Thursday, December 20, 2007

Certified Scrum Master course in Lisboa

Fullsix will bring to Lisbon Mitch Lacey to present the first “Certified Scrum Master” course in Portugal. Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration.

Register Here.

Monday, December 17, 2007

.Net Math 0.7 + 0.2 = 0.89999999999999991

While developing a multicast simulator for my master thesis I had to sum up the bandwidth distribution of the channels.

So, I did a little routine that while it was parsing the bandwidths it would sum up their probabilities.

After all was summed up … the math did not work out as it was supposed and the overall probability did not sum to 1.

Debugging the app I found that .net was doing a very strange sum of doubles:

Immediate windows:


? TotalProbs
0.7
? prob
0.2
? TotalProbs+prob
0.89999999999999991

Strange enough ?

Am I missing something ?

Is it too late to be doing math ?

Code Block:

using System;

using System.Text;

using System.Globalization;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{

class Program
{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

string[] tokens = {"0,2", "0,25","0,25","0,2","0,1"};

double TotalProbs = 0; //Count the overall bandwidth probabilities

double prob = 0;

NumberFormatInfo nfi = new NumberFormatInfo();

nfi.NumberDecimalSeparator = ","; //Force the double separator wherever you are.

for (int i = 0; i <>

{

prob = double.Parse(tokens[i], nfi);

TotalProbs += prob;

}

if (TotalProbs !=1)

{

throw new Exception("This should not happen!!!");

}

}

}
}

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Problems renewing flickr Pro Account! Flickr Support sucks!

I have a Flickr Pro account, but last november my membership ended without prior warning.
One day I went to my flickr page and ... bang ... only a small amount of my photos were there ... My account was reduced to "normal" user limits.

So I tried to renew it quickly but due to some bug they have on the payment of people that have yahoo.com.br Id's I was not able.

So I opened an event in flickr support (case419397 and after case443682)

"My account expired and I want to renew it.
When trying to renew, the prices are presented in Brazilian and not Dollars or Euro as I'm Portuguese.
When I try to pay I get the message "No foi possivel processar a transacão. Tente Mais tarde" in the url https://cbp.3dsolution.com.br/cbp/response.asp?Errorcode=100

I want to renew my flickr account and also want to make sure that all me images uploaded during last year are not deleted.
Please help!"


I took more or less ONE MONTH and 9 messages from support for them to recognize they had a problem and to freely extend my membership for 3 months until they solve the problem (I hope).

Each answer from Flickr support did not address my issue, or simply disregarded what I had previously wrote. Horrible Support!

Today I received the partial good news :)

"We are aware that this is a problem for some of our users and our engineers are currently working to find a solution.

I've added 3 free months of pro to your account so you can get started using your pro features right away. Please try your payment again when this temporary upgrade expires: the issue should be resolved by then.
Regards,
Ana"

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Automatic Properties of c# and problems with Intellisense

Just did a little program to try out the new Automatic Properties of c# as seen on ScottGu’s Blog

It compiles with no errors and runs ok, but in design time I get a lot of errors saying:

“Accessor in non-abstract and non-extern property must declare a body” after the get; and set;

And some “unexpected token” on the new Person …

I’m using Visual Studio 2008 RTM.

Sample console app:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

namespace ConsoleApplication1

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

Person person = new Person { FirstName = "Scott", LastName = "Guthrie", Age = 32 };

}

}

public class Person

{

public string FirstName { get; set; }

public string LastName { get; set; }

public int Age { get; set; }

}

}

Also there is no intellisense as it was supposed to …

Any ideas why it’s not working as it is supposed ?

I'm using Resharper 3.0.2 .. .but with intellisense disabled ... mybe the problem is from this mix...

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

No mouse on Ubunto Server over Virtual PC

I was trying to put the Ubuntu Server to work on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
After installing a Graphical interface in order to be able to use gnuplot I was not able to use the mouse ... the mouse was there but I was not able to control it :(

I found the solution here

  1. At boot press the Esc key enter the grub menu screen.

  2. Make sure your kernel boot line is selected.

  3. Press e to edit the kernel boot line.

  4. Type i8042.noloop at the end of the line.

  5. Press enter to accept the changes and then Publish Postb to boot.

  6. Once logged into Ubuntu, open the /boot/grub/menu.lst as root.

  7. Add i8042.noloop to the end of the kernel boot lines.



The article also explains how to solve Graphic problems with the display and the color depth with Ubunto desktop in Virtual Pc 2007.