Software View

Context: MySQL tables maintain textual data in latin1 character encoding unless the default settings are overridden at the server, database, table or column level. Still it is possible that text in utf8 goes into these latin1 tables (for example via a web form submission). For some reason you want to change the character set from latin1 to utf8.

When software projects go out of hand, estimators are often blamed for not doing their job correct. While there is no question about the negative consequences of hasty estimates, how do you identify if an estimate is good (or bad) in the first place? And to what extent can we relate a failed software project to its estimate?

Here are the characteristics of a good software project estimate:

1. Based on a well defined and credible effort/cost model (estimation technique).
2. Detailed enough so that the coverage of the full scope is verifiable and leads to no ambiguity.
3. The validity, relevance and credibility of historical data used and expert judgment are maintained high.
4. Assumptions are clearly mentioned and verified with the client. Tendency of assumptions not to hold true is evaluated - failures are either tackled as risks or added to the Terms and Conditions of the contract.
5. Risks identified, their impact assessed, and incorporated into the estimate.
6. Facilitates future revision without much burden.

Apart from the above, a good estimate needs to be accepted and supported by the development team, project manager and other stakeholders of both the development company and the client.

In short, a good software project estimate is one that helps create a realizable development plan and that's it (It should also support realizable plan revisions anyway.). This point is important. So read this paragraph again.

If a project fails even with such a good estimate, there's no point of blaming the estimators. It's a matter of not following the initial plan that was expected and conceived to be realizable. As we already know, there are many other reasons for software project failures.

Here's how one might go about deploying a Spring application in JBoss (4.something) that uses JPA with Hibernate as the provider for persistence and JTA for transaction demarcation.

1. Define the Spring configuration file in the web.xml file

Different people have tried this in different ways. For me, configuring ALSA to capture from the "Mix" device didn't work since I don't have a "Mix" listed when I try the amixer command. I could however write the ALSA output to a file by configuring the PCM chain.

Have the following code in your ~/.asoundrc file:

I recently encountered an irritating problem – in fact for the second time. My IP address received from the service provider is blacklisted at Spamhaus. Effect? I send legitimate emails to my clients, they don't receive them. Neither do I receive any warning.

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT)

It was the final day of the Agile Processes And Project Management training carried out at PPSL. As recommended for agile teams, I introduced couple of tools to improve the team performance. One was to use a web based content management system (like Drupal, Wiki) to establish communication needs and maintain software models created and documentation of projects only to a sufficient degree.

You are into Java security. In one command execution (with no questions asked), if you want to

Some seems to have used complicated mechanisms including writing new software to do so. Here's a simple approach:

1. Import the keystore from JKS to PKCS12

I threw my cents at a discussion forum and mentioned two ways to create a video of a flying helicopter with rotor blades ramaining standstill - both approaches after capturing a video of a flying machine with a normal camera (without variable frame rate recording).

I felt trying! Original video was grabbed from YouTube.

Option 1: Use a transcoder and experiment with different output frame rates until the blades are seen standstill.

Option 2: Use a video editing software, remove many frames so that blades are seen standstill.

I tried enabling clustering support in both standard and war distributions of Apache Axis2 version 1.4. It was not as simple as said. I could see possibly a bug related with coding in war distribution. And in both distributions, I could see improper axis2.xml files and several mistakes in packaging jars. Here's how you go about enabling clustering support:

Environment: