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• Repair corrupt hard disk on Mac without install CD

  - by Sarah

  The hard disk of my late 2009 MacBook Pro appears to have become corrupted. I am traveling and do not have my install CD (and won't for several weeks, nor will I be anywhere near an Apple store). The hard disk is not the original, which failed in June 2011. It's some Hitachi replacement installed by IT. History: I was typing an email this afternoon, my computer suddenly started making soft clicking sounds and then froze. I was not moving around. I rebooted, which took a while. I heard more clicking sounds and the computer froze at least once again. It's now kind of working, with mdworker sucking up one CPU. There are no awkward hard drive sounds when I run Chrome or play music. However, when I launched Stickies, I found no trace of my saved Stickies. I ran a live disk verification from within Disk Utility, and it reported Problem: As reported, I don't have access to an installation disc and am nowhere near an area where I can get one for at least two weeks. I have the option of asking someone to go to some trouble and expense to get one for me, but I'm not sure it's worth it: I've read that I can use fsck from single-user mode to repair the disk. Should I just try this? Is it risky? I'm concerned that the clicky sound portends imminent (mechanical) hard drive failure, so it's not worth doing a silly repair. This hard disk is backed up, but I definitely won't be able to access the backup while traveling. I'd like to maximize the probability that I can keep using my computer (and all its current files) while traveling. Update I bit the bullet and ran fsck -fy from single-user mode. It only needed one pass (modification) to reach the "okay" stage. However, rebooting took nearly 5 min and involved several rounds of scratchy sounds and a few bad clicks. I'm now back to kind of using my computer (the same files are missing as before). When I ran live disk verification from Disk Utility this time, however, it reported that the volume appears to be OK. Am I right to infer from the scratchy sounds, however, that my hard drive is still rapidly on its way out? Is there anything else I can do to increase its functionality over the next few weeks?

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• Achieving A 1600 x 900 Resolution For (Guest OS) Ubuntu Under (Host OS) Windows 7

  - by panamack

  I am running Ubuntu 11.10 as a guest OS using VirtualBox 4.1.16 installed on Windows 7 Ultimate. On my laptop I'd like to be able to run Ubuntu in full screen mode at 1600 x 900. I only have options within the virtual machine to select 4:3 display settings such as 1600 x 1200, 1440 x 1050 etc. I have guest additions installed. At the windows command prompt, I tried typing: VBoxManage setextradata "Virtual Ubuntu Coursera ESSAAS" "CustomVideoMode1" "1600x900x16" This didn't work, still no 1600 x 900 res available in Ubuntu. I tried this having read the following section of the VirtualBox help (this also says something about a 'video mode hint feature' not sure what this means): 9.7. Advanced display configuration 9.7.1. Custom VESA resolutions Apart from the standard VESA resolutions, the VirtualBox VESA BIOS allows you to add up to 16 custom video modes which will be reported to the guest operating system. When using Windows guests with the VirtualBox Guest Additions, a custom graphics driver will be used instead of the fallback VESA solution so this information does not apply. Additional video modes can be configured for each VM using the extra data facility. The extra data key is called CustomVideoMode with x being a number from 1 to 16. Please note that modes will be read from 1 until either the following number is not defined or 16 is reached. The following example adds a video mode that corresponds to the native display resolution of many notebook computers: VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "CustomVideoMode1" "1400x1050x16" The VESA mode IDs for custom video modes start at 0x160. In order to use the above defined custom video mode, the following command line has be supplied to Linux: vga = 0x200 | 0x160 vga = 864 For guest operating systems with VirtualBox Guest Additions, a custom video mode can be set using the video mode hint feature. UPDATE 02.06.12 I've just tried creating a new virtual machine using the same original disk image I had been given. This had Guest Additions v 4.1.6 installed and provided me with the 1600 x 900 full screen display I want. It's after I then install Guest Additions v 4.1.16 (the version included with my VirtualBox installation) that my only choices are 4:3 displays e.g. 1600 x 1200. Seems this is the cause.

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• How to Use Windows’ Advanced Search Features: Everything You Need to Know

  - by Chris Hoffman

  You should never have to hunt down a lost file on modern versions of Windows — just perform a quick search. You don’t even have to wait for a cartoon dog to find your files, like on Windows XP. The Windows search indexer is constantly running in the background to make quick local searches possible. This enables the kind of powerful search features you’d use on Google or Bing — but for your local files. Controlling the Indexer By default, the Windows search indexer watches everything under your user folder — that’s C:\Users\NAME. It reads all these files, creating an index of their names, contents, and other metadata. Whenever they change, it notices and updates its index. The index allows you to quickly find a file based on the data in the index. For example, if you want to find files that contain the word “beluga,” you can perform a search for “beluga” and you’ll get a very quick response as Windows looks up the word in its search index. If Windows didn’t use an index, you’d have to sit and wait as Windows opened every file on your hard drive, looked to see if the file contained the word “beluga,” and moved on. Most people shouldn’t have to modify this indexing behavior. However, if you store your important files in other folders — maybe you store your important data a separate partition or drive, such as at D:\Data — you may want to add these folders to your index. You can also choose which types of files you want to index, force Windows to rebuild the index entirely, pause the indexing process so it won’t use any system resources, or move the index to another location to save space on your system drive. To open the Indexing Options window, tap the Windows key on your keyboard, type “index”, and click the Indexing Options shortcut that appears. Use the Modify button to control the folders that Windows indexes or the Advanced button to control other options. To prevent Windows from indexing entirely, click the Modify button and uncheck all the included locations. You could also disable the search indexer entirely from the Programs and Features window. Searching for Files You can search for files right from your Start menu on Windows 7 or Start screen on Windows 8. Just tap the Windows key and perform a search. If you wanted to find files related to Windows, you could perform a search for “Windows.” Windows would show you files that are named Windows or contain the word Windows. From here, you can just click a file to open it. On Windows 7, files are mixed with other types of search results. On Windows 8 or 8.1, you can choose to search only for files. If you want to perform a search without leaving the desktop in Windows 8.1, press Windows Key + S to open a search sidebar. You can also initiate searches directly from Windows Explorer — that’s File Explorer on Windows 8. Just use the search box at the top-right of the window. Windows will search the location you’ve browsed to. For example, if you’re looking for a file related to Windows and know it’s somewhere in your Documents library, open the Documents library and search for Windows. Using Advanced Search Operators On Windows 7, you’ll notice that you can add “search filters” form the search box, allowing you to search by size, date modified, file type, authors, and other metadata. On Windows 8, these options are available from the Search Tools tab on the ribbon. These filters allow you to narrow your search results. If you’re a geek, you can use Windows’ Advanced Query Syntax to perform advanced searches from anywhere, including the Start menu or Start screen. Want to search for “windows,” but only bring up documents that don’t mention Microsoft? Search for “windows -microsoft”. Want to search for all pictures of penguins on your computer, whether they’re PNGs, JPEGs, or any other type of picture file? Search for “penguin kind:picture”. We’ve looked at Windows’ advanced search operators before, so check out our in-depth guide for more information. The Advanced Query Syntax gives you access to options that aren’t available in the graphical interface. Creating Saved Searches Windows allows you to take searches you’ve made and save them as a file. You can then quickly perform the search later by double-clicking the file. The file functions almost like a virtual folder that contains the files you specify. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a saved search that shows you all the new files created in your indexed folders within the last week. You could perform a search for “datecreated:this week”, then click the Save search button on the toolbar or ribbon. You’d have a new virtual folder you could quickly check to see your recent files. One of the best things about Windows search is that it’s available entirely from the keyboard. Just press the Windows key, start typing the name of the file or program you want to open, and press Enter to quickly open it. Windows 8 made this much more obnoxious with its non-unified search, but unified search is finally returning with Windows 8.1.     

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• How to use jQuery Date Range Picker plugin in asp.net

  - by alaa9jo

  I stepped by this page: http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/date_range_picker_using_jquery_ui_16_and_jquery_ui_css_framework/ and let me tell you,this is one of the best and coolest daterangepicker in the web in my opinion,they did a great job with extending the original jQuery UI DatePicker.Of course I made enhancements to the original plugin (fixed few bugs) and added a new option (Clear) to clear the textbox. In this article I well use that updated plugin and show you how to use it in asp.net..you will definitely like it. So,What do I need? 1- jQuery library : you can use 1.3.2 or 1.4.2 which is the latest version so far,in my article I will use the latest version. 2- jQuery UI library (1.8): As I mentioned earlier,daterangepicker plugin is based on the original jQuery UI DatePicker so that library should be included into your page. 3- jQuery DateRangePicker plugin : you can go to the author page or use the modified one (it's included in the attachment),in this article I will use the modified one. 4- Visual Studio 2005 or later : very funny :D,in my article I will use VS 2008. Note: in the attachment,I included all CSS and JS files so don't worry. How to use it? First thing,you will have to include all of the CSS and JS files into your page like this: <script src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/daterangepicker.jQuery.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <link href="CSS/redmond/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <link href="CSS/ui.daterangepicker.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> <style type="text/css"> .ui-daterangepicker { font-size: 10px; } </style> Then add this html: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Font-Size="10px"></asp:TextBox><asp:Button ID="SubmitButton" runat="server" Text="Submit" OnClick="SubmitButton_Click" /> <span>First Date:</span><asp:Label ID="FirstDate" runat="server"></asp:Label> <span>Second Date:</span><asp:Label ID="SecondDate" runat="server"></asp:Label> As you can see,it includes TextBox1 which we are going to attach the daterangepicker to it,2 labels to show you later on by code on how to read the date from the textbox and set it to the labels Now we have to attach the daterangepicker to the textbox by using jQuery (Note:visit the author's website for more info on daterangerpicker's options and how to use them): <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() { $("#<%= TextBox1.ClientID %>").attr("readonly", "readonly"); $("#<%= TextBox1.ClientID %>").attr("unselectable", "on"); $("#<%= TextBox1.ClientID %>").daterangepicker({ presetRanges: [], arrows: true, dateFormat: 'd M, yy', clearValue: '', datepickerOptions: { changeMonth: true, changeYear: true} }); }); </script> Finally,add this C# code: protected void SubmitButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (TextBox1.Text.Trim().Length == 0) { return; } string selectedDate = TextBox1.Text; if (selectedDate.Contains("-")) { DateTime startDate; DateTime endDate; string[] splittedDates = selectedDate.Split("-".ToCharArray(), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); if (splittedDates.Count() == 2 && DateTime.TryParse(splittedDates[0], out startDate) && DateTime.TryParse(splittedDates[1], out endDate)) { FirstDate.Text = startDate.ToShortDateString(); SecondDate.Text = endDate.ToShortDateString(); } else { //maybe the client has modified/altered the input i.e. hacking tools } } else { DateTime selectedDateObj; if (DateTime.TryParse(selectedDate, out selectedDateObj)) { FirstDate.Text = selectedDateObj.ToShortDateString(); SecondDate.Text = string.Empty; } else { //maybe the client has modified/altered the input i.e. hacking tools } } } This is the way on how to read from the textbox,That's it!. FAQ: 1-Why did you add this code?: <style type="text/css"> .ui-daterangepicker { font-size: 10px; } </style> A:For two reasons: 1)To show the Daterangepicker in a smaller size because it's original size is huge 2)To show you how to control the size of it. 2- Can I change the theme? A: yes you can,you will notice that I'm using Redmond theme which you will find it in jQuery UI website,visit their website and download a different theme,you may also have to make modifications to the css of daterangepicker,it's all yours. 3- Why did you add a font size to the textbox? A: To make the design look better,try to remove it and see by your self. 4- Can I register the script at codebehind? A: yes you can 5- I see you have added these two lines,what they do? $("#<%= TextBox1.ClientID %>").attr("readonly", "readonly"); $("#<%= TextBox1.ClientID %>").attr("unselectable", "on"); A:The first line will make the textbox not editable by the user,the second will block the blinking typing cursor from appearing if the user clicked on the textbox,you will notice that both lines are necessary to be used together,you can't just use one of them...for logical reasons of course. Finally,I hope everyone liked the article and as always,your feedbacks are always welcomed and if anyone have any suggestions or made any modifications that might be useful for anyone else then please post it at at the author's website and post a reference to your post here.

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• Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet

  - by Stephen Walther

  The Ajax Control Toolkit is now available from NuGet. This makes it super easy to add the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit to any Web Forms application. If you haven’t used NuGet yet, then you are missing out on a great tool which you can use with Visual Studio to add new features to an application. You can use NuGet with both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms applications. NuGet is compatible with both Websites and Web Applications and it works with both C# and VB.NET applications. For example, I habitually use NuGet to add the latest version of ELMAH, Entity Framework, jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Templates to applications that I create. To download NuGet, visit the NuGet website at: http://NuGet.org Imagine, for example, that you want to take advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit RoundedCorners extender to create cross-browser compatible rounded corners in a Web Forms application. Follow these steps. Right click on your project in the Solution Explorer window and select the option Add Library Package Reference. In the Add Library Package Reference dialog, select the Online tab and enter AjaxControlToolkit in the search box: Click the Install button and the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit will be installed. Installing the Ajax Control Toolkit makes several modifications to your application. First, a reference to the Ajax Control Toolkit is added to your application. In a Web Application Project, you can see the new reference in the References folder: Installing the Ajax Control Toolkit NuGet package also updates your Web.config file. The tag prefix ajaxToolkit is registered so that you can easily use Ajax Control Toolkit controls within any page without adding a @Register directive to the page. <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="ajaxToolkit" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" /> </controls> </pages> </system.web> </configuration> You should do a rebuild of your application by selecting the Visual Studio menu option Build, Rebuild Solution so that Visual Studio picks up on the new controls (You won’t get Intellisense for the Ajax Control Toolkit controls until you do a build). After you add the Ajax Control Toolkit to your application, you can start using any of the 40 Ajax Control Toolkit controls in your application (see http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/samples/ for a reference for the controls). <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm1" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Rounded Corners</title> <style type="text/css"> #pnl1 { background-color: gray; width: 200px; color:White; font: 14pt Verdana; } #pnl1_contents { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <asp:Panel ID="pnl1" runat="server"> <div id="pnl1_contents"> I have rounded corners! </div> </asp:Panel> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="sm1" runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:RoundedCornersExtender TargetControlID="pnl1" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> The page contains the following three controls: Panel – The Panel control named pnl1 contains the content which appears with rounded corners. ToolkitScriptManager – Every page which uses the Ajax Control Toolkit must contain a single ToolkitScriptManager. The ToolkitScriptManager loads all of the JavaScript files used by the Ajax Control Toolkit. RoundedCornersExtender – This Ajax Control Toolkit extender targets the Panel control. It makes the Panel control appear with rounded corners. You can control the “roundiness” of the corners by modifying the Radius property. Notice that you get Intellisense when typing the Ajax Control Toolkit tags. As soon as you type <ajaxToolkit, all of the available Ajax Control Toolkit controls appear: When you open the page in a browser, then the contents of the Panel appears with rounded corners. The advantage of using the RoundedCorners extender is that it is cross-browser compatible. It works great with Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari even though different browsers implement rounded corners in different ways. The RoundedCorners extender even works with an ancient browser such as Internet Explorer 6. Getting the Latest Version of the Ajax Control Toolkit The Ajax Control Toolkit continues to evolve at a rapid pace. We are hard at work at fixing bugs and adding new features to the project. We plan to have a new release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each month. The easiest way to get the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit is to use NuGet. You can open the NuGet Add Library Package Reference dialog at any time to update the Ajax Control Toolkit to the latest version.

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• C# 4.0: Dynamic Programming

  - by Paulo Morgado

  The major feature of C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Not just dynamic typing, but dynamic in broader sense, which means talking to anything that is not statically typed to be a .NET object. Dynamic Language Runtime The Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is piece of technology that unifies dynamic programming on the .NET platform, the same way the Common Language Runtime (CLR) has been a common platform for statically typed languages. The CLR always had dynamic capabilities. You could always use reflection, but its main goal was never to be a dynamic programming environment and there were some features missing. The DLR is built on top of the CLR and adds those missing features to the .NET platform. The Dynamic Language Runtime is the core infrastructure that consists of: Expression Trees The same expression trees used in LINQ, now improved to support statements. Dynamic Dispatch Dispatches invocations to the appropriate binder. Call Site Caching For improved efficiency. Dynamic languages and languages with dynamic capabilities are built on top of the DLR. IronPython and IronRuby were already built on top of the DLR, and now, the support for using the DLR is being added to C# and Visual Basic. Other languages built on top of the CLR are expected to also use the DLR in the future. Underneath the DLR there are binders that talk to a variety of different technologies: .NET Binder Allows to talk to .NET objects. JavaScript Binder Allows to talk to JavaScript in SilverLight. IronPython Binder Allows to talk to IronPython. IronRuby Binder Allows to talk to IronRuby. COM Binder Allows to talk to COM. Whit all these binders it is possible to have a single programming experience to talk to all these environments that are not statically typed .NET objects. The dynamic Static Type Let’s take this traditional statically typed code: Calculator calculator = GetCalculator(); int sum = calculator.Sum(10, 20); Because the variable that receives the return value of the GetCalulator method is statically typed to be of type Calculator and, because the Calculator type has an Add method that receives two integers and returns an integer, it is possible to call that Sum method and assign its return value to a variable statically typed as integer. Now lets suppose the calculator was not a statically typed .NET class, but, instead, a COM object or some .NET code we don’t know he type of. All of the sudden it gets very painful to call the Add method: object calculator = GetCalculator(); Type calculatorType = calculator.GetType(); object res = calculatorType.InvokeMember("Add", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, calculator, new object[] { 10, 20 }); int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res); And what if the calculator was a JavaScript object? ScriptObject calculator = GetCalculator(); object res = calculator.Invoke("Add", 10, 20); int sum = Convert.ToInt32(res); For each dynamic domain we have a different programming experience and that makes it very hard to unify the code. With C# 4.0 it becomes possible to write code this way: dynamic calculator = GetCalculator(); int sum = calculator.Add(10, 20); You simply declare a variable who’s static type is dynamic. dynamic is a pseudo-keyword (like var) that indicates to the compiler that operations on the calculator object will be done dynamically. The way you should look at dynamic is that it’s just like object (System.Object) with dynamic semantics associated. Anything can be assigned to a dynamic. dynamic x = 1; dynamic y = "Hello"; dynamic z = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3 }; At run-time, all object will have a type. In the above example x is of type System.Int32. When one or more operands in an operation are typed dynamic, member selection is deferred to run-time instead of compile-time. Then the run-time type is substituted in all variables and normal overload resolution is done, just like it would happen at compile-time. The result of any dynamic operation is always dynamic and, when a dynamic object is assigned to something else, a dynamic conversion will occur. Code Resolution Method double x = 1.75; double y = Math.Abs(x); compile-time double Abs(double x) dynamic x = 1.75; dynamic y = Math.Abs(x); run-time double Abs(double x) dynamic x = 2; dynamic y = Math.Abs(x); run-time int Abs(int x) The above code will always be strongly typed. The difference is that, in the first case the method resolution is done at compile-time, and the others it’s done ate run-time. IDynamicMetaObjectObject The DLR is pre-wired to know .NET objects, COM objects and so forth but any dynamic language can implement their own objects or you can implement your own objects in C# through the implementation of the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface. When an object implements IDynamicMetaObjectProvider, it can participate in the resolution of how method calls and property access is done. The .NET Framework already provides two implementations of IDynamicMetaObjectProvider: DynamicObject : IDynamicMetaObjectProvider The DynamicObject class enables you to define which operations can be performed on dynamic objects and how to perform those operations. For example, you can define what happens when you try to get or set an object property, call a method, or perform standard mathematical operations such as addition and multiplication. ExpandoObject : IDynamicMetaObjectProvider The ExpandoObject class enables you to add and delete members of its instances at run time and also to set and get values of these members. This class supports dynamic binding, which enables you to use standard syntax like sampleObject.sampleMember, instead of more complex syntax like sampleObject.GetAttribute("sampleMember").

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• mysql not starting

  - by Eiriks

  I have a server running on rackspace.com, it been running for about a year (collecting data for a project) and no problems. Now it seems mysql froze (could not connect either through ssh command line, remote app (sequel pro) or web (pages using the db just froze). I got a bit eager to fix this quick and rebooted the virtual server, running ubuntu 10.10. It is a small virtual LAMP server (10gig storage - I'm only using 1, 256mb ram -has not been a problem). Now after the reboot, I cannot get mysql to start again. service mysql status mysql stop/waiting I believe this just means mysql is not running. How do I get this running again? service mysql start start: Job failed to start No. Just typing 'mysql' gives: mysql ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) There is a .sock file in this folder, 'ls -l' gives: srwxrwxrwx 1 mysql mysql 0 2012-12-01 17:20 mysqld.sock From googleing this for a while now, I see that many talk about the logfile and my.cnf. Logs Not sure witch ones I should look at. This log-file is empty: 'var/log/mysql/error.log', so is the 'var/log/mysql.err' and 'var/log/mysql.log'. my.cnf is located in '/etc/mysql' and looks like this. Can't see anything clearly wrong with it either. # # The MySQL database server configuration file. # # You can copy this to one of: # - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options, # - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options. # # One can use all long options that the program supports. # Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with # --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use. # # For explanations see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html # This will be passed to all mysql clients # It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes # escpecially if they contain "#" chars... # Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location. [client] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here is entries for some specific programs # The following values assume you have at least 32M ram # This was formally known as [safe_mysqld]. Both versions are currently parsed. [mysqld_safe] socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # # # * IMPORTANT # If you make changes to these settings and your system uses apparmor, you may # also need to also adjust /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld. # user = mysql socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp skip-external-locking # # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. bind-address = 127.0.0.1 # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 16M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 192K thread_cache_size = 8 # This replaces the startup script and checks MyISAM tables if needed # the first time they are touched myisam-recover = BACKUP #max_connections = 100 #table_cache = 64 #thread_concurrency = 10 # # * Query Cache Configuration # query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_size = 16M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. # As of 5.1 you can enable the log at runtime! #general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log #general_log = 1 log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log # Here you can see queries with especially long duration #log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log #long_query_time = 2 #log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. # note: if you are setting up a replication slave, see README.Debian about # other settings you may need to change. #server-id = 1 #log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # * InnoDB # # InnoDB is enabled by default with a 10MB datafile in /var/lib/mysql/. # Read the manual for more InnoDB related options. There are many! # # * Security Features # # Read the manual, too, if you want chroot! # chroot = /var/lib/mysql/ # # For generating SSL certificates I recommend the OpenSSL GUI "tinyca". # # ssl-ca=/etc/mysql/cacert.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/server-cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server-key.pem [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M # # * IMPORTANT: Additional settings that can override those from this file! # The files must end with '.cnf', otherwise they'll be ignored. # !includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/ I need the data in the database (so i'd like to avoid reinstalling), and I need it back up running again. All hint, tips and solutions are welcomed and appreciated.

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• Un-failing over a Cisco PIX 515e

  - by ABrown

  We had a power outage at our data center last week and when our dual PIX 515E running IOS 7.0(8) (configured with a failover cable) came back, they were in a failed over state where the Secondary unit is active and the Primary unit is standby I have tried 'failover reset', 'failover active', and 'failover reload-standby' as well as executing reloads on both units in a variety of orders, and they don't come back Primary/Active Secondary/Standby. The only thing in my arsenal that I haven't tried is driving to the data center and performing a hard reboot, which I hate to do. I have read How Failover Works on the Cisco Secure Firewall and it seems like this should be wicked straight forward. output of show failover on Primary: Failover On Cable status: Normal Failover unit Primary Failover LAN Interface: N/A - Serial-based failover enabled Unit Poll frequency 15 seconds, holdtime 45 seconds Interface Poll frequency 15 seconds Interface Policy 1 Monitored Interfaces 2 of 250 maximum Version: Ours 7.0(8), Mate 7.0(8) Last Failover at: 02:52:05 UTC Mar 10 2010 This host: Primary - Standby Ready Active time: 0 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.165): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.3): Normal Other host: Secondary - Active Active time: 897045 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.164): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.4): Normal Stateful Failover Logical Update Statistics Link : Unconfigured. output of show failover on Secondary: Failover On Cable status: Normal Failover unit Secondary Failover LAN Interface: N/A - Serial-based failover enabled Unit Poll frequency 15 seconds, holdtime 45 seconds Interface Poll frequency 15 seconds Interface Policy 1 Monitored Interfaces 2 of 250 maximum Version: Ours 7.0(8), Mate 7.0(8) Last Failover at: 02:03:04 UTC Feb 28 2010 This host: Secondary - Active Active time: 896925 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.164): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.4): Normal Other host: Primary - Standby Ready Active time: 0 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.165): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.3): Normal Stateful Failover Logical Update Statistics Link : Unconfigured. I'm seeing the following in my syslog: Mar 10 03:05:00 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:05:09 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reload-standby' command. Mar 10 03:05:12 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=20,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:05:12 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Failed. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=0,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is down. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=1,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:10 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is up. Mar 10 03:06:10 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=411,op=2,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:23 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=80,my=Active,peer=Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:06:23 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:06:24 fw2 %PIX-6-720027: (VPN-Primary) HA status callback: My state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:07:05 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:07:31 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover active' command. Mar 10 03:08:04 fw1 %PIX-5-611103: User logged out: Uname: enable_1 Mar 10 03:08:04 fw1 %PIX-6-315011: SSH session from admin1_int on interface inside for user "pix" terminated normally Mar 10 03:08:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=20,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:08:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Failed. Mar 10 03:09:10 fw1 %PIX-6-605005: Login permitted from admin1_int/36891 to inside:192.168.4.4/ssh for user "pix" Mar 10 03:09:23 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:09:38 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=0,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is down. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=1,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is up. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=411,op=2,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:52 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=80,my=Active,peer=Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:09:52 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:09:53 fw2 %PIX-6-720027: (VPN-Primary) HA status callback: My state Standby Ready. I'm not exactly sure how to interpret that syslog data. Primary doesn't seem to even try to become Active. When I reload the individual units separately, my connections are retained, so it doesn't seem like I have a real hardware failure. Is there something I can query (IOS or SNMP) to check for hardware issues? Any thoughts? My IOS-fu is weak. Thanks for any help you might provide, Aaron

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• Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Fonts can help your documents stand out and be easier to read, and Office 2010 helps you take your fonts even further with support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, and more.  Here’s a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010. Introduction Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft has made an effort to support more advanced font features across their products.  Windows 7 includes support for advanced OpenType font features and laid the groundwork for advanced font support in programs with the new DirectWrite subsystem.  It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures. Now, with the upcoming release of Office 2010, Microsoft is bringing advanced typographical features to the Office programs we love.  This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more.  These new features are available in Word, Outlook, and Publisher 2010, and work the same on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Please note that Windows does include several OpenType fonts that include these advanced features.  Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, and Corbel all include multiple number forms, while Consolas, Palatino Linotype, and Gabriola (Windows 7 only) include all the OpenType features.  And, of course, these new features will work great with any other OpenType fonts you have that contain advanced ligatures, stylistic sets, and number forms. Using advanced typography in Word To use the new font features, open a new document, select an OpenType font, and enter some text.  Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font.  Click the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to open the font properties. Alternately, select the text and click Font. Now, click on the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features. You can change the ligatures setting… Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing… And even select Lining or Old-style number forms. Here’s a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font. Finally, you can choose various Stylistic sets for your font.  The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many.  Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6. Here’s lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6. Impressive, huh?  The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing.  Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6. Here’s another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri. These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too. And, since Outlook uses Word as it’s editing engine, you can use the same options in Outlook 2010.  Note that these font effects may not show up the same if the recipient’s email client doesn’t support advanced OpenType typography.  It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010. Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010 Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features.  This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design.  Simply insert a text box, enter some text, select it, and click the arrow on the bottom of the font box as in Word to open the font properties. This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Word’s font options.  You can preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box.  You can also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters.   Conclusion Advanced typographical effects are a welcome addition to Word and Publisher 2010, and they are very impressive when coupled with modern fonts such as Gabriola.  From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun. Do you have a favorite OpenType font that includes advanced typographical features?  Let us know in the comments! More Reading Advances in typography in Windows 7 – Engineering 7 Blog New features in Microsoft Word 2010 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Font in Excel 2007Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both?Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in SafariAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteFriday Fun: Desktop Tower Defense Pro TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

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• Using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in VB.NET can be tricky…

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Sometime you’re searching for something forever and when you find it, you realize it was right under your nose.  Maybe you were distracted by other things around… or maybe that thing right under your nose was so well hidden that it deserves a blog post…   That happened to me a few days ago while using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in my VB.NET application…  I thought it was a cool feature and I decided to use it…  So there I am adding new settings with “USER” scope and StringCollection as the data type, testing my application and everything works perfectly fine...  That was before I decided to modify the “Value” of one of my settings…  After changing the value of one of my settings, I start my application again and, to my surprise, my new values aren’t showing!  Hmmm… That’s odd…  My setting was a pretty long list of strings so I was rather angry at myself for not saving my work after I was done…  So I open up the Settings.setting in the designer and click the ellipsis symbol to enter my string collection again, but to my great pleasure (and disbelief) my strings are there!!!  Alright, you rock VB.NET!  You’ve just save me a bunch of typing time and I’m thinking it’s just a simple Visual Studio glitch…  I hit “Save” then “Save All” (just in case) and finally I rebuild everything and fire up my app once again.  Huh?  Where are my darn strings????????  Ok there’s a bug there…  I open up the app.config and my new strings are there!!!  Alright, let’s recap…  My new strings are in the app.config, they show correctly in the Settings.settings designer UI but they aren’t showing at runtime…  Hmmmm?  Let’s try something else…  Let’s start the application but outside Visual Studio this time… I fire up the exe and BAM!  My strings where there!  I “alt-tab” and hit “F5” and BOOM, no strings!  So it’s a bug in the Visual Studio environment… or could it be a FEATURE?  I must admit that I’m a little confused over what’s a bug and what’s a feature in Visual Studio… lol!   Finally I found out there’s a “cache” for your Visual Studio located here:  C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\<your app name and a very weird temp ID>\<your app version>\user.config When using the “Settings.settings” with a setting of scope “user”, this file is out of sync with your app.config until you manually decide to update it… The button is right there… under your nose… at the top left corner of your screen in the settings designer…  See the big “Synchronize” button there?  Yep…  Now that’s user friendly isn’t it?  Oh, and wait until you see what it does when you click it…  It prompts you and basically says:  “Would you like your settings to start working inside Visual Studio now that you found out that I exist?” and of course the right answer is yes… or rather “OK”…  Unfortunately, you have to do this every time you edit a value… On the other hand, adding and removing settings seem to work flawlessly without having to click this magical button… go figure!  Oh and I almost forgot… this great “feature” is only available for VB.NET…  A project in C# using Settings.settings will work perfectly EVEN when editing values… Here’s a screenshot that shows this important button: Button Using other data types appears to work perfectly well…   Maybe it’s simply related to the StringCollection data type?  If you are a VB.NET programmer, you should pay attention to this when you plan on using the settings functionalities and your scope is “user” and your data type is StringCollection… Happy coding all!

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• SQL – Quick Start with Explorer Sections of NuoDB – Query NuoDB Database

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is the third post in the series of the blog posts I am writing about NuoDB. NuoDB is very innovative and easy-to-use product. I can clearly see how one can scale-out NuoDB with so much ease and confidence. In my very first blog post we discussed how we can install NuoDB (link), and in my second post I discussed how we can manage the NuoDB database transaction engines and storage managers with a few clicks (link). Note: You can Download NuoDB from here. In this post, we will learn how we can use the Explorer feature of NuoDB to do various SQL operations. NuoDB has a browser-based Explorer, which is very powerful and has many of the features any IDE would normally have. Let us see how it works in the following step-by-step tutorial. Let us go to the NuoDBNuoDB Console by typing the following URL in your browser: http://localhost:8080/ It will bring you to the QuickStart screen. Make sure that you have created the sample database. If you have not created sample database, click on Create Database and create it successfully. Now go to the NuoDB Explorer by clicking on the main tab, and it will ask you for your domain username and password. Enter the username as a domain and password as a bird. Alternatively you can also enter username as a quickstart and password as a quickstart. Once you enter the password you will be able to see the databases. In our example we have installed the Sample Database hence you will see the Test database in our Database Hierarchy screen. When you click on database it will ask for the database login. Note that Database Login is different from Domain login and you will have to enter your database login over here. In our case the database username is dba and password is goalie. Once you enter a valid username and password it will display your database. Further expand your database and you will notice various objects in your database. Once you explore various objects, select any database and click on Open. When you click on execute, it will display the SQL script to select the data from the table. The autogenerated script displays entire result set from the database. The NuoDB Explorer is very powerful and makes the life of developers very easy. If you click on List SQL Statements it will list all the available SQL statements right away in Query Editor. You can see the popup window in following image. Here is the cool thing for geeks. You can even click on Query Plan and it will display the text based query plan as well. In case of a SELECT, the query plan will be much simpler, however, when we write complex queries it will be very interesting. We can use the query plan tab for performance tuning of the database. Here is another feature, when we click on List Tables in NuoDB Explorer.  It lists all the available tables in the query editor. This is very helpful when we are writing a long complex query. Here is a relatively complex example I have built using Inner Join syntax. Right below I have displayed the Query Plan. The query plan displays all the little details related to the query. Well, we just wrote multi-table query and executed it against the NuoDB database. You can use the NuoDB Admin section and do various analyses of the query and its performance. NuoDB is a distributed database built on a patented emergent architecture with full support for SQL and ACID guarantees.  It allows you to add Transaction Engine processes to a running system to improve the performance of your system.  You can also add a second Storage Engine to your running system for redundancy purposes.  Conversely, you can shut down processes when you don’t need the extra database resources. NuoDB also provides developers and administrators with a single intuitive interface for centrally monitoring deployments. If you have read my blog posts and have not tried out NuoDB, I strongly suggest that you download it today and catch up with the learnings with me. Trust me though the product is very powerful, it is extremely easy to learn and use. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)   Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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• Configuring Expert Search in Communicator 14 and SharePoint 2010

  Communicator 14 provides functionality to be able to search for contacts not just by name, but by skill.  For example a customer service agent at an airline can search for other agents with Travel Advisory experience by typing the search criteria into the Communicator search box and performing a search by keyword.  The search results will return users who have specified that skill in their profile on their SharePoint My Site.  This is actually pretty easy to configure, Ill show you how. Create Search and People Search Results Pages in SharePoint Communicator 14 Expert Search works by using the SharePoint 2010 Search Service to search SharePoint for user profiles with matching keywords.  This requires that you have an Enterprise Search site in your site collection which includes the search service and also the People Results pages.  The easiest way to do this is to create a Search Center site in your site collection. Note: I get an error when trying to create an Enterprise Search site in a Team Site in the SharePoint 2010 RTM bits, so I created it as a site collection that is evident in the URLs you see below. In the screenshots below, you can see that the URL of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection is http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx, and the URL of the People Search Results page is http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx. Point Communications Server 14 to Search and People Search Results Pages For Communicator 14 to be able to perform an Expert Search, you need to configure Communications Server 14 to point to the Search Service and People Search Results page URLs. From a server with the OCS Core bits installed, fire up the Communications Server Management Shell and type Get-CsClientPolicy. Scroll down to the bottom of the output, were interested in setting the values of: SPSearchInternalURL SPSearchExternalURL SPSearchCenterInternalURL SPSearchCenterExternalURL SPSearchInternalURL and SPSearchExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the SharePoint search service in the Search site collection, while SPSearchCenterInternalURL and SPSearchCenterExternalURL correspond to the internal and external URLs of the people search results pages. Well use the Communications Server Management Shell to set the values of these CS policy properties. For simplicity, Im only going to set the internal URLs here. Set-CsClientPolicy SPSearchInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/search/_vti_bin/search.asmx     -SPSearchCenterInternalURL http://sps2010/sites/Search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx Log out and back into Communicator.  You can verify that these settings were applied by running the Get-CsClientPolicy cmdlet again from the Communications Server Management Shell. However, theres another super-secret ninja trick to verify that the settings were applied: Find the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray Hold down the Ctrl button Click (left) the Communicator icon in the Windows System Tray do not depress the Ctrl button You should now see an extra menu item called Configuration Information, click it. Scroll down and locate the Expert Search URL and SharePoint Search Center URL keys and verify that their values correspond to those you set using the Set-CsClientPolicy PowerShell cmdlet. Configure a Sharepoint User Profile Import Im not going to provide detailed steps here except to say that you need to configure the SharePoint 2010 User Profile  Service Application to import user account details from Active Directory on a scheduled basis. This is a critical step because there are several user profile properties e.g. SipAddress that are only populated by a user profile import.  When performing an Expert Search, Communicator can only render results for users who have a SipAddress specified. Add Skills to User Profiles Navigate to your My Site and click on My Profile.  This page allows you to set many contact details that are searchable in SharePoint.  Were particularly interested in the Ask Me About property of a users profile.  Expert Search searches against this property to find users with matching skills. Configure a SharePoint Search Crawl Ensure that you have a scheduled job to crawl your Local SharePoint Sites content source.  Depending on how you have this configured, it will also crawl the My Site site collection and add user properties such as Ask Me About to the search index. Thats It! SharePoint 2010 provides new social and collaboration features to help users find other users with similar skills or interests. Expert Search extends this functionality directly into Microsoft Communicator 14, allowing you to interact with the users directly from the search results. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Adding UCM as a search source in Windows Explorer

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  A customer recently pointed out to me that Windows 7 supports federated search within Windows Explorer. This means you can perform searches to external sources such as Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc right from within Explorer. While we do have the Desktop Integration Suite which offers searching within Explorer, I thought it would be interesting to look into this method which would not require any client software to implement. Basically, federated searching hooks up in Windows Explorer through the OpenSearch protocol. A Search Connector Descriptor file is run and it installs the search provider. The file is a .osdx file which is an OpenSearch Description document. It describes the search provider you are hooking up to along with the URL for the query. If those results can come back as an RSS or ATOM feed, then you're all set. So the first step is to install the RSS Feeds component from the UCM Samples page on OTN. If you're on 11g, I've found the RSS Feeds works just fine on that version too. Next, you want to perform a Quick Search with a particular search term and then copy the RSS link address for that search result. Here is what an example URL might looks like: http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SCS_FEED&feedName=search_results&QueryText=%28+%3cqsch%3eoracle%3c%2fqsch %3e+%29&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&SearchQueryFormat= Universal&SearchProviders=server& Now you want to create a new text file and start out with this information: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><OpenSearchDescription xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/"> <ShortName></ShortName> <Description></Description> <Url type="application/rss+xml" template=""/> <Url type="text/html" template=""/> </OpenSearchDescription> Enter a ShortName and Description. The ShortName will be the value used when displaying the search provider in Explorer. In the template attribute for the first Url element, enter the URL copied previously. You will then need to convert the ampersand symbols to '&' to make them XML compliant. Finally, you'll want to switch out the search term with '{searchTerms}'. For the second Url element, you can do the same thing except you want to copy the UCM search results URL from the page of results. That URL will look something like: http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&QueryText=%3Cqsch%3Eoracle%3C%2Fqsch%3E&listTemplateId= &ftx=1&SearchQueryFormat=Universal&TargetedQuickSearchSelection= &MiniSearchText=oracle Again, convert the ampersand symbols and replace the search term with '{searchTerms}'. When complete, save the file with the .osdx extension. The completed file should look like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/"> <ShortName>Universal Content Management</ShortName> <Description>OpenSearch for UCM via Windows 7 Search Federation.</Description> <Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SCS_FEED&amp;feedName=search_results&amp;QueryText=%28+%3Cqsch%3E{searchTerms}%3C%2fqsch%3E+%29&amp;SortField=dInDate&amp;SortOrder=Desc&amp;ResultCount=200&amp;SearchQueryFormat=Universal"/> <Url type="text/html" template="http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS&amp;SortField=dInDate&amp;SortOrder=Desc&amp;ResultCount=20&amp;QueryText=%3Cqsch%3E{searchTerms}%3C%2Fqsch%3E&amp;listTemplateId=&amp;ftx=1&amp;SearchQueryFormat=Universal&amp;TargetedQuickSearchSelection=&amp;MiniSearchText={searchTerms}"/> </OpenSearchDescription> After you save the file, simply double-click it to create the provider. It will ask if you want to add the search connector to Windows. Click Add and it will add it to the Searches folder in your user folder as well as your Favorites. Now just click on the search icon and in the upper right search box, enter your term. As you are typing, it begins executing searches and the results will come back in Explorer. Now when you double-click on an item, it will try and download the web viewable for viewing. You also have the ability to save the search, just as you would in UCM. And there is a link to Search On Website which will launch your browser and go directly to the search results page there. And with some tweaks to the RSS component, you can make the results a bit more interesting. It supports the Media RSS standard, so you can pass along the thumbnail of the documents in the results. To enable this, edit the rss_resources.htm file in the RSS Feeds component. In the std_rss_feed_begin resource include, add the namespace 'xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/' to the rss definition: <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"> Next, in the rss_channel_item_with_thumb include, below the closing image element, add this element: </images> <media:thumbnail url="<$if strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@t") > 0 or strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@g") > 0 or strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@p") > 0$><$rssHttpHost$><$thumbnailUrl$><$elseif dGif$><$HttpWebRoot$>images/docgifs/<$dGif$><$endif$>" /> <description> This and lots of other tweaks can be done to the RSS component to help extend it for optimum use in Explorer. Hopefully this can get you started. *Note: This post also applies to Universal Records Management (URM).

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• Personal search – the future of search

  - by jamiet

  [Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Prevent Changing the Screen Saver and Wallpaper in Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  Sometimes you might not want users to have the ability to change Screen Savers and Wallpaper on Windows 7 workstations. Today we look at how to prevent them from changing either one or both. You might administer computers in your home or small office and find it annoying when users continuously change the wallpaper and Screen Savers to something obnoxious. A lot of times they might be inexperienced users and download these so-called “wonderful and free” Screen Saver/Wallpaper packages from shady sites that include loads of Spyware. Preventing users from changing them is another helpful tool to avoid wasteful time spent switching things back. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using Group Policy Editor  Note: This method uses Group Policy which is not available in Home versions on Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and enter gpedit.msc into the Search box and hit Enter. When Local Group Policy Editor opens, navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Control Panel \ Personalization. Then in the right column double-click on Prevent changing desktop background. Now check the radio button next to Enabled, then click OK. Back on the Group Policy Screen, double-click on Prevent changing screen saver. In the next screen select the radio button next to Enable, click OK, then close out of Group Policy Editor. Now when a user goes into the Personalization section, the Desktop Background hyperlink is now grayed out and inactive. Notice the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator at the bottom of the section. If they click to change the Screen Saver, an error message will pop up letting them know the function is disabled. Prevent Changing Screensavers & Wallpaper Using a Registry Hack You can also make a couple Registry changes to prevent users from changing the Wallpaper & Screen Saver…which will work on Home versions of Windows 7. Before making any Registry changes make sure you back it up first. Open the Registry by typing regedit into the Search box in the Start menu and hit Enter. First we’ll start with the Wallpaper. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and create a new String Value and name it Wallpaper. Then modify the Value data to point to the location of the Wallpaper you want it to always be. Where in this example it’s our main wallpaper on our local drive…then click OK. Now let’s make sure they can’t change the Screen Saver. In the same Registry location, we need to make a new DWORD (32-bit) Value. Give it the Value name of NoDispScrSavPage and the value data of “1” and click OK. Close out of the Registry and restart the machine or simply log off then back on again for the changes to take effect. Results For the Wallpapers, a user can still go in and see the selections, however if they try to change it to something else… It will just go back to the Personalization screen and no changes will be made, as we set the value to only be the background we specified. If the user tries to make a change to the Screen Saver, the hyperlink will be grayed out and inactive, and the message One or more of the settings on this page has been disabled by the system administrator will be displayed at the bottom of the section. Conclusion If you’re tired of users changing the Wallpaper and Screen Saver, and want another way to help avoid Malware, locking down these settings can help a lot. Again, before making any changes to the Registry, make sure to back it up. These settings should work in Vista and XP as well. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Save 1-4% More Battery Life With Windows Vista Battery SaverCustomize Your Windows Vista Logon ScreenEnable "Ubuntu Style" Logons in Windows VistaManage the Delete Confirmation Dialog box in Windows 7Dual Monitors: Use a Different Wallpaper on Each Desktop TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

  - by Phil Factor

  "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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• Create an Alias Directory inside a Virtual Host

  - by Praveen Kumar

  First, let me say, I asked this question in StackOverflow, and thought I could get more replies here. I checked here, here, here, here, here, and here before asking this question. I guess my search skills are weak. I am using the WampServer version 2.2e. I have a need like, I need a virtual path inside a virtual host. Let me say the two hosts that I have. Primary Virtual Host (Localhost) NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName localhost DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/www" </VirtualHost> My Apps Virtual Hosts <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName apps.ptrl DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps" ErrorLog "logs/apps-ptrl-error.log" CustomLog "logs/apps-ptrl-access.log" common <Directory "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps"> allow from all order allow,deny AllowOverride All </Directory> DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php </VirtualHost> My Blog Virtual Host <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName blog.praveen-kumar.ptrl DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog" ErrorLog "logs/praveen-kumar-ptrl-error.log" CustomLog "logs/praveen-kumar-ptrl-access.log" common <Directory "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog"> allow from all order allow,deny AllowOverride All </Directory> DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php </VirtualHost> My requirement now is to have http://apps.ptrl/blog/ and http://blog.praveen-kumar.ptrl/ should be the same directory. One thing I thought of is, moving the blog folder inside the apps folder, but it is connected with Git and other stuffs are there, so it is not possible to move the folder. So, I thought of creating an alias to the VirtualHost in this way: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName apps.ptrl DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps" ErrorLog "logs/apps-ptrl-error.log" CustomLog "logs/apps-ptrl-access.log" common <Directory "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps"> allow from all order allow,deny AllowOverride All </Directory> DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php # The alias to the blog! Alias /blog "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog" <Directory "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog"> allow from all order allow,deny AllowOverride All </Directory> </VirtualHost> But when I tried to access http://apps.ptrl/blog, I am getting an Error 403 Forbidden page. Am I doing the right thing? If you need to look at the access log, and error log, they are here: # Access Log 127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:09:53:11 +0530] "GET /blog HTTP/1.1" 403 206 127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:09:53:11 +0530] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 209 127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:09:53:53 +0530] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6935 127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:09:53:53 +0530] "GET /app/blog/thumb.png HTTP/1.1" 404 216 # Error Log [Sun Oct 14 09:53:11 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog [Sun Oct 14 09:53:11 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps/favicon.ico [Sun Oct 14 09:53:53 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps/app/blog, referer: http://apps.ptrl/ Waiting eagerly for some help. I am ready to provide more info, if needed. Update #1: Changed VirtualHosts: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName apps.ptrl DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps" ErrorLog "logs/apps-ptrl-error.log" CustomLog "logs/apps-ptrl-access.log" common # The alias to the blog! Alias /blog "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog" <Directory "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/praveen-kumar/blog"> allow from all order allow,deny AllowOverride All </Directory> <Directory "C:/Wamp/vhosts/ptrl/apps"> allow from all order allow,deny AllowOverride All </Directory> DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php </VirtualHost> The issue now: I am able to access the site. The physical links are working now. i.e., I am able to open http://apps.ptrl/blog/index.php but not http://apps.ptrl/blog/view-1.ptf, which gets translated to http://apps.ptrl/blog/index.php?page=view&id=1. Any solutions?

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• Do You Develop Your PL/SQL Directly in the Database?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  I know this sounds like a REALLY weird question for many of you. Let me make one thing clear right away though, I am NOT talking about creating and replacing PLSQL objects directly into a production environment. Do we really need to talk about developers in production again? No, what I am talking about is a developer doing their work from start to finish in a development database. These are generally available to a development team for building the next and greatest version of your databases and database applications. And of course you are using a third party source control system, right? Last week I was in Tampa, FL presenting at the monthly Suncoast Oracle User’s Group meeting. Had a wonderful time, great questions and back-and-forth. My favorite heckler was there, @oraclenered, AKA Chet Justice.  I was in the middle of talking about how it’s better to do your PLSQL work in the Procedure Editor when Chet pipes up - Don’t do it that way, that’s wrong Just press play to edit the PLSQL directly in the database Or something along those lines. I didn’t get what the heck he was talking about. I had been showing how the Procedure Editor gives you much better feedback and support when working with PLSQL. After a few back-and-forths I got to what Chet’s main objection was, and again I’m going to paraphrase: You should develop offline in your SQL worksheet. Don’t do anything in the database until it’s done. I didn’t understand. Were developers expected to be able to internalize and mentally model the PL/SQL engine, see where their errors were, etc in these offline scripts? No, please give Chet more credit than that. What is the ideal Oracle Development Environment? If I were back in the ‘real world’ of database development, I would do all of my development outside of the ‘dev’ instance. My development process looks a little something like this: Do I have a program that already does something like this – copy and paste Has some smart person already written something like this – copy and paste Start typing in the white-screen-of-panic and bungle along until I get something that half-works Tweek, debug, test until I have fooled my subconscious into thinking that it’s ‘good’ As you might understand, I don’t want my co-workers to see the evolution of my code. It would seriously freak them out and I probably wouldn’t have a job anymore (don’t remind me that I already worked myself out of development.) So here’s what I like to do: Run a Local Instance of Oracle on my Machine and Develop My Code Privately I take a copy of development – that’s what source control is for afterall – and run it where no one else can see it. I now get to be my own DBA. If I need a trace – no problem. If I want to run an ASH report, no worries. If I need to create a directory or run some DataPump jobs, that’s all on me. Now when I get my code ‘up to snuff,’ then I will check it into source control and compile it into the official development instance. So my teammates suddenly go from seeing no program, to a mostly complete program. Is this right? If not, it doesn’t seem wrong to me. And after talking to Chet in the car on the way to the local cigar bar, it seems that he’s of the same opinion. So what’s so wrong with coding directly into a development instance? I think ‘wrong’ is a bit strong here. But there are a few pitfalls that you might want to look out for. A few come to mind – and I’m sure Chet could add many more as my memory fails me at the moment. But here goes: Development instance isn’t properly backed up – would hate to lose that work Development is wiped once a week and copied over from Prod – don’t laugh Someone clobbers your code You accidentally on purpose clobber someone else’s code The more developers you have in a single fish pond, the greater chance something ‘bad’ will happen This Isn’t One of Those Posts Where I Tell You What You Should Be Doing I realize many shops won’t be open to allowing developers to stage their own local copies of Oracle. But I would at least be aware that many of your developers are probably doing this anyway – with or without your tacit approval. SQL Developer can do local file tracking, but you should be using Source Control too! I will say that I think it’s imperative that you control your source code outside the database, even if your development team is comprised of a single developer. Store your source code in a file, and control that file in something like Subversion. You would be shocked at the number of teams that do not use a source control system. I know I continue to be shocked no matter how many times I meet another team running by the seat-of-their-pants. I’d love to hear how your development process works. And of course I want to know how SQL Developer and the rest of our tools can better support your processes. And one last thing, if you want a fun and interactive presentation experience, be sure to have Chet in the room

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• Personal search – the future of search

  - by jamiet

  [Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• How do you use blog content?

  - by fatherjack

  Do you write a blog, have you ever thought about it? I think people fall into one of a few categories when it comes to blogs, especially blogs with technical content. Writing articles furiously - daily, twice daily and reading dozens of others. Writing the odd piece of content and read plenty of others' output. Started a blog once and its fizzled out but reading lots. Thought about starting a blog someday but never got around to it, hopping into the occasional blog when a link or a Tweet takes them there. Never thought about writing one but often catching content from them when Google (or other preferred search engine) finds content related to their search. Now I am not saying that either of these is right or wrong, nor am I saying that anyone should feel any compulsion to be in any particular category. What I would say is that you as a blog reader have the power to move blog writers from one category to another. How, you might ask? How do I have any power over a blog writer? It is very simple - feedback. If you give feedback then the blog writer knows that they are reaching an audience, if there is no response then they we are simply writing down our thoughts for what could amount to nothing more than a feeble amount of exercise and a few more key stokes towards the onset of RSI. Most blogs have a mechanism to alert the writer when there are comments, and personally speaking, if an email is received saying there has been a response to a blog article then there is a rush of enthusiasm, a moment of excitement that someone is actually reading and considering the text that was submitted and made available for the whole world to read. I am relatively new to this blog game and could be in some extended honeymoon period as I have also recently been incorporated into the Simple Talk 'stable'. I can understand that once you get to the "Dizzy Heights of Ozar" (www.brentozar.com) then getting comments and feedback might not be such a pleasure and may even be rather more of a chore but that, I guess, is the price of fame. For us mere mortals starting out blogging, getting feedback (or even at the moment for me, simply the hope of getting feedback) is what keeps it going. The hope that you will pick a topic that hasn't been done recently by Brad McGehee, Grant Fritchey,  Paul Randall, Thomas LaRock or any one of the dozen of rock star bloggers listed here or others from SQLServerPedia and so on, and then do it well enough to be found, reviewed, or <shudder> (re)tweeted to bring more visitors is what we are striving for, along with the fact that the content we might produce is something that will be of benefit to others. There is only so much point to typing content that no-one is reading and putting it on a blog. You may as well just write it in a diary. A technical blog is not like, say, a blog covering photography techniques where the way to frame and take a picture stands true whether it was written last week, last year or last century - technical content goes sour, quite quickly. There isn't much call for articles about yesterdays technology unless its something that still applies to current versions too, so some content written no more than 2 years ago isn't worth having now. The combination of a piece of content that you know is going to not last long and the fact that no-one reads it is a strong force against writing anything else. Getting feedback counters that despair and gives a value to writing something new. I would say that any feedback is good but there are obviously comments that are just so negative or otherwise badly phrased that they would hasten the demise of a blog but, in general most feedback will encourage a writer. It may not be a comment that supports or agrees with the main theme of a post but if it generates discussion or opens up a previously unexplored viewpoint it is contributing to the blog and is therefore encouraging to the writer. Even if you only say "thank you" before you leave a blog, having taken a section of script to use for yourself or having been given a few links to some content that has widened your knowledge it will be so welcome to the blog owner. Isn't it also the decent thing to do, acknowledging that you have benefited from another's efforts?

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• Tools of the Trade

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!  I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.  For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward.  I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago.  Let’s just say that things have improved.  One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees.  Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week.  But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too.  This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured.  Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company.  My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team.  So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive.  This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2.  Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server.  For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server.  There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server.  Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it.  It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team.  And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more.  SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational.  SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases.  SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT.  And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control.  I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December.  This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits.  Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs.  Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast.  Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language.  Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files).  Provides in-context preview of the search results.  Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files.  It has language-specific syntax highlighting.  I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems.  Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace.  Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs?  SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls.  We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon.  Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs.  Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids.  Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance.  Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool.  SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge.  For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases.  This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system.  The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups.  Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing.  I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for.  We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager.  But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design.  The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow.  I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync.  I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them.  FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard.  Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps.  I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68.   Whew!  That’s a lot.  No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it.  Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time.  Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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• Evil DRY

  - by StefanSteinegger

  DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." So the important thing here is "knowledge". Nobody ever said "every piece of code". I try to give some examples of misusing the DRY principle. Code Repetitions by Coincidence There is code that is repeated by pure coincidence. It is not the same code because it is based on the same piece of knowledge, it is just the same by coincidence. It's hard to give an example of such a case. Just think about some lines of code the developer thinks "I already wrote something similar". Then he takes the original code, puts it into a public method, even worse into a base class where none had been there before, puts some weird arguments and some if or switch statements into it to support all special cases and calls this "increasing maintainability based on the DRY principle". The resulting "reusable method" is usually something the developer not even can give a meaningful name, because its contents isn't anything specific, it is just a bunch of code. For the same reason, nobody will really understand this piece of code. Typically this method only makes sense to call after some other method had been called. All the symptoms of really bad design is evident. Fact is, writing this kind of "reusable methods" is worse then copy pasting! Believe me. What will happen when you change this weird piece of code? You can't say what'll happen, because you can't understand what the code is actually doing. So better don't touch it anymore. Maintainability just died. Of course this problem is with any badly designed code. But because the developer tried to make this method as reusable as possible, large parts of the system get dependent on it. Completely independent parts get tightly coupled by this common piece of code. Changing on the single common place will have effects anywhere in the system, a typical symptom of too tight coupling. Without trying to dogmatically (and wrongly) apply the DRY principle, you just had a system with a weak design. Now you get a system which just can't be maintained anymore. So what can you do against it? When making code reusable, always identify the generally reusable parts of it. Find the reason why the code is repeated, find the common "piece of knowledge". If you have to search too far, it's probably not really there. Explain it to a colleague, if you can't explain or the explanation is to complicated, it's probably not worth to reuse. If you identify the piece of knowledge, don't forget to carefully find the place where it should be implemented. Reusing code is never worth giving up a clean design. Methods always need to do something specific. If you can't give it a simple and explanatory name, you did probably something weird. If you can't find the common piece of knowledge, try to make the code simpler. For instance, if you have some complicated string or collection operations within this code, write some general-purpose operations into a helper class. If your code gets simple enough, its not so bad if it can't be reused. If you are not able to find anything simple and reasonable, copy paste it. Put a comment into the code to reference the other copies. You may find a solution later. Requirements Repetitions by Coincidence Let's assume that you need to implement complex tax calculations for many countries. It's possible that some countries have very similar tax rules. These rules are still completely independent from each other, since every country can change it of its own. (Assumed that this similarity is actually by coincidence and not by political membership. There might be basic rules applying to all European countries. etc.) Let's assume that there are similarities between an Asian country and an African country. Moving the common part to a central place will cause problems. What happens if one of the countries changes its rules? Or - more likely - what happens if users of one country complain about an error in the calculation? If there is shared code, it is very risky to change it, even for a bugfix. It is hard to find requirements to be repeated by coincidence. Then there is not much you can do against the repetition of the code. What you really should consider is to make coding of the rules as simple as possible. So this independent knowledge "Tax Rules in Timbuktu" or wherever should be as pure as possible, without much overhead and stuff that does not belong to it. So you can write every independent requirement short and clean. DRYing try-catch and using Blocks This is a technical issue. Blocks like try-catch or using (e.g. in C#) are very hard to DRY. Imagine a complex exception handling, including several catch blocks. When the contents of the try block as well as the contents of the individual catch block are trivial, but the whole structure is repeated on many places in the code, there is almost no reasonable way to DRY it. try { // trivial code here using (Thingy thing = new thingy) { //trivial, but always different line of code } } catch(FooException foo) { // trivial foo handling } catch (BarException bar) { // trivial bar handling } catch { // trivial common handling } finally { // trivial finally block } The key here is that every block is trivial, so there is nothing to just move into a separate method. The only part that differs from case to case is the line of code in the body of the using block (or any other block). The situation is especially interesting if the many occurrences of this structure are completely independent: they appear in classes with no common base class, they don't aggregate each other and so on. Let's assume that this is a common pattern in service methods within the whole system. Examples of Evil DRYing in this situation: Put a if or switch statement into the method to choose the line of code to execute. There are several reasons why this is not a good idea: The close coupling of the formerly independent implementation is the strongest. Also the readability of the code and the use of a parameter to control the logic. Put everything into a method which takes a delegate as argument to call. The caller just passes his "specific line of code" to this method. The code will be very unreadable. The same maintainability problems apply as for any "Code Repetition by Coincidence" situations. Enforce a base class to all the classes where this pattern appears and use the template method pattern. It's the same readability and maintainability problem as above, but additionally complex and tightly coupled because of the base class. I would call this "Inheritance by Coincidence" which will not lead to great software design. What can you do against it: Ideally, the individual line of code is a call to a class or interface, which could be made individual by inheritance. If this would be the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I assume that it is no such a trivial case. Consider to refactor the error concept to make error handling easier. The last but not worst option is to keep the replications. Some pattern of code must be maintained in consistency, there is nothing we can do against it. And no reason to make it unreadable. Conclusion The DRY-principle is an important and basic principle every software developer should master. The key is to identify the "pieces of knowledge". There is code which can't be reused easily because of technical reasons. This requires quite a bit flexibility and creativity to make code simple and maintainable. It's not the problem of the principle, it is the problem of blindly applying a principle without understanding the problem it should solve. The result is mostly much worse then ignoring the principle.

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