A while ago, I made what I'm hoping is my last purchase from eBay [I spend WAY too much there]. What was it you ask? A mini-DVI to DVI adapter. Thus hooking my MacBook up to my 22' Samsung monitor [I used to do a lot of gaming, now it's all work]. So now I've basically unplugged everything from my PC [eww, I knoww] and hooked it into the MacBook. I feel as though I'm overloading it, but it's fine, I feel. I might want to get a USB hub soon. Any suggestions? I'd prefer self-powered, since I don't have much room for more AC adapters under my desk.

Needless to say, I feel more organized than before. Not to mention comfortable.

Leave some comments below!

The clip above, is as always just a rough cut. When the film is finished it will look much better as a result of post production.

Next up, more scenes featuring Harold Dennis and Steve Parks. Thanks for your support. Talk to you next week. Enjoy.

Within the space of two day last week I managed to break my mobile phone and my laptop... not handy (especially as the GF hasn't been around). I have had a Dell XPS M1330 for around 5 months, and the whole experience of dealing with Dell up until last week had been a pleasant one. This all changed when I rang Dell customer service to find out why my computer battery wasn’t charging (I knew beforehand that the AC adapter had broken, and that I simply needed a new adapter).

After eventually getting through I was greeted by a friendly young sounding man who obviously was not from the UK. He listened to my problem and acknowledged that I was speaking to him through Skype. He asked me to run a diagnostic on my machine and to call them back with the results of this test. He then assured me that once this was done that he would send a new Adapter to Spain the next day.
Well, I ran the diagnostics and rang them back... this is where the problems started.

I was greeted again by another gentleman from a slightly more exotic region than my own and was asked if I had run the diagnostics... I replied (truthfully) yes, and then told him the results. After listening to this the man then asked me to run the diagnostics on my computer.... WTF I JUST GAVE YOU THE RESULTS!!!!!
Then then asked if I had turned my computer "off and of again"... to which I replied of course. After much broken English he agreed to send the part to me.

I was then told that because I lived in Spain that they could not send me the part because of "security reasons"... ah I see... AC adapters running amuck throughout Spanish immigration.... makes perfect sense.

They then agreed to send the part to the UK (no security problems there then), but only on the condition that I send my old adapter (which was the only thing that was, and still is, keeping my laptop alive) back to them the same day. I told them that this was not possible under any circumstance, and to their credit they agreed to let me keep my old faulty adapter.
My contact in the UK received the adapter the next day.... it appeared to be the wrong part. I was angry... very angry. After much investigation and using the magic of social media I found that the adapter that I was send would work with my laptop although it wouldn’t fit "as snugly". The total length of my calls to Dell tops 2 hours.

Now, compare this to Nokia. Last week I sat on my N95 with my keys in my pocket and cracked the screen. Once I had found a Nokia service center I took the phone there and explained in broken Spanish the problem. They said that it wasn’t a massive problem and that I could get the phone back the next week. One week later I went into the store paid over my money (a measly €45, which I thought was pretty cheap)... and as if by magic I was returned my N95 complete with new screen installed. I was very happy.

So my question is... seeing as Dell probably sells more computers than any other manufacturer world wide... why don’t they set up service centers??? It would be easy... take the part in if can be fixed.... get it fixed... if it can’t replace the part. Apple run a similar system in their stores and it works... but Dell have taken the cheap option and employed a gathering of people in a shed in the Middle East to read from a script as their version of customer support. It is, quite frankly, a joke.

'I want to control the transactionality in my Mediation Module so that I can implement a service's operation with three calls to a JDBC adapter - and I want them all to be tied together - either the whole operation succeeds or fails. How can I do that?'.

Well, as of WebSphere ESB 6.1, this is pretty easy. Just tie together an export of some sort, a mediation flow component, and a JDBC adapter in a Mediation Module, in a global transaction, using the techniques referenced in Part 1 of this series. Then use the new Service Invoke mediation primitive to do three sequential invocations of the JDBC adapter, and Bob's your uncle.

The result will look something like this:

However, it sometimes gets a bit more complicated.

OK, that's great. Now we need to implement an operation where three calls to the database need to be bound together into a transaction. However, one subsequent call should sit outside the transaction - if it fails, it shouldn't affect the other three. How can I do that?

The trick lies in refactoring the interfaces involved. Take the mediation flow component, and conceptually split it into two, componentA and componentB. The export connects to componentA, which connects to componentB, which connects to the JDBC adapter. componentA should also be connected directly to the JDBC adapter. componentA should have the same interface as before. However, you should create a new interface for componentB, which has an operation for each transaction that needs to be bound together (the three calls to the database in our example above).

(the gotcha here is that in a mediation module, you can only have one mediation flow component, so componentB will have to be a Java component)

Here's the important part: make sure the global transaction boundaries cover componentB and the database only. Do not include componentA or the export.

Now, have the 'master' operation in componentA call your new operation on componentB first. Then, have it call the other operation on the JDBC adapter directly (the one that shouldn't be tied into the transaction).

Your transactional scenario is now set up as requested, and will behave to tie together the first three calls to the database (or whatever else you do in the operation implementation in componentB). It should look like this:

The film production continues to progress. It never progresses as quickly as we would like but we are resolute in our belief in the film and continue to work very hard on bringing 'The Visitor from Elsewhere' complete and wrapped to a large audience. Thanks for your support. Please tell your friends about the movie and the movie blog as I will continue to try to keep it updated as time permits, with my goal remaining to be a post every week. Thanks again to all of you watching.

Patterns originated as an architectural concept by Christopher Alexander (1977/79). In 1987, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham began experimenting with the idea of applying patterns to programming and presented their results at the OOPSLA conference that year. Design patterns gained popularity in computer science after the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published in 1994.

Classification:

Design Patterns originally grouped design patterns into the categories Creational Patterns, Structural Patterns, and Behavioral Patterns, and described them using the concepts of delegation, aggregation, and consultation.

Creational patterns

These patterns have to do with class instantiation. They can be further divided into class-creation patterns and object-creational patterns. While class-creation patterns use inheritance effectively in the instantiation process, object-creation patterns use delegation to get the job done.

• Abstract Factory groups object factories that have a common theme.
• Builder constructs complex objects by separating construction and representation.
• Factory Method creates objects without specifying the exact class to create.
• Prototype creates objects by cloning an existing object.
• Singleton restricts object creation for a class to only one instance.

Structural patterns

These concern class and object composition. They use inheritance to compose interfaces and define ways to compose objects to obtain new functionality.

• Adapter allows classes with incompatible interfaces to work together by wrapping its own interface around that of an already existing class.
• Bridge decouples an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.
• Composite composes one-or-more similar objects so that they can be manipulated as one object.
• Decorator dynamically adds/overrides behaviour in an existing method of an object.
• Facade provides a simplified interface to a large body of code.
• Flyweight reduces the cost of creating and manipulating a large number of similar objects.
• Proxy provides a placeholder for another object to control access, reduce cost, and reduce complexity.

Behavioral patterns

These design patterns are about classes objects communication. They are specifically concerned with communication between objects.

• Chain of responsibility delegates commands to a chain of processing objects.
• Command creates objects which encapsulate actions and parameters.
• Interpreter implements a specialized language.
• Iterator accesses the elements of an object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation.
• Mediator allows loose coupling between classes by being the only class that has detailed knowledge of their methods.
• Memento provides the ability to restore an object to its previous state (undo).
• Observer is a publish/subscribe pattern which allows a number of observer objects to see an event.
• State allows an object to alter its behavior when its internal state changes.
• Strategy allows one of a family of algorithms to be selected on-the-fly at runtime.
• Template method defines the skeleton of an algorithm as an abstract class, allowing its subclasses to provide concrete behavior.
• Visitor separates an algorithm from an object structure by moving the hierarchy of methods into one object.

Concurrency patterns

Active Object: The Active Object design pattern decouples method execution from method invocation that reside in their own thread of control. The goal is to introduce concurrency, by using asynchronous method invocation and a scheduler for handling requests.

Balking: The Balking pattern is a software design pattern that only executes an action on an object when the object is in a particular state.

Double checked locking : Double-checked locking is a software design pattern also known as "double-checked locking optimization". The pattern is designed to reduce the overhead of acquiring a lock by first testing the locking criterion (the 'lock hint') in an unsafe manner; only if that succeeds does the actual lock proceed.

The pattern, when implemented in some language/hardware combinations, can be unsafe. It can therefore sometimes be considered to be an anti-pattern.

Guarded In concurrent programming, guarded suspension is a software design pattern for managing operations that require both a lock to be acquired and a precondition to be satisfied before the operation can be executed.

Monitor object A monitor is an approach to synchronize two or more computer tasks that use a shared resource, usually a hardware device or a set of variables.

Read write lock A read/write lock pattern or simply RWL is a software design pattern that allows concurrent read access to an object but requires exclusive access for write operations.

Scheduler The scheduler pattern is a software design pattern. It is a concurrency pattern used to explicitly control when threads may execute single-threaded code.

Thread pool In the thread pool pattern in programming, a number of threads are created to perform a number of tasks, which are usually organized in a queue. Typically, there are many more tasks than threads.

Thread-specific storage Thread-local storage (TLS) is a computer programming method that uses static or global memory local to a thread.

Reactor The reactor design pattern is a concurrent programming pattern for handling service requests delivered concurrently to a service handler by one or more inputs. The service handler then demultiplexes the incoming requests and dispatches them synchronously to the associated request handlers.

What is cool about control adapters is that they do not require a page developer to program against a new control, or modify the control programming model semantics (you still use the same control properties, methods, events and templates you did before). Indeed – a page developer can be entirely oblivious that a control adapter is being used (the control adapter model makes it very clean to register and encapsulate this support).

The CSS Control Adapter Toolkit includes a bunch of pre-built control adapter samples that show how you can use the control adapter architecture to emit 100% CSS based rendering output (no tables or inline styles – instead use external CSS stylesheets for everything).

References:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/02/444850.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/12/21/433692.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228122.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/67276kc5.aspx
http://www.asp.net/CssAdapters/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163543.aspx

Die Hardware-Lösung stammt von Hackern von DesbloqueioBr. Die haben die "falsche" Sim-Karte als kleinen schlanken Adapter-Chip verwirklicht. Der wird auf der Sim-Karte angebracht, die man nutzen möchte, und das Ganze steckt man einfach normal in das iPhone hinein.

Auf iPhonehacks.com wird berichtet, dass unabhängige Tester den Chip schon mit zwei verschiedenen iPhones ausprobiert haben und beide Male das Handy erfolgreich nutzen konnten. Da keine Veränderungen am Telefon vorgenommen werden, sollte es eigentlich auch keine Probleme mit etwaigen Updates oder bei Garantiefällen geben.

Den Chip will DesbloqueioBr gerüchteweise schon bald zum Preis von 250-375 US-Dollar verkaufen. Hier noch ein Video der Gruppe, mit dem wahrscheinlich ersten entsperrten iPhone 3G der Welt.. inklusive Audio-Kommentar, in Portugiesisch, wie ich vermute.

Finally a small tip.. When you want to clean the lens never breath/spit/hrrrr/hhuuhhuuu on them. Never. It will ruin the coatings and decrease image quality... A piece of cloth used for cleaning glasses is the safest way..

So, to the DVD makers of the world.  Stop using crazy voltages to power your players.  You will definatly make your customers much happier.  The sales people will also appreciate the change, as they will no longer have to sit through the abuse of angry parents who can't deal with  their own children.

Here's the sign up form - I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Google Code repository that contains both a start and end copy of the solution so you can see and try the refactoring that was demonstrated.

David O'Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.