0, 0), (200, 200), 3) Drawing a rectangle: When drawing a rectangle, we are required to specify a color, the coordinates of the upper-left corner of the rectangle, and its dimensions: pygame.draw.rect(screen, colors[2], (200, 0, 100, 100)) Drawing an ellipse: You might be surprised to discover that drawing an ellipse requires similar parameters as for rectangles. The parameters actually describe an imaginary rectangle that can be drawn around the ellipse: pygame.draw.ellipse(screen, colors[3], (100, 300, 100, 50), 2) The resulting window with a circle, line, rectangle, and ellipse using random colors: The code for the drawing demo is as follows: import pygame, sys from pygame.locals import * import numpy pygame.init() screen = pygame.display.set_mode((400, 400)) pygame.display.set_caption('Drawing with Pygame') colors = numpy.random.randint(0, 255, size=(4, 3)) WHITE = (255, 255, 255) #Make screen white screen.fill(WHITE) #Circle in the center of the window pygame.draw.circle(screen, colors[0], (200, 200), 25, 0) # Half diagonal from the upper-left corner to the center pygame.draw.line(screen, colors[1], (0, 0), (200, 200), 3) pygame.draw.rect(screen, colors[2], (200, 0, 100, 100)) pygame.draw.ellipse(screen, colors[3], (100, 300, 100, 50), 2) while True: for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == QUIT: pygame.quit() sys.exit() pygame.display.update() Summary Here we saw how to create a basic game to get us started. The game demonstrated fonts and screen management in the time-honored tradition of Hello world examples. The next section of drawing with Pygame taught us how to draw basic shapes such as rectangles, ovals, circles, lines, and others. We also learned important information about colors and color management. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Using Execnet for Parallel and Distributed Processing with NLTK [Article] TortoiseSVN: Getting Started [Article] Python 3 Object Oriented Programming: Managing objects [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Certainly, whether you are a beginner designer or an expert, creating a responsive website from the ground up can be convoluted. This is probably because of some indispensable technical issues in RWD, such as determining the proper number of columns in the grid and calculating the percentage of the width for each column, determining the correct breakpoint, and other technicalities that usually appear in the development stage. Many threads regarding the issues of creating responsive websites are open on StackOverflow: CSS Responsive grid 1px gap issue (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12797183/cssresponsive-grid-1px-gap-issue) @media queries - one rule overrides another? (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12822984/media-queriesone-rule-overrides-another) Why use frameworks? Following are a few reasons why using a framework is considered a good option: Time saver: If done right, using a framework could obviously save a lot of time. A framework generally comes with predefined styles and rules, such as the width of the gird, the button styles, font sizes, form styles, CSS reset, and other aspects to build a website. So, we don't have to repeat the same process from the beginning but simply follow the instructions to apply the styles and structure the markup. Bootstrap, for example, has been equipped with grid styles (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/scaffolding.html), basic styles (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html), and user interface styles (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html). Community and extension: A popular framework will most likely have an active community that extends the framework functionality. jQuery UI Bootstrap is perhaps a good example in this case; it is a theme for jQuery UI that matches the look and feel of the Bootstrap original theme. Also, Skeleton, has been extended to the WordPress theme (http://themes.simplethemes.com/skeleton/) and to Drupal (http://demo.drupalizing.com/?theme=skeleton). Cross browser compatibility : This task of assuring how the web page is displayed on different browsers is a really painful one. With a framework, we can minimize this hurdle, since the developers, most likely, have done this job before the framework is released publicly. Foundation is a good example in this case. It has been tested in the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 browsers (http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/support.html). Documentation: A good framework also comes with documentation. The documentation will be very helpful when we are working with a team, to get members on the same page and make them follow the standard code-writing convention. Bootstrap ( http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/getting-started.html) and Foundation ( http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/index.php), for example, have provided detailed documentation on how to use the framework. There are actually many responsive frameworks to choose from, such as Skeleton, Bootstrap, and Foundation. Let's take a look. Skeleton Skeleton (http://www.getskeleton.com/) is a minimal responsive framework; if you have been working with the 960.gs framework (http://960.gs/), Skeleton should immediately look familiar. Skeleton is 960 pixels wide with 16 columns in its basic grid; the only difference is that the grid is now responsive by integrating the CSS3 media queries. In case this is the first time you have heard about 960.gs or Grid System, you can follow the screencast tutorial by Jeffrey Way available at http://learncss.tutsplus.com/lesson/css-frameworks/. In this screencast, he shows how Grid System works and also guides you to create a website with 960.gs. It is a good place to start with Grid System. Bootstrap Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) was originally built by Mark Otto (http://markdotto.com) and only intended for internal use in Twitter. Short story: Bootstrap was then launched as a free software for public. In it's early development, the responsive feature was not yet included; it was then added in Version 2 in response to the increasing demand for RWD. Bootstrap has a lot more added features as compared to Skeleton. It is packed with styled user interface components of commonly-used interfaces on a website, such as buttons, navigation, pagination, and forms. Beyond that, Bootstrap is also powered with some custom jQuery plugins, such as a tab, carousel, popover, and modal box. To get started with Bootstrap, you can follow the tutorial series (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA615C8C2E86B555E) by David Cochran (https://twitter.com/davidcochran). He has thoroughly explained from the basics to utilizing the plugins in this series. Bootstrap has been associated with Twitter so far, but since the author has departed from Twitter and Bootstrap itself has grown beyond expectation, Bootstrap is likely to get separated from the Twitter brand as well (http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/09/29/onward/). Foundation Foundation (http://foundation.zurb.com) was built by a team at ZURB (http://www.zurb.com/about/), a product design agency based in California. Similar to Bootstrap, Foundation is beyond just a responsive CSS framework; it is equipped with predefined styles for a common web user interface, such as buttons (http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/buttons.html), navigation (http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/top-bar.html), and forms. In addition to this, it has also been powered up with some jQuery plugins. A few high-profile brands, such as Pixar (http://projection.pixar.com/) and National Geographic Channel (http://globalcloset.education.nationalgeographic.com/), have built their website on top of this framework. Who is using these frameworks? Now, apart from the two high-profile names we have mentioned in the preceding section, it will be nice to see what other brands and websites have been doing with these frameworks to get inspired. Let's take a look. Hivemind Hivemind is a design firm based in Wisconsin. Their website (www.ourhivemind.com) has been built using Skeleton. As befits the Skeleton framework, their website is very neat, simple, and well structured. The following screenshot shows how it responds in different viewport sizes: Living.is Living.is (http://living.is) is a social sharing website for living room stuff, ideas, and inspiration, such as sofas, chairs, and shelves. Their website has been built using Bootstrap. If you have been examining the Bootstrap UI components yourself, you will immediately recognize this from the button styles. The following screenshot shows how the Living.is page is displayed in the large viewport size: When viewed in a smaller viewport, the menu navigation is concatenated, turning into a navigation button with three stripes, as shown in the following screenshot. This approach now seems to be a popular practice, and this type of button is generally agreed to be a navigation button; the new Google Chrome website has also applied this button approach in their new release. When we click or tap on this button, it will expand the navigation downward, as shown in the following screenshot: To get more inspiration from websites that are built with Bootstrap, you can visit http://builtwithbootstrap.com/. However, the websites listed are not all responsive. Swizzle Swizzle (www.getswizzle.com) is an online service and design studio based in Canada. Their website is built on Foundation. The following screenshot shows how it is displayed in the large viewport size: Swizzle used a different way to deliver their navigation in a smaller viewport. Rather than expanding the menu as Bootstrap does, Swizzle replaces the menu navigation with a MENU link that refers to the navigation at the footer. The cons Using a framework also comes with its own problems. The most common problems found when adopting a framework are as follows: Excessive codes: Since a framework is likely to be used widely, it needs to cover every design scenario, and so it also comes with extra styles that you might not need for your website. Surely, you can sort out the styles and remove them, but this process, depending on the framework, could take a lot of time and could also be a painful task. Learning curve: The first time, it is likely that you will need to spend some time to learn how the framework works, including examining the CSS classes, the ID, and the names, and structuring HTML properly. But, this probably will only happen in your first try and won't be an issue once you are familiar with the framework. Less flexibility: A framework comes with almost everything set up, including the grid width, button styles, and border radius, and follows the standard of its developers. If things don't work the way we want them to, changing it could take a lot of time, and if it is not done properly, it could ruin all other code structure. TOther designers may also have particular issues regarding using a framework; you can further follow the discussion on this matter at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/203069/ what-is-the-best-css-framework-and-are-they-worth-the-effort. The CSS Trick forum has also opened a similar thread on this topic at http://css-tricks.com/forums/discussion/11904/css-frameworks-the-pros-and-cons/p1. Summary In this article we discussed some basic things about Responsive Web Design framework. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Creating mobile friendly themes [Article] Tips and Tricks for Getting Started with OpenGL and GLSL 4.0 [Article] Debugging REST Web Services [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Getting ready The following prerequisites have to be met before we can introduce the first Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller into the existing Active Directory domain: In order to add a Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller, the Forest Functional Level (FFL) must be Windows Server 2003. ADPREP is part of the domain controller process and the schema will get upgraded during this process. So the account must have the Schema and Enterprise admins privileges to install the first Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller. If there is a firewall between the new server and the existing domain controllers, make sure all the RPC high ports are open between these servers. The domain controller installation and replication can be controlled by a static or a range of RPC ports by modifying the registry on the domain controllers. The new Windows 2012 server's primary DNS IP address must be the IP address of an existing domain controller. The new server must be able to access the existing Active Directory domain and controllers by NetBIOS and Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). If the new domain controller will be in a new site or in a new subnet, make sure to update the Active Directory Sites and Services with this information. In Windows Server 2012, domain controllers can be remotely deployed by using the Server Manager. The following recipe provides the step-by-step instructions on how to deploy a domain controller in an existing Active Directory environment. How to do it... Install and configure a Windows Server 2012. Join the new Windows Server 2012 to the existing Active Directory domain. Open Server Manager. Navigate to the All Servers group in the left-hand side pane. From the Server Name box, right-click on the appropriate server and select the Add Roles and Features option. You can also select Add Roles and Features from the Manage menu in the command bar. If the correct server is not listed here, you can manually add it from the Manage tab on the top right-hand side and select Add Server. Click on Next on the Welcome window. In the Select Installation Type window, select Role based or Feature based installation. Click on Next. In the Select destination server window, select Select a server from the server pool option and the correct server from the Server Pool box. Click on Next. On the Select server roles window, select Active Directory Domain Services. You will see a pop-up window to confirm the installation of Group Policy Management Tool. It is not required to install the administrative tools on a domain controller. However, this tool is required for the Group Policy Object management and administration. Click on Next. Click on Next in the Select features window. Click on Next on the Active Directory Domain Services window. In the Confirm Installation Selections window, select the Restart the destination server automatically if required option. In the pop-up window click on Yes to confirm the restart option and click on Install. This will begin the installation process. You will see the progress on the installation window itself. This window can be closed without interrupting the installation process. You can get the status update from the notification section in the command bar as shown in the following screenshot: The Post-deployment Configuration option needs to be completed after the Active Directory Domain Services role installation. This process will promote the new server as a domain controller. From the notification window, select Promote this server to a domain controller hyperlink. From the Deployment Configuration window, you should be able to: Install a new forest Install a new child domain Add an additional domain controller for an existing domain Specify alternative credentials for the domain controller promotion, and so on Since our goal is to install an additional domain controller to an existing domain, select the Add a domain controller to an existing domain option. Click on Next. In the Domain Controller Options window, you will see the following options: Domain Name System (DNS) server Global Catalog (GC) Read only Domain controller (RODC) Site name: Type the Directory Service Restore Mode (DSRM) password Select Domain Name System (DNS) server and Global Catalog (GC) checkboxes and provide the Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM) password. Click on Next. Click on Next on the DNS Options window. In the Additional Options window you will see the following options: Install from media Replicate from Accept the default options unless you have technical reasons to modify these. Click on Next. In the Paths window, you can specify the AD Database, Log, and SYSVOL locations. Select the appropriate locations and then click on Next. Review the Microsoft Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides for best practices recommendations. For performance improvements, it is recommended to place database, log, and so on in separate drives. Click on Next on the Preparation Options window. During this process the Active Directory Schema and Domain Preparation will happen in the background. You should be able to review the selected option on the next screen. You can export these settings and configurations to a PowerShell script by clicking on the View Script option in the bottom-right corner of the screen. This script can be used for future domain controller deployments. Click on Next to continue with the installation. The prerequisite checking process will happen in the background. You will see the result in the Prerequisites Check window. This is a new enhancement in Windows Server 2012. Review the result and click on Install. The progress of the domain controller promotion will display on the Installation window. The following warning message will be displayed on the destination server before it restarts the server: You can review the %systemroot%debugdcpromo.log and %SystemRoot%debugnetsetup.log log files to get more information about DCPROMO and domain join-related issues. Summary Thus we learned the details of how to do Active Directory migration and its prerequisites, schema upgrade procedure, verification of the schema version, and installation of the Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller in the existing Windows Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 domain. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Migrating from MS SQL Server 2008 to EnterpriseDB [Article] Moving a Database from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 in Three Steps [Article] Authoring an EnterpriseDB report with Report Builder 2.0 [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) It starts with the Cost Worksheet In PCM, the Cost Worksheet is the common element for all the monetary modules. The Cost Worksheet is a spreadsheet-like module with rows and columns. The following screenshot shows a small part of a typical Cost Worksheet register: The columns are set by PCM but the rows are determined by the organization. The rows are the Cost Codes. This is your cost breakdown structure. This is the lowest level of detail with which money will be tracked in PCM. It can also be called Cost Accounts. All money entered into the documents in any of the monetary modules in PCM will be allocated to a Cost Code on the Cost Worksheet. Even if you do not specifically allocate to a Cost Code, the system will allocate to a system generated Cost Code called NOT COSTED. The NOT COSTED Cost Code is important so no money slips through the cracks. If you forget to assign money to your Cost Codes on the project it will assign the money to this code. When reviewing the Cost Worksheet, a user can review the NOT COSTED Cost Code and see if any money is associated with this code. If there is money associated with NOT COSTED, he can find that document where he has forgotten to allocate all the money to proper Cost Codes. Users cannot edit any numbers directly on the Cost Worksheet; it is a reflection of information entered on various documents on your project. This provides a high level of accountability in that no money can be entered or changed without a document entered someplace within PCM (like can be done with a spreadsheet) The Cost Code itself can be up to 30 characters in length and can be divided into segments to align with the cost breakdown structure, as shown in the following screenshot: The number of Cost Codes and the level of breakdown is typically determined by the accounting or ERP system used by your organization or it can be used as an extension of the ERP system's coding structure. When the Cost Code structure matches, integration between the two systems becomes easier. There are many other factors to consider when thinking about integrating systems but the Cost Code structure is at the core of relating the two systems. Defining the segments within the Cost Codes is done as part of the initial setup and implementation of PCM. This is done in the Cost Code Definitions screen, as shown in the following screenshot: To set up, you must tell PCM what character of the Cost Code the segment starts with and how long the segment is (the number of characters). Once this is done you can also populate a dictionary of titles for each segment. A trick used for having different segment titles for different projects is to create an identical segment dictionary but for different projects. For example, if you have a different list of Disciplines for every project, you can create and define a list of Disciplines for each project with the same starting character and length. Then you can use the proper Cost Code definitions in your layouts and reporting for that project. The following screenshot shows how this can be done: Once the Cost Codes have been defined, the Cost Worksheet will need to be populated for your project. There are various ways to accomplish this. Create a dummy project with the complete list of company Cost Codes you would ever use on a project. When you want to populate the Cost Code list on a new project, use the Copy Cost Codes function from the project tree. Import a list of Cost Codes that have been developed in a spreadsheet (Yes, I used the word "spreadsheet". There are times when a spreadsheet comes in handy – managing a multi-million dollar project is not one of them). PCM has an import function from the Cost Worksheet where you can import a comma-separated values (CSV) file of the Cost Codes and titles. Enter the Cost Codes one at a time from the Cost Worksheet. If there are a small number of Cost Codes, this might be the fastest and easiest method. Understanding the columns of the Cost Worksheet will help you understand how powerful and important the Cost Worksheet really is. The columns of the Cost Worksheet in PCM are set by the system. They are broken down into a few categories, as follows: Budget Commitment Custom Actuals Procurement Variances Miscellaneous Each of the categories has a corresponding color to help differentiate them when looking at the Cost Worksheet. Within each of these categories are a number of columns. The Budget, Commitment, and Custom categories have the same columns while the other categories have their own set of columns. These three categories work basically the same. They can be defined in basic terms as follows: Budget: This is the money that your company has available to spend and is going to be received by the project. Examples depend on the perspective of the setup of PCM. In the example of our cavemen Joe and David, David is the person working for Joe. If David was using PCM, the Budget category would be the amount of the agreed price between Joe and David to make the chair or the amount of money that David was going to be paid by Joe to make the chair. Committed: This is the money that has been agreed to be spent on the project, not the money that has been spent. So in our example it would be the amount of money that David has agreed to pay his subcontractors to supply him with goods and services to build the chair for him. Custom: This is a category that is available to be used by the user for another contracting type. It has its own set of columns identical to the Budget and Commitment categories. This can be used for a Funding module where you can track the amount of money funded for the project, which can be much different from the available budget for the project. Money distributed to the Trends module can be posted to many of the columns as determined by the user upon adding the Trend. The Trend document is not referenced in the following explanations. When money is entered in a document, it must be allocated or distributed to one or multiple Cost Codes. As stated before, if you forget or do not allocate the money to a Cost Code, PCM will allocate the money to the NOT COSTED Cost Code. The system knows what column to place the money in but the user must tell PCM the proper row (Cost Code). If the Status Type of a document is set to Closed or Rejected, the money is removed from the Cost Worksheet but the document is still available to be reviewed. This way only documents that are in progress or approved will be placed on the Cost Worksheet. Let's look at each of the columns individually and explain how money is posted. The only documents that affect the Cost Worksheet are as follows: Contracts (three types) Change Orders Proposals Payment Requisitions Invoices Trends Procurement Contracts Let's look at the first three categories first since they are the most complex. Following is a table of the columns associated with these categories. Understand that the terminology used here is the standard out of the box terminology of PCM and may not match what has been set up in your organization. The third contract type (Custom) can be turned on or off using the Project Settings. It can be used for a variety of types as it has its own set of columns in the Cost Worksheet. The Custom contract type can be used in the Change Management module; however, it utilizes the Commitment tab, which requires the user to understand exactly what category the change is related. The following tables show various columns on the Cost Worksheet starting with the Cost Code itself. The first table shows all the columns used by each of the three contract categories: Cost Worksheet Columns The columns listed above are affected by the Contracts, Purchase Orders, or any Change Document modules. Let's look at specific definitions of what document type can be posted to which column. The Original Column The Original column is used for money distributed from any of the Contract modules. If a Commitment contract is added under the Contracts – Committed module and the money is distributed to various Cost Codes (rows), the column used is the Original Commitment column in the worksheet. It's the same with the Contracts – Budgeted and Contracts – Custom modules. The Purchase Order module is posted to the Commitments category. Money can also be posted to this column for Budget and Commitment contracts from the Change Management module where a phase has been assigned this column. This is not a typical practice as the Original column should be unchangeable from the values on the original contract. The Approved Column The Approved Revisions column is used for money distributed from the Change Order module. If a Change Order is added under the Change Order module against a commitment contract and the money is distributed to various Cost Codes (rows), and the Change Order has been approved, the money on this document is posted to the Approved Commitment Revisions column in the worksheet. We will discuss what happens prior to approval later. The Revised Column The Revised column is a computed column adding the original money and the approved money. Money cannot be distributed to this column from any document in PCM. The Pending Changes Column The Pending Revisions column can be populated by several document types as follows: Change Orders: Prior to approving the Change Order document, all money associated with the Change Order document created from the Change Orders module from the point of creation will be posted to the Pending Changes column. Change Management: These are documents associated with a change management process where the change phase is associated with the Pending column. This can be from the Proposal module or the Change Order module. Proposals: These are documents created in the Proposals module either through the Change Management module or directly from the module itself. The Estimated Changes Column The Estimated Revisions column is populated from phases in Change Management that have been assigned to distribute money to this column The Adjustment Column The Adjustment column is populated from phases in Change Management that have been assigned to distribute money to this column The Projected Column The Projected column is a computed column of all columns associated with a category. This column is very powerful in understanding the potential cost at completion of this Cost Code. Actuals There are two columns that are associated with actual cost documents in PCM. The modules that affect these columns are as follows: Payment Requisitions Invoices These columns are the Actuals Received and Actuals Issued columns. These column names can be confusing and should be considered for change during implementation. This is the way you could look at what money these columns include. Actuals Received: This column holds money where you have received a Payment Requisition or Invoice to be paid by you. This also includes the Custom category. Actuals Issued: This column holds money where you have issued a Payment Requisition or Invoice to be paid to you. As Payment Requisitions or Invoices are being entered and the money distributed to Cost Codes, this money will be placed in one of these two columns depending on the contract relationship associated with these documents. Be aware that money is placed into these columns as soon as it is entered into Payment Requisitions or Invoices regardless of approval or certification. Procurement There are many columns relating to the Procurement module. This book does not go into details of the Procurement module. The column names related to Procurement are as follows: Procurement Estimate Original Estimate Estimate Accuracy Estimated Gross Profit Buyout Purchasing Buyout Variances There are many Variance columns that are computed columns. These columns show the variance (or difference) between other columns on the worksheet, as follows. Original Variance: The Original Budget minus the Original Commitment Approved Variance: The Revised Budget minus the Revised Commitment Pending Variance: The (Revised Budget plus Pending Budget Revisions) minus (Revised Commitment plus Pending Commitment) Projected Variance: The Projected Budget minus the Projected Commitment These columns are very powerful to help analyze relationships between the Budget category and the Commitment category. Miscellaneous There are a few miscellaneous columns as follows that are worth noting so you understand what the numbers mean: Budget Percent: This represents the percentage of the Actuals Issued column of the Revised Budget column for that Cost Code. Commitment Percentage: This represents the percentage of the Actuals Received column of the Revised Commitment column for that Cost Code. Planned to Commit: This is the planned expenditure for the Cost Code. This value can only be populated from the Details tab of the Cost Code. It is also used for an estimators value of the Cost Code. Drilling down to the detail The beauty of the Cost Worksheet is the ability to quickly review what documents have had an effect on which column on the worksheet. Look at the Cost Worksheet as a ten-thousand foot view of the money on your project. There is a lot of information that can be gleaned from this high-level review especially if you are using layouts properly. If you see some numbers that need further review, then drilling down to the detail directly from the Cost Worksheet is quite simple. To drill down to the detail, click on the Cost Code. This will bring up a new page with tabs for the different categories. Click on the tab you wish to review and the grid shows all the documents where some or all the money has been posted to this Cost Code. This page shows all columns affected by the selected category, with the rows representing each document and the corresponding value from that document that affects the selected Cost Code on the Cost Worksheet. From this page you can click on the link under the Item column (as shown in the previous screenshot) to open the actual document that the row represents. Summary Understanding the concepts in this article is key to understanding how the money flows within PCM. Take the time to review this information so that other articles of the book on changes, payments, and forecasting make more sense. The ability to have all aspects of the money on your project accessible from one module is extremely powerful and should be one of the modules that you refer to on a regular basis. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Author Podcast - Ronald Rood discusses the birth of Oracle Scheduler [Article] Author Podcast - Bob Griesemer on Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g [Article] Oracle Integration and Consolidation Products [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) I would like to introduce you to Django by using a definition straight from its official website: Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. The first part of this definition makes clear that Django is a software framework written in Python and designed to support the development of web applications by offering a series of solutions to common problems and an abstraction of common design patterns for web development. The second part already gives you a it clear idea of the basic concepts on which Django is built, by highlighting its capabilities on rapid development without compromising the quality and the maintainability of the code. To get the job done in a fast and clean way, the Django stack is made up of a series of layers that have nearly no dependencies between them. This introduces great benefits as it will drive you to code with almost no knowledge sharing between components making future changes easy to apply and avoiding side effects on other components. All this identifies Django as a loosely coupled framework and its structure is a consequence of the just described approach and can be defined as the Model-Template-View (MTV) framework, a variation of the well know architectural pattern called Model-View-Controller (MVC). The MTV structure can be explained in the following way: Model: The application data View: Which data is presented Template: How the data is presented As you can understand from the architectural structure of the framework one of the most basic and important Django components is the Object Relational Mapper (ORM) that lets you define your data models entirely in Python and offers a complete dynamic API to access your database. The template engine also plays an important role in making the framework so great and easy to use—it is built to be designer-friendly. This means the templates are just HTML and that the template language doesn't add any variable assignments or advanced logic, offering only "programming-esque" functionality such as looping. Another innovative concept in the Django template engine is the introduction of template inheritance. The possibility to extend a base template discourages redundancy and helps you to keep the information in one place. The key to the success of a web framework is to also make it possible to easily plug third part modules in it. Django uses this concept and it comes—like Python—with "batteries included". It is built with a system to plug in applications in an easy way and the framework itself already includes a series of useful applications that you can feel free to use or not. One of the included applications that makes Django successful is the automatic admin interface, a complete, user-friendly, and production-ready web admin interface for your projects. It's easy to customize and extend and is a great added value that helps you to speed up most common web projects. In modern web application development, systems are often built for a global audience, and web frameworks have to take into account the need to provide support for internalization and localization. Django has full support for the translation of text, formatting of dates, times, and numbers, and time zones, and all this makes it possible to create multilingual web projects in a clear and easy way. On top of all these great features, Django is shipped with a complete cache framework that is a must-have support in a web framework if we want to grant great performance with high load. This component makes caching an easy task offering supports for different types of cache backends, from memory cache to the most famous, memacached. There are several other reasons that make Django a great framework and most of them can be really understood by diving into the framework, so do not hesitate and let's jump into Django. Installation Installing Django on your system is very easy. As it is just Python, you will only need a small effort to get it up and running on your machine. We will do it in two easy steps: Step 1 – What do I need? The only thing you need on your system to get Django running is obviously Python. At the time of writing this book, the latest version available is the 1.5c1 (release candidate) and it works on all Python versions from 2.6.5 to 2.7, and it also features experimental support for Version 3.2 and Version 3.3. Get the right Python package for your system at http://www.python.org. If you are running Linux or Mac OSX, Python is probably already installed in your operating system. If you are using Windows you will need to add the path of the Python installation folder (C:Python27) to the environment variables. You can verify that Python is installed by typing python in your shell. The expected result should look similar to the following output: Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 20 2012, 16:23:33) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 4.0 (tags/Apple/clang-418.0.60)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> Step 2 – Get and install Django Now we will see two methods to install Django: through a Python package manager tool called pip and the manual way. Feel free to use the one that you prefer. At the time of writing this book the Django Version 1.5 is in the release candidate status, if this is still the case jump to the manual installation step and download the 1.5 release candidate package in place of the last stable one. Installing Django with pip Install pip; the easiest way is to get the installer from http://www.pip-installer.org: If you are using a Unix OS execute the following command: $ sudo pip install Django If you are using Windows you will need to start a shell with administrator privileges and run the following command: $ pip install Django Installing Django manually Download the last stable release from the official Django website https://www.djangoproject.com/download/. Uncompress the downloaded file using the tool that you prefer. Change to the directory just created (cd Django-X.Y). If you are using a Unix OS execute the following command: $ sudo python setup.py install If you are using Windows you will need to start a shell with administrator privileges and run the command: $ python setup.py install Django Verifying the Django installation To verify that Django is installed on your system you just need to open a shell and launch a Python console by typing python. In the Python console try to import Django: >>> import django >>> django.get_version() '1.5' c1 And that's it!! Now that Django is installed on your system we can start to explore all its potential. Summary In this article we learned about what Django actually is, what you can do with it, and why it's so great. We also learned how to download and install Django with minimum fuss and then set it up so that you can use it as soon as possible. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Creating an Administration Interface in Django [Article] Creating an Administration Interface with Django 1.0 [Article] Views, URLs, and Generic Views in Django 1.0 [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) A very important feature of reproducible science is generating reports. The main idea of automatic report generation is that the results of analyses are not manually copied to the report. Instead, both the R code and the report's text are combined in one or more plain text files. The report is generated by a tool that executes the chunks of code, captures the results (including figures), and generates the report by weaving the report's text and results together. To achieve this, you need to learn a few special commands, called markup specifiers, that tell the report generator which part of your text is R code, and which parts you want in special typesetting such as boldface or italic. There are several markup languages to do this, but the following is a minimal example using the Markdown language: A simple example with Markdown The left panel shows the plain text file in RStudio's editor and the right panel shows the web page that is generated by clicking on the Knit HTML button. The markup specifiers used here are the double asterisks for boldface, single underscores for slanted font, and the backticks for code. By adding an r to the first backtick, the report generator executes the code following it. To reproduce this example, go to File | New | R Markdown, copy the text as shown in the preceding screenshot, and save as one.Rmd. Next, click on Knit HTML. The Markdown language is one of many markup languages in existence and RStudio supports several of them. RStudio has excellent support for interweaving code with Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, or even in plain comments. Notebooks are useful to quickly share annotated lines of code or results. There are a few ways to control the layout of a notebook. The Markdown language is easy to learn and has a fair amount of layout options. It also allows you to include equations in the LaTeX format. The HTML option is really only useful if you aim to create a web page. You should know, or be willing to learn HTML to use it. The result of these three methods is always a web page (that is, an HTML file) although this can be exported to PDF. If you need ultimate control over your document's layout, and if you need features like automated bibliographies and equation numbering, LaTeX is the way to go. With this last option, it is possible to create papers for scientific journals straight from your analysis. Depending on the chosen system, a text file with a different extension is used as the source file. The following table gives an overview: Markup system Input file type Report file type Notebook Markdown HTML LaTeX .R .Rmd .Rhtml .Rnw .html (via .md) .html (via .md) .html .pdf (via .tex) Finally, we note that the interweaving of code and text (often referred to as literate programming) may serve two purposes. The first, described in this article, is to generate a data analysis report by executing code to produce the result. The second is to document the code itself, for example, by describing the purpose of a function and all its arguments. Prerequisites for report generation For notebooks, R Markdown, and Rhtml, RStudio relies on Yihui Xie's knitr package for executing code chunks and merging the results. The knitr package can be installed via RStudio's Packages tab or with the command install. packages("knitr"). For LaTeX/Sweave files, the default is to use R's native Sweave driver. The knitr package is easier to use and has more options for fine-tuning, so in the rest of this article we assume that knitr is always used. To make sure that knitr is also used for Sweave files, go to Tools | Options | Sweave and choose knitr as Weave Rnw files. If you're working in an RStudio project, you can set this as a project option as well by navigating to Project | Project Options | Sweave. When you work with LaTeX/Sweave, you need to have a working LaTeX distribution installed. Popular distributions are TeXLive for Linux, MikTeX for Windows, and MacTeX for Mac OS X. Notebook The easiest way to generate a quick, sharable report straight from your Rscript is by creating a notebook via File | Notebook, or by clicking on the Notebook button all the way on the top right of the Rscript tab (right next to the Source button). Notebook options RStudio offers three ways to generate a notebook from an Rscript—the simplest are Default and knitr::stitch. These only differ a little in layout. The knitr::spin mode allows you to use the Markdown markup language to specify text layout. The markup options are presented after navigating to File | Notebook or after clicking on the Notebook button. Under the hood, the Default and knitr::stitch options use knitr to generate a Markdown file which is then directly converted to a web page (HTML file). The knitr::spin mode allows for using Markdown commands in your comments and will convert your .R file to a .Rmd (R Markdown) file before further processing. In Default mode, R code and printed results are rendered to code blocks in a fixedwidth font with a different background color. Figures are included in the output and the document is prepended with a title, an optional author name, and the date. The only option to include text in your output is to add it as an R comment (behind the # sign) and it will be rendered as such. In knitr::stitch mode, instead of prepending the report with an author name and date, the report is appended with a call to Sys.time() and R's sessionInfo(). The latter is useful since it shows the context in which the code was executed including R's version, locale settings, and loaded packages. The result of the knitr::stitch mode depends on a template file called knitr-template.Rnw, included with the knitr package. It is stored in a directory that you can find by typing system. file('misc',package='knitr'). The knitr::spin mode allows you to escape from the simple notebook and add text outside of code blocks, using special markup specifiers. In particular, all comment lines that are preceded with #' (hash and single quote) are interpreted as the Markdown text. For example, the following code block: # This is printed as comment in a code block 1 + 1 #' This will be rendered as main text #' Markdown **specifiers** are also _recognized_ Will be rendered in the knitr::spin mode as shown in the following screenshot: Reading a notebook in the knitr::spin mode allows for escaping to Markdown The knitr package has several general layout options for included code (that will be discussed in the next section). When generating a notebook in the knitr::spin mode, these options can be set by preceding them with a #+ (hash and plus signs). For example, the following code: #' The code below is _not_ evaluated #+ eval=FALSE 1 + 1 Results in the following report: Setting knitr options for a notebook in knitr::spin mode Although it is convenient to be able to use Markdown commands in the knitr::spin mode, once you need such options it is often better to switch to R Markdown completely, as discussed in the next section. Note that a notebook is a valid R script and can be executed as such. This is in contrast with the other report generation options—those are text files that need knitr or Sweave to be processed. Publishing a notebook Notebooks are ideal to share examples or quick results from fairly simple data analyses. Since early 2012, the creators of RStudio offer a website, called RPubs. com, where you can upload your notebooks by clicking on the Publish button in the notebook preview window that automatically opens after a notebook has been generated. Do note that this means that results will be available for the world to see, so be careful when using personal or otherwise private data. Summary In this article we discussed prerequisites for producing a report. We also learnt how to produce reports via Notebook that automatically include the results of an analysis. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Organizing, Clarifying and Communicating the R Data Analyses[Article] Customizing Graphics and Creating a Bar Chart and Scatterplot in R [Article] Graphical Capabilities of R[Article]