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• Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x

  - by Rick Strahl

  IIS 7 improves internal compression functionality dramatically making it much easier than previous versions to take advantage of compression that’s built-in to the Web server. IIS 7 also supports dynamic compression which allows automatic compression of content created in your own applications (ASP.NET or otherwise!). The scheme is based on content-type sniffing and so it works with any kind of Web application framework. While static compression on IIS 7 is super easy to set up and turned on by default for most text content (text/*, which includes HTML and CSS, as well as for JavaScript, Atom, XAML, XML), setting up dynamic compression is a bit more involved, mostly because the various default compression settings are set in multiple places down the IIS –> ASP.NET hierarchy. Let’s take a look at each of the two approaches available: Static Compression Compresses static content from the hard disk. IIS can cache this content by compressing the file once and storing the compressed file on disk and serving the compressed alias whenever static content is requested and it hasn’t changed. The overhead for this is minimal and should be aggressively enabled. Dynamic Compression Works against application generated output from applications like your ASP.NET apps. Unlike static content, dynamic content must be compressed every time a page that requests it regenerates its content. As such dynamic compression has a much bigger impact than static caching. How Compression is configured Compression in IIS 7.x  is configured with two .config file elements in the <system.WebServer> space. The elements can be set anywhere in the IIS/ASP.NET configuration pipeline all the way from ApplicationHost.config down to the local web.config file. The following is from the the default setting in ApplicationHost.config (in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config forlder) on IIS 7.5 with a couple of small adjustments (added json output and enabled dynamic compression): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <httpCompression directory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files"> <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> <dynamicTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </dynamicTypes> <staticTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </staticTypes> </httpCompression> <urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" /> </system.webServer> </configuration> You can find documentation on the httpCompression and urlCompression keys here respectively: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms690689%28v=vs.90%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347437%28v=vs.90%29.aspx The httpCompression Element – What and How to compress Basically httpCompression configures what types to compress and how to compress them. It specifies the DLL that handles gzip encoding and the types of documents that are to be compressed. Types are set up based on mime-types which looks at returned Content-Type headers in HTTP responses. For example, I added the application/json to mime type to my dynamic compression types above to allow that content to be compressed as well since I have quite a bit of AJAX content that gets sent to the client. The UrlCompression Element – Enables and Disables Compression The urlCompression element is a quick way to turn compression on and off. By default static compression is enabled server wide, and dynamic compression is disabled server wide. This might be a bit confusing because the httpCompression element also has a doDynamicCompression attribute which is set to true by default, but the urlCompression attribute by the same name actually overrides it. The urlCompression element only has three attributes: doStaticCompression, doDynamicCompression and dynamicCompressionBeforeCache. The doCompression attributes are the final determining factor whether compression is enabled, so it’s a good idea to be explcit! The default for doDynamicCompression='false”, but doStaticCompression="true"! Static Compression is enabled by Default, Dynamic Compression is not Because static compression is very efficient in IIS 7 it’s enabled by default server wide and there probably is no reason to ever change that setting. Dynamic compression however, since it’s more resource intensive, is turned off by default. If you want to enable dynamic compression there are a few quirks you have to deal with, namely that enabling it in ApplicationHost.config doesn’t work. Setting: <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" /> in applicationhost.config appears to have no effect and I had to move this element into my local web.config to make dynamic compression work. This is actually a smart choice because you’re not likely to want dynamic compression in every application on a server. Rather dynamic compression should be applied selectively where it makes sense. However, nowhere is it documented that the setting in applicationhost.config doesn’t work (or more likely is overridden somewhere and disabled lower in the configuration hierarchy). So: remember to set doDynamicCompression=”true” in web.config!!! How Static Compression works Static compression works against static content loaded from files on disk. Because this content is static and not bound to change frequently – such as .js, .css and static HTML content – it’s fairly easy for IIS to compress and then cache the compressed content. The way this works is that IIS compresses the files into a special folder on the server’s hard disk and then reads the content from this location if already compressed content is requested and the underlying file resource has not changed. The semantics of serving an already compressed file are very efficient – IIS still checks for file changes, but otherwise just serves the already compressed file from the compression folder. The compression folder is located at: %windir%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files\ApplicationPool\ If you look into the subfolders you’ll find compressed files: These files are pre-compressed and IIS serves them directly to the client until the underlying files are changed. As I mentioned before – static compression is on by default and there’s very little reason to turn that functionality off as it is efficient and just works out of the box. The one tweak you might want to do is to set the compression level to maximum. Since IIS only compresses content very infrequently it would make sense to apply maximum compression. You can do this with the staticCompressionLevel setting on the scheme element: <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> Other than that the default settings are probably just fine. Dynamic Compression – not so fast! By default dynamic compression is disabled and that’s actually quite sensible – you should use dynamic compression very carefully and think about what content you want to compress. In most applications it wouldn’t make sense to compress *all* generated content as it would generate a significant amount of overhead. Scott Fortsyth has a great post that details some of the performance numbers and how much impact dynamic compression has. Depending on how busy your server is you can play around with compression and see what impact it has on your server’s performance. There are also a few settings you can tweak to minimize the overhead of dynamic compression. Specifically the httpCompression key has a couple of CPU related keys that can help minimize the impact of Dynamic Compression on a busy server: dynamicCompressionDisableCpuUsage dynamicCompressionEnableCpuUsage By default these are set to 90 and 50 which means that when the CPU hits 90% compression will be disabled until CPU utilization drops back down to 50%. Again this is actually quite sensible as it utilizes CPU power from compression when available and falling off when the threshold has been hit. It’s a good way some of that extra CPU power on your big servers to use when utilization is low. Again these settings are something you likely have to play with. I would probably set the upper limit a little lower than 90% maybe around 70% to make this a feature that kicks in only if there’s lots of power to spare. I’m not really sure how accurate these CPU readings that IIS uses are as Cpu usage on Web Servers can spike drastically even during low loads. Don’t trust settings – do some load testing or monitor your server in a live environment to see what values make sense for your environment. Finally for dynamic compression I tend to add one Mime type for JSON data, since a lot of my applications send large chunks of JSON data over the wire. You can do that with the application/json content type: <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> What about Deflate Compression? The default compression is GZip. The documentation hints that you can use a different compression scheme and mentions Deflate compression. And sure enough you can change the compression settings to: <scheme name="deflate" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> to get deflate style compression. The deflate algorithm produces slightly more compact output so I tend to prefer it over GZip but more HTTP clients (other than browsers) support GZip than Deflate so be careful with this option if you build Web APIs. I also had some issues with the above value actually being applied right away. Changing the scheme in applicationhost.config didn’t show up on the site  right away. It required me to do a full IISReset to get that change to show up before I saw the change over to deflate compressed content. Content was slightly more compressed with deflate – not sure if it’s worth the slightly less common compression type, but the option at least is available. IIS 7 finally makes GZip Easy In summary IIS 7 makes GZip easy finally, even if the configuration settings are a bit obtuse and the documentation is seriously lacking. But once you know the basic settings I’ve described here and the fact that you can override all of this in your local web.config it’s pretty straight forward to configure GZip support and tweak it exactly to your needs. Static compression is a total no brainer as it adds very little overhead compared to direct static file serving and provides solid compression. Dynamic Compression is a little more tricky as it does add some overhead to servers, so it probably will require some tweaking to get the right balance of CPU load vs. compression ratios. Looking at large sites like Amazon, Yahoo, NewEgg etc. – they all use Related Content Code based ASP.NET GZip Caveats HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET  

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• Another Marketing Conference, part one – the best morning sessions.

  - by Roger Hart

  Yesterday I went to Another Marketing Conference. I honestly can’t tell if the title is just tipping over into smug, but in the balance of things that doesn’t matter, because it was a good conference. There was an enjoyable blend of theoretical and practical, and enough inter-disciplinary spread to keep my inner dilettante grinning from ear to ear. Sure, there was a bumpy bit in the middle, with two back-to-back sales pitches and a rather thin overview of the state of the web. But the signal:noise ratio at AMC2012 was impressively high. Here’s the first part of my write-up of the sessions. It’s a bit of a mammoth. It’s also a bit of a mash-up of what was said and what I thought about it. I’ll add links to the videos and slides from the sessions as they become available. Although it was in the morning session, I’ve not included Vanessa Northam’s session on the power of internal comms to build brand ambassadors. It’ll be in the next roundup, as this is already pushing 2.5k words. First, the important stuff. I was keeping a tally, and nobody said “synergy” or “leverage”. I did, however, hear the term “marketeers” six times. Shame on you – you know who you are. 1 – Branding in a post-digital world, Graham Hales This initially looked like being a sales presentation for Interbrand, but Graham pulled it out of the bag a few minutes in. He introduced a model for brand management that was essentially Plan >> Do >> Check >> Act, with Do and Check rolled up together, and went on to stress that this looks like on overall business management model for a reason. Brand has to be part of your overall business strategy and metrics if you’re going to care about it at all. This was the first iteration of what proved to be one of the event’s emergent themes: do it throughout the stack or don’t bother. Graham went on to remind us that brands, in so far as they are owned at all, are owned by and co-created with our customers. Advertising can offer a message to customers, but they provide the expression of a brand. This was a preface to talking about an increasingly chaotic marketplace, with increasingly hard-to-manage purchase processes. Services like Amazon reviews and TripAdvisor (four presenters would make this point) saturate customers with information, and give them a kind of vigilante power to comment on and define brands. Consequentially, they experience a number of “moments of deflection” in our sales funnels. Our control is lessened, and failure to engage can negatively-impact buying decisions increasingly poorly. The clearest example given was the failure of NatWest’s “caring bank” campaign, where staff in branches, customer support, and online presences didn’t align. A discontinuity of experience basically made the campaign worthless, and disgruntled customers talked about it loudly on social media. This in turn presented an opportunity to engage and show caring, but that wasn’t taken. What I took away was that brand (co)creation is ongoing and needs monitoring and metrics. But reciprocally, given you get what you measure, strategy and metrics must include brand if any kind of branding is to work at all. Campaigns and messages must permeate product and service design. What that doesn’t mean (and Graham didn’t say it did) is putting Marketing at the top of the pyramid, and having them bawl demands at Product Management, Support, and Development like an entitled toddler. It’s going to have to be collaborative, and session 6 on internal comms handled this really well. The main thing missing here was substantiating data, and the main question I found myself chewing on was: if we’re building brands collaboratively and in the open, what about the cultural politics of trolling? 2 – Challenging our core beliefs about human behaviour, Mark Earls This was definitely the best show of the day. It was also some of the best content. Mark talked us through nudging, behavioural economics, and some key misconceptions around decision making. Basically, people aren’t rational, they’re petty, reactive, emotional sacks of meat, and they’ll go where they’re led. Comforting stuff. Examples given were the spread of the London Riots and the “discovery” of the mountains of Kong, and the popularity of Susan Boyle, which, in turn made me think about Per Mollerup’s concept of “social wayshowing”. Mark boiled his thoughts down into four key points which I completely failed to write down word for word: People do, then think – Changing minds to change behaviour doesn’t work. Post-rationalization rules the day. See also: mere exposure effects. Spock < Kirk - Emotional/intuitive comes first, then we rationalize impulses. The non-thinking, emotive, reactive processes run much faster than the deliberative ones. People are not really rational decision makers, so  intervening with information may not be appropriate. Maximisers or satisficers? – Related to the last point. People do not consistently, rationally, maximise. When faced with an abundance of choice, they prefer to satisfice than evaluate, and will often follow social leads rather than think. Things tend to converge – Behaviour trends to a consensus normal. When faced with choices people overwhelmingly just do what they see others doing. Humans are extraordinarily good at mirroring behaviours and receiving influence. People “outsource the cognitive load” of choices to the crowd. Mark’s headline quote was probably “the real influence happens at the table next to you”. Reference examples, word of mouth, and social influence are tremendously important, and so talking about product experiences may be more important than talking about products. This reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “creating bad-ass users” concept of designing to make people more awesome rather than products they like. If we can expose user-awesome, and make sharing easy, we can normalise the behaviours we want. If we normalize the behaviours we want, people should make and post-rationalize the buying decisions we want.  Where we need to be: “A bigger boy made me do it” Where we are: “a wizard did it and ran away” However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some purchasing decisions are personal and informed rather than social and reactive. There’s a quadrant diagram, in fact. What was really interesting, though, towards the end of the talk, was some advice for working out how social your products might be. The standard technology adoption lifecycle graph is essentially about social product diffusion. So this idea isn’t really new. Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” idea may not strictly apply. However, his concepts of beachheads and reference segments are exactly what is required to normalize and thus enable purchase decisions (behaviour change). The final thing is that in only very few categories does a better product actually affect purchase decision. Where the choice is personal and informed, this is true. But where it’s personal and impulsive, or in any way social, “better” is trumped by popularity, endorsement, or “point of sale salience”. UX, UCD, and e-commerce know this to be true. A better (and easier) experience will always beat “more features”. Easy to use, and easy to observe being used will beat “what the user says they want”. This made me think about the astounding stickiness of rational fallacies, “common sense” and the pathological willful simplifications of the media. Rational fallacies seem like they’re basically the heuristics we use for post-rationalization. If I were profoundly grimy and cynical, I’d suggest deploying a boat-load in our messaging, to see if they’re really as sticky and appealing as they look. 4 – Changing behaviour through communication, Stephen Donajgrodzki This was a fantastic follow up to Mark’s session. Stephen basically talked us through some tactics used in public information/health comms that implement the kind of behavioural theory Mark introduced. The session was largely about how to get people to do (good) things they’re predisposed not to do, and how communication can (and can’t) make positive interventions. A couple of things stood out, in particular “implementation intentions” and how they can be linked to goals. For example, in order to get people to check and test their smoke alarms (a goal intention, rarely actualized  an information campaign will attempt to link this activity to the clocks going back or forward (a strong implementation intention, well-actualized). The talk reinforced the idea that making behaviour changes easy and visible normalizes them and makes them more likely to succeed. To do this, they have to be embodied throughout a product and service cycle. Experiential disconnects undermine the normalization. So campaigns, products, and customer interactions must be aligned. This is underscored by the second section of the presentation, which talked about interventions and pre-conditions for change. Taking the examples of drug addiction and stopping smoking, Stephen showed us a framework for attempting (and succeeding or failing in) behaviour change. He noted that when the change is something people fundamentally want to do, and that is easy, this gets a to simpler. Coordinated, easily-observed environmental pressures create preconditions for change and build motivation. (price, pub smoking ban, ad campaigns, friend quitting, declining social acceptability) A triggering even leads to a change attempt. (getting a cold and panicking about how bad the cough is) Interventions can be made to enable an attempt (NHS services, public information, nicotine patches) If it succeeds – yay. If it fails, there’s strong negative enforcement. Triggering events seem largely personal, but messaging can intervene in the creation of preconditions and in supporting decisions. Stephen talked more about systems of thinking and “bounded rationality”. The idea being that to enable change you need to break through “automatic” thinking into “reflective” thinking. Disruption and emotion are great tools for this, but that is only the start of the process. It occurs to me that a great deal of market research is focused on determining triggers rather than analysing necessary preconditions. Although they are presumably related. The final section talked about setting goals. Marketing goals are often seen as deriving directly from business goals. However, marketing may be unable to deliver on these directly where decision and behaviour-change processes are involved. In those cases, marketing and communication goals should be to create preconditions. They should also consider priming and norms. Content marketing and brand awareness are good first steps here, as brands can be heuristics in decision making for choice-saturated consumers, or those seeking education. 5 – The power of engaged communities and how to build them, Harriet Minter (the Guardian) The meat of this was that you need to let communities define and establish themselves, and be quick to react to their needs. Harriet had been in charge of building the Guardian’s community sites, and learned a lot about how they come together, stabilize  grow, and react. Crucially, they can’t be about sales or push messaging. A community is not just an audience. It’s essential to start with what this particular segment or tribe are interested in, then what they want to hear. Eventually you can consider – in light of this – what they might want to buy, but you can’t start with the product. A community won’t cohere around one you’re pushing. Her tips for community building were (again, sorry, not verbatim): Set goals Have some targets. Community building sounds vague and fluffy, but you can have (and adjust) concrete goals. Think like a start-up This is the “lean” stuff. Try things, fail quickly, respond. Don’t restrict platforms Let the audience choose them, and be aware of their differences. For example, LinkedIn is very different to Twitter. Track your stats Related to the first point. Keeping an eye on the numbers lets you respond. They should be qualified, however. If you want a community of enterprise decision makers, headcount alone may be a bad metric – have you got CIOs, or just people who want to get jobs by mingling with CIOs? Build brand advocates Do things to involve people and make them awesome, and they’ll cheer-lead for you. The last part really got my attention. Little bits of drive-by kindness go a long way. But more than that, genuinely helping people turns them into powerful advocates. Harriet gave an example of the Guardian engaging with an aspiring journalist on its Q&A forums. Through a series of serendipitous encounters he became a BBC producer, and now enthusiastically speaks up for the Guardian community sites. Cultivating many small, authentic, influential voices may have a better pay-off than schmoozing the big guys. This could be particularly important in the context of Mark and Stephen’s models of social, endorsement-led, and example-led decision making. There’s a lot here I haven’t covered, and it may be worth some follow-up on community building. Thoughts I was quite sceptical of nudge theory and behavioural economics. First off it sounds too good to be true, and second it sounds too sinister to permit. But I haven’t done the background reading. So I’m going to, and if it seems to hold real water, and if it’s possible to do it ethically (Stephen’s presentations suggests it may be) then it’s probably worth exploring. The message seemed to be: change what people do, and they’ll work out why afterwards. Moreover, the people around them will do it too. Make the things you want them to do extraordinarily easy and very, very visible. Normalize and support the decisions you want them to make, and they’ll make them. In practice this means not talking about the thing, but showing the user-awesome. Glib? Perhaps. But it feels worth considering. Also, if I ever run a marketing conference, I’m going to ban speakers from using examples from Apple. Quite apart from not being consistently generalizable, it’s becoming an irritating cliché.

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• Tips for XNA WP7 Developers

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  There are several things any XNA developer should know/consider when coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This post assumes you are familiar with the XNA Framework and with the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0. It’s not exhaustive; it’s simply a list of things I’ve gathered over time. I may come back and add to it over time, and I’m happy to add anything anyone else has experienced or learned as well. Display · The screen is either 800x480 or 480x800. · But you aren’t required to use only those resolutions. · The hardware scaler on the phone will scale up from 240x240. · One dimension will be capped at 800 and the other at 480; which depends on your code, but you cannot have, e.g., an 800x600 back buffer – that will be created as 800x480. · The hardware scaler will not normally change aspect ratio, though, so no unintended stretching. · Any dimension (width, height, or both) below 240 will be adjusted to 240 (without any aspect ratio adjustment such that, e.g. 200x240 will be treated as 240x240). · Dimensions below 240 will be honored in terms of calculating whether to use portrait or landscape. · If dimensions are exactly equal or if height is greater than width then game will be in portrait. · If width is greater than height, the game will be in landscape. · Landscape games will automatically flip if the user turns the phone 180°; no code required. · Default landscape is top = left. In other words a user holding a phone who starts a landscape game will see the first image presented so that the “top” of the screen is along the right edge of his/her phone, such that the natural behavior would be to turn the phone 90° so that the top of the phone will be held in the user’s left hand and the bottom would be held in the user’s right hand. · The status bar (where the clock, battery power, etc., are found) is hidden when the Game-derived class sets GraphicsDeviceManager.IsFullScreen = true. It is shown when IsFullScreen = false. The default value is false (i.e. the status bar is shown). · You should have a good reason for hiding the status bar. Users find it helpful to know what time it is, how much charge their battery has left, and whether or not their phone is in service range. This is especially true for casual games that you expect someone to play for a few minutes at a time, e.g. while waiting for some event to start, for a phone call to come in, or for a train, bus, or subway to arrive. · In portrait mode, the status bar occupies 32 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 480x800 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 461x768 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 480x768 (or some resolution with the same 0.625 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. · In landscape mode, the status bar occupies 72 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 800x480 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 728x437 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 728x480 (or some resolution with the same 1.51666667 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. Input · Touch input is scaled with screen size. · So if your back buffer is 600x360, a tap in the bottom right corner will come in as (599,359). You don’t need to do anything special to get this automatic scaling of touch behavior. · If you do not use full area of the screen, any touch input outside the area you use will still register as a touch input. For example, if you set a portrait resolution of 240x240, it would be scaled up to occupy a 480x480 area, centered in the screen. If you touch anywhere above this area, you will get a touch input of (X,0) where X is a number from 0 to 239 (in accordance with your 240 pixel wide back buffer). Any touch below this area will give a touch input of (X,239). · If you keep the status bar visible, touches within its area will not be passed to your game. · In general, a screen measurement is the diagonal. So a 3.5” screen is 3.5” long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6 (480/800 = 0.6), this means that a phone with a 3.5” screen is only approximately 1.8” wide by 3” tall. So there are approximately 267 pixels in an inch on a 3.5” screen. · Again, this time in metric! 3.5 inches is approximately 8.89 cm. So an 8.89 cm screen is 8.89 cm long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6, this means that a phone with an 8.89 cm screen is only approximately 4.57 cm wide by 7.62 cm tall. So there are approximately 105 pixels in a centimeter on an 8.89 cm screen. · Think about the size of your finger tip. If you do not have large hands, think about the size of the fingertip of someone with large hands. Consider that when you are sizing your touch input. Especially consider that when you are spacing two touch targets near one another. You need to judge it for yourself, but items that are next to each other and are each 100x100 should be fine when it comes to selecting items individually. Smaller targets than that are ok provided that you leave space between them. · You want your users to have a pleasant experience. Making touch controls too small or too close to one another will make them nervous about whether they will touch the right target. Take this into account when you plan out your game initially. If possible, do some quick size mockups on an actual phone using colored rectangles that you position and size where you plan to have your game controls. Adjust as necessary. · People do not have transparent hands! Nor are their hands the size of a mouse pointer icon. Consider leaving a dedicated space for input rather than forcing the user to cover up to one-third of the screen with a finger just to play the game. · Another benefit of designing your controls to use a dedicated area is that you’re less likely to have players moving their finger(s) so frantically that they accidentally hit the back button, start button, or search button (many phones have one or more of these on the screen itself – it’s easy to hit one by accident and really annoying if you hit, e.g., the search button and then quickly tap back only to find out that the game didn’t save your progress such that you just wasted all the time you spent playing). · People do not like doing somersaults in order to move something forward with accelerometer-based controls. Test your accelerometer-based controls extensively and get a lot of feedback. Very well-known games from noted publishers have created really bad accelerometer controls and been virtually unplayable as a result. Also be wary of exceptions and other possible failures that the documentation warns about. · When done properly, the accelerometer can add a nice touch to your game (see, e.g. ilomilo where the accelerometer was used to move the background; it added a nice touch without frustrating the user; I also think CarniVale does direct accelerometer controls very well). However, if done poorly, it will make your game an abomination unto the Marketplace. Days, weeks, perhaps even months of development time that you will never get back. I won’t name names; you can search the marketplace for games with terrible reviews and you’ll find them. Graphics · The maximum frame rate is 30 frames per second. This was set as a compromise between battery life and quality. · At least one model of phone is known to have a screen refresh rate that is between 59 and 60 hertz. Because of this, using a fixed time step with a target frame rate of 30 will cause a slight internal delay to build up as the framework is forced to wait slightly for the next refresh. Eventually the delay will get to the point where a draw is skipped in order to recover from the delay. (See Nick's comment below for clarification.) · To deal with that delay, you can either stay with a fixed time step and set the frame rate slightly lower or else you can go to a variable time step and make sure to adjust all of your update data (e.g. player movement distance) to take into account the elapsed time from the last update. A variable time step makes your update logic slightly more complicated but will avoid frame skips entirely. · Currently there are no custom shaders. This might change in the future (there is no hardware limitation preventing it; it simply wasn’t a feature that could be implemented in the time available before launch). · There are five built-in shaders. You can create a lot of nice effects with the built-in shaders. · There is more power on the CPU than there is on the GPU so things you might typically off-load to the GPU will instead make sense to do on the CPU side. · This is a phone. It is not a PC. It is not an Xbox 360. The emulator runs on a PC and uses the full power of your PC. It is very good for testing your code for bugs and doing early prototyping and layout. You should not use it to measure performance. Use actual phone hardware instead. · There are many phone models, each of which has slightly different performance levels for I/O, screen blitting, CPU performance, etc. Do not take your game right to the performance limit on your phone since for some other phones you might be crossing their limits and leaving players with a bad experience. Leave a cushion to account for hardware differences. · Smaller screened phones will have slightly more dots per inch (dpi). Larger screened phones will have slightly less. Either way, the dpi will be much higher than the typical 96 found on most computer screens. Make sure that whoever is doing art for your game takes this into account. · Screens are only required to have 16 bit color (65,536 colors). This is common among smart phones. Using gradients on a 16 bit display can produce an ugly artifact known as banding. Banding is when, rather than a smooth transition from one color to another, you instead see distinct lines. Be careful to avoid this when possible. Banding can be avoided through careful art creation. Its effects can be minimized and even unnoticeable when the texture in question is always moving. You should be careful not to rely on “looks good on my phone” since some phones do have 32-bit displays and thus you’ll find yourself wondering why you’re getting bad reviews that complain about the graphics. Avoid gradients; if you can’t, make sure they are 16-bit safe. Audio · Never rely on sounds as your sole signal to the player that something is happening in the game. They might have the sound off. They might be playing somewhere loud. Etc. · You have to provide controls to disable sound & music. These should be separate. · On at least one model of phone, the volume control API currently has no effect. Players can adjust sound with their hardware volume buttons, but in game selectors simply won’t work. As such, it may not be worth the effort of providing anything beyond on/off switches for sound and music. · MediaPlayer.GameHasControl will return true when a game is hooked up to a PC running Zune. When Zune is running, any attempts to do anything (beyond check GameHasControl) with MediaPlayer will cause an exception to be thrown. If this exception is thrown, catch it and disable music. Exceptions take time to propagate; you don’t want one popping up in every single run of your game’s Update method. · Remember that players can already be listening to music or using the FM radio. In this case GameHasControl will be false and you should handle this appropriately. You can, alternately, ask the player for permission to stop their current music and play your music instead, but the (current) requirement that you restore their music when done is very hard (if not impossible) to deal with. · You can still play sound effects even when the game doesn’t have control of the music, but don’t think this is a backdoor to playing music. Your game will fail certification if your “sound effect” seems to be more like music in scope and length.

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• EFI VMware Virtual SCSI Hard Drive (0.0) ... unsuccessful

  - by Ravichandra

  I installed the VMware-workstation-full-8.0.0-471780 and created new virtual michin with Mac OSX 10.6.6 with 4GB Ram, 1 Processer, 40GB Hard Disk(SCSI) and General -- Guest Operating system : Apple Mac OS X, Version: Mac OS Server 10.6. when I Power On the the VMWare gives the follwing unsuccessfull comments. -- EFI VMware Virtual SCSI Hard Drive (0.0) ... unsuccessful -- EFI VMware Virtual IDE CDROM Drive (IDE 1.0) ... unsuccessful Could you please help me. how to solve this errors

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• Xubuntu vs Ubuntu 10.04 Performance

  - by wag2639

  I know it just came out today, but are there any statistics with memory requirements, system resources, power usage, and performance to decide which is better Xubuntu or Ubuntu (XFCE vs Gnome)? My main concern is running it as secondary OS on my Lenovo T400 laptop to just get online quickly and using SSH from a terminal to connect to remote web servers.

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• Asus EEE PC 1005HA battery not being detected

  - by Imran

  My EEE PC's battery is not being detected since this morning. The battery indicator doesn't turn on, Power Options in Windows doesn't detect a battery either. Apart from removing the battery and plugging it back again (which I already did), what can I do??

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• Eject disk on Mac Pro running VMWare ESXi

  - by DougN

  I'm almost embarrassed to ask this, but I'm stuck. I installed VMWare ESXi on a Mac Pro. It's working great! The problem is that you press F12 to eject the disk, and F12 is what you use to shutdown ESX. I can power down, open the case, pull out the CD drive and use a paper clip to force the drawer open, but that's kind of a pain. Any other way to do this?

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• Ubuntu suddenly freezes

  - by tapan

  I've a strange problem with my ubuntu 10.04 installation. Whenever i boot into ubuntu the entire system freezes / hangs soon after (~ 2 mins in). This problem exists on my windows 7 installation too. However if i start World of Warcraft or Warcraft on windows it doesnt hang for the duration i'm playing the game. After i stop playing and exit the game my laptop hangs inside 2 mins. Here is when it gets weirder. If i disconnect the charger, the laptop doesn't hang. However when I start it in ubuntu recovery mode and drop to root shell and use the 'startx' command everything works perfectly. I cannot figure out what the problem is. i have an intel core2duo 2.2ghz processor, intel mobile 965 graphics, 2 GB RAM for more details here is the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo : processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2201.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority bogomips : 4389.80 clflush size : 64 power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2201.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority bogomips : 4388.96 clflush size : 64 power management: here is the output of cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 2052440 kB MemFree: 55924 kB Buffers: 579352 kB Cached: 821752 kB SwapCached: 704 kB Active: 897124 kB Inactive: 1032256 kB Active(anon): 412140 kB Inactive(anon): 264804 kB Active(file): 484984 kB Inactive(file): 767452 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB HighTotal: 1178440 kB HighFree: 6012 kB LowTotal: 874000 kB LowFree: 49912 kB SwapTotal: 995988 kB SwapFree: 986616 kB Dirty: 8928 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 527596 kB Mapped: 76536 kB Slab: 39480 kB SReclaimable: 21100 kB SUnreclaim: 18380 kB PageTables: 5672 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 2022208 kB Committed_AS: 1856400 kB VmallocTotal: 122880 kB VmallocUsed: 11928 kB VmallocChunk: 104644 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 4096 kB DirectMap4k: 16376 kB DirectMap4M: 892928 kB Also the kern.log doesn't show any errors. What I want to know is what might be the problem, how i could test for it and if there are any solutions I could try. Thanks :).

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• Powering-down USB Powered Devices on laptop sleep

  - by Carl

  I recently purchased a Targus Lap Chill Mat, which is a USB powered device, but doesn't have any interface/storage/etc function. I'd like it to power-down when my (macbook) laptop sleeps (since the fan obviously doesn't need to be running when the laptop is idle) without having to unplug it. Any suggestions?

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• Illustrator CS4 Gradient Following a Path

  - by James B

  I'm trying to draw a power cable in illustrator, I want the cable to have one side dark and the other light with a gradient in the middle, because the cable has curved corners it won't work the usual way. I have tried making an art brush with a gradient in it which definitely didn't give me the effect I was looking for. Do you know anyway I can solve this problem?

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• How repair/uninstall Visual Web Developer 2010 Beta 2?

  - by Sprinter

  I cannot uninstall Visual Web Developer 2010 Beta 2. When I was trying to uninstall the first time, the power went off to my machine and screwed up the Beta 2 installation. I cannot find a Visual Web Developer 2010 Beta 2 download on the Microsoft website any longer to repair the Beta 2 installation. How can I get VWD 2010 Beta 2 off of my system so I can install the new release?

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• Acer Aspire One AOA 150 netbook health monitoring software

  - by iceman

  I have a Acer Aspire One AOA 150 with Windows Xp Home. I want to monitor the voltages from the power supply, the temperature of the system, the CPU and fan speeds. Much like the functionality of GKrellM(though I haven't used this on the netbook yet) , a GTK applet designed to make an impressive panel of monitors or xsensors in Linux. Is this possible with the netbook? I want a software for Windows 7 and Windows Xp.

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• Ubuntu/Windows suddenly freezes

  - by tapan

  I've a strange problem with my ubuntu 10.04 installation. Whenever i boot into ubuntu the entire system freezes / hangs soon after (~ 2 mins in). This problem exists on my windows 7 installation too. However if i start World of Warcraft or Warcraft on windows it doesnt hang for the duration i'm playing the game. After i stop playing and exit the game my laptop hangs inside 2 mins. Here is when it gets weirder. If i disconnect the charger, the laptop doesn't hang. However when I start it in ubuntu recovery mode and drop to root shell and use the 'startx' command everything works perfectly. I cannot figure out what the problem is. i have an intel core2duo 2.2ghz processor, intel mobile 965 graphics, 2 GB RAM for more details here is the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo : processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2201.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority bogomips : 4389.80 clflush size : 64 power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 15 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz stepping : 11 cpu MHz : 2201.000 cache size : 4096 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm ida tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority bogomips : 4388.96 clflush size : 64 power management: here is the output of cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 2052440 kB MemFree: 55924 kB Buffers: 579352 kB Cached: 821752 kB SwapCached: 704 kB Active: 897124 kB Inactive: 1032256 kB Active(anon): 412140 kB Inactive(anon): 264804 kB Active(file): 484984 kB Inactive(file): 767452 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB HighTotal: 1178440 kB HighFree: 6012 kB LowTotal: 874000 kB LowFree: 49912 kB SwapTotal: 995988 kB SwapFree: 986616 kB Dirty: 8928 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 527596 kB Mapped: 76536 kB Slab: 39480 kB SReclaimable: 21100 kB SUnreclaim: 18380 kB PageTables: 5672 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 2022208 kB Committed_AS: 1856400 kB VmallocTotal: 122880 kB VmallocUsed: 11928 kB VmallocChunk: 104644 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 4096 kB DirectMap4k: 16376 kB DirectMap4M: 892928 kB Also the kern.log doesn't show any errors. What I want to know is what might be the problem, how i could test for it and if there are any solutions I could try. Thanks :).

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• Access IIS Admin without local administrator rights

  - by Carl

  We are running Microsoft Server 2003 with IIS. We would like to give our developers access to manage IIS (through IIS Admin) but do not want them to be administrators of the entire machine. Putting them in "Power Users" group does not seem to work. What permissions should we grant to our developers to allow them to manage IIS (e.g. add websites, modify app pools, etc.) without giving them full admin rights to the server?

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• Unable to Set Up Remote Access on Windows Home Server

  - by Matt Hanson

  When trying to turn on Remote Access on my Windows Home Server (HP MediaSmart Ex485, MediaSmart Server 3.0, Power Pack 3), I am not able to continue through the wizard as this first check fails: "Verifying that your remote Web site is available locally" Everything else on the server works fine, including being able to: Ping server RDP to server Access all shares as expected Browse to both http://servername and http://servername:55000 I have noticed though that I am unable to browse to http://servername:56000 as I should be able to do. I've performed a server recovery to reset the installation to factory defaults, with no such luck.

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• Attach radeon driver to specific PCI devices?

  - by genpfault

  I have two Radeon cards in this machine, a 6570 and a 6950: lspci | grep VGA: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Turks [Radeon HD 6570] 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cayman PRO [Radeon HD 6950] I'm trying to get VGA passthrough to work with KVM on Debian Wheezy, passing through the 6950 as a secondary video card to a Windows 7 guest. This works fine if I blacklist the radeon kernel module via /etc/modprobe.d/. If I remove the blacklist to run X11 (or even just a KMS console) on the 6570 the radeon module seems to attach to both cards: dmesg | egrep "01:00.0|02:00.0|radeon": pci 0000:01:00.0: [1002:6759] type 0 class 0x000300 pci 0000:01:00.0: reg 10: [mem 0xe0000000-0xefffffff 64bit pref] pci 0000:01:00.0: reg 18: [mem 0xf7e20000-0xf7e3ffff 64bit] pci 0000:01:00.0: reg 20: [io 0xe000-0xe0ff] pci 0000:01:00.0: reg 30: [mem 0xf7e00000-0xf7e1ffff pref] pci 0000:01:00.0: supports D1 D2 pci 0000:02:00.0: [1002:6719] type 0 class 0x000300 pci 0000:02:00.0: reg 10: [mem 0xd0000000-0xdfffffff 64bit pref] pci 0000:02:00.0: reg 18: [mem 0xf7d20000-0xf7d3ffff 64bit] pci 0000:02:00.0: reg 20: [io 0xd000-0xd0ff] pci 0000:02:00.0: reg 30: [mem 0xf7d00000-0xf7d1ffff pref] pci 0000:02:00.0: supports D1 D2 vgaarb: device added: PCI:0000:01:00.0,decodes=io+mem,owns=io+mem,locks=none vgaarb: device added: PCI:0000:02:00.0,decodes=io+mem,owns=none,locks=none vgaarb: bridge control possible 0000:02:00.0 vgaarb: bridge control possible 0000:01:00.0 pci 0000:01:00.0: Boot video device [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled. radeon 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 radeon 0000:01:00.0: VRAM: 1024M 0x0000000000000000 - 0x000000003FFFFFFF (1024M used) radeon 0000:01:00.0: GTT: 512M 0x0000000040000000 - 0x000000005FFFFFFF [drm] radeon: 1024M of VRAM memory ready [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready. radeon 0000:01:00.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X radeon 0000:01:00.0: radeon: using MSI. [drm] radeon: irq initialized. radeon 0000:01:00.0: WB enabled [drm] radeon: ib pool ready. [drm] radeon: power management initialized fbcon: radeondrmfb (fb0) is primary device fb0: radeondrmfb frame buffer device [drm] Initialized radeon 2.12.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0 radeon 0000:02:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0003) radeon 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 radeon 0000:02:00.0: VRAM: 2048M 0x0000000000000000 - 0x000000007FFFFFFF (2048M used) radeon 0000:02:00.0: GTT: 512M 0x0000000080000000 - 0x000000009FFFFFFF [drm] radeon: 2048M of VRAM memory ready [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready. radeon 0000:02:00.0: irq 49 for MSI/MSI-X radeon 0000:02:00.0: radeon: using MSI. [drm] radeon: irq initialized. radeon 0000:02:00.0: WB enabled [drm] radeon: ib pool ready. [drm] radeon: power management initialized fb1: radeondrmfb frame buffer device [drm] Initialized radeon 2.12.0 20080528 for 0000:02:00.0 on minor 1 [drm] radeon: finishing device. radeon 0000:02:00.0: ffff88041a941800 unpin not necessary [drm] radeon: ttm finalized pci-stub 0000:02:00.0: claimed by stub pci-stub 0000:02:00.0: irq 49 for MSI/MSI-X This causes the Win7 VM to bluescreen on boot. How can I configure things so that the radeon module only attaches to the 6570 and not the 6950?

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• VMware Workstation reboot 32-bit host when starting 32/64-bit guest using VT-x

  - by Powerman

  I'm trying to start 64-bit guest (MacOSX and Windows7) on 32-bit host (Hardened Gentoo Linux, kernel 2.6.28-hardened-r9) using VMware Workstation (6.5.3.185404 and 7.0.1.227600). If VT-X disabled in BIOS, VMware refuse to start 64-bit guest (as expected). If VT-X enabled in BIOS, VMware start guest without complaining, but then, in about a second (I suppose as soon as guest try to switch on 64-bit) my host reboots (actually, it's more like reset - normal reboot procedure skipped and BIOS POST start immediately). My hardware is Core 2 Duo 6600 on ASUS P5B-Deluxe with latest stable BIOS 1101. I've power-cycled system, then enabled Vanderpool in BIOS. My CPU doesn't support Trusted Execution Technology, and there no way to disable it in BIOS. I've rebooted several times after that, sometimes with power-cycled, and ensure Vandertool is enabled in BIOS. I've also run VMware-guest64check-5.5.0-18463 tool, and it report "This host is capable of running a 64-bit guest operating system under this VMware product.". About a year ago I tried to disable hardened in kernel to ensure this isn't because of PaX/GrSecurity, but that doesn't help. I have not checked 32-bit guests with VT-X enabled yet, but without VT-X they works ok. ASUS provide "beta" BIOS updates, but according to their descriptions these updates doesn't fix this issue, so I'm not sure is it good idea to try it. My best guess now it's motherboard/BIOS bug. Any ideas? Update 1: I've tried to boot vt.iso provided at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8978 and here is it report: CPU 0: VT is enabled on this core CPU 1: VT is enabled on this core Update 2: I've just tried to boot 32-bit guests (Windows7, Ubuntu9.04 and Gentoo) using all possible virtualization modes. In Automatic, Automatic with Replay, Binary translation everything works, in Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI I got message "This host does not support EPT. Using software virtualization with a software MMU." and everything works. BUT in Intel VT-x or AMD-V mode all 32-bit guests reset host just like 64-bit guests! So, this issue is not specific to 64-bit guests. One more thing. Using Intel VT-x or AMD-V mode for both 32/64-bit guests my host reset right after starting VM, i.e. before VM BIOS POST and before guest even start booting. But using Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI VM BIOS runs ok, then 64-bit guests start booting (Windows7 completed "Loading files" progressbar), and only after that host reset.

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• MacBook hangs when restarting to Vista through BootCamp

  - by John

  I have Vista Pro installed on my Macbook and while it mostly works well, sometimes when I select Windows from the boot screen after turning the thing on, the screen just goes black and it all stops. If I hold the power button until it powers down and repeat, it works. It's not getting as far as Windows at all, I think, because if Windows was previously shut down to Hibernate, it still restores fine... and I'm pretty sure if Windows' startup had hung and been force-rebooted my session would be borked?

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• Logitech Media Elite Func button

  - by Noam Gal

  I have the aforementioned keyboard, and occasionally the "Func" key will get unpressed. It gets especially annoying when I try to rename a file, and start winword by accident, or try to refresh a page, and nothing happens (It's the undo - no effect inside a browser usually). I know I can rebind those keys to just do nothing, but I just wanted to know why does the func mode changes by itself? Can it be something with power management/screen saver?

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• How to fix an external HDD?

  - by Bogdan

  Hi, I have a Verbatim 1080p external HDD (47535 model). When i plug it in, the power and the hdd leds are lighting, but it has an anoying sound every half second or so. Is there any posibility to fix it OR retrieve my data? Or is a mechanical problem? Thanks!

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• How do you reset a Nexxt 54M Wireless AP Router?

  - by Fernando

  I have this Nexxt router, and I haven't been able to reset it correctly. I pressed the thin button in the back (which you have to press with a pen point or something similar, really slim), but haven't managed to make it work. The CPU, WLAN and power lights go on and remain still. The lights for the connected cables don't turn on...

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• WD1000FYPS harddrive is marked 0 mb in 3ware (and no SMART)

  - by osgx

  After reboot my SATA 1TB WD1000FYPS (previously is was "Drive error") is marked 0 mb in 3ware web gui. Complete message: Available Drives (Controller ID 0) Port 1 WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0 0.00 MB NOT SUPPORTED [Remove Drive] SMART gives me only Device Model and ATA protocol version 1 (not 7-8 as it must be for SATA) What does it mean? Just before reboot, when is was marked only with "Device Error", smart was: Device Model: WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0 Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1130*** Firmware Version: 02.01B01 User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Sun Mar 7 18:47:35 2010 MSK SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 188 186 021 Pre-fail Always - 7591 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 229 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 199 199 140 Pre-fail Always - 3 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000e 193 193 000 Old_age Always - 125 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 078 078 000 Old_age Always - 16615 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 77 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 198 198 000 Old_age Always - 1564 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 146 146 000 Old_age Always - 164824 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 117 100 000 Old_age Always - 35 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 199 199 000 Old_age Always - 1 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 What can be wrong with he? Can it be restored? PS new smart is === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD1000FYPS-01ZKB0 Serial Number: [No Information Found] Firmware Version: [No Information Found] Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 1 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Mon Mar 8 00:29:44 2010 MSK SMART is only available in ATA Version 3 Revision 3 or greater. We will try to proceed in spite of this. SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 82-83 don't show if SMART supported. Checking for SMART support by trying SMART ENABLE command. Command failed, ata.status=(0x00), ata.command=(0x51), ata.flags=(0x01) Error SMART Enable failed: Input/output error SMART ENABLE failed - this establishes that this device lacks SMART functionality. A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options. PPS There was a rapid grow of " 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count " before dying. The hard was used in raid, with several hards from the same fabric packaging box (close id's). The hard drives were placed identically. Rapid means almost linear grow from 300 to 1700 in 6-7 hours. Maximal temperature was 41C. (thanks to munin's smart monitoring)

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• 2.0 speeds on USB hub?

  - by Matthew Robertson

  How capable are USB hubs? I have an AirPort Extreme router with a printer attached (it's not powered by USB). I want to extend this and add two hard drives (one for Time Machine and the other for EyeTV recordings). Can a 4-port USB hub (I'm considering this one) achieve USB 2.0 speeds and power the hard drives? What difference would a self-powered vs externally-powered hub produce?

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• Looking for guide to disassembly of Acer Aspire 5730

  - by Ssvarc

  I have an Acer Aspire 5730-4163 whose power jack has died. I'm looking for a disassembly how-to or service manual, preferably with clear pictures. Google hasn't turned up anything for me. Anyone know of a link? Thanks!

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• Xenserver 5.5 U2 a bit unstable with an unstable W2003 VM

  - by twistedbrain

  In the last week I had to reboot the host system twice and the second one by means of the power button. The system is a Dell PE 6950 (4 Opteron dual core, 2,8 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, 900 GB disk in a RAID 10 array composed by 4 450GB 15000 rpm disks) with XenServer 5.5 U2. We're installing it and at now there are working in production a 2003 32 bit Windows server VM with 2 GB RAM, 3 vcpu and about 200 GB disk in 4 partition (12 GB boot, 20 GB program, 80 GB user data, 80 GB other data). The first time I was compressing many Windows 2003 folders (some tens GB by means of W2003 compressed folder option) from a Windows remote console and some hours before my colleague installed Backup Exec agent that was alredy installed and that required a reboot (that was pending). The console stopped responding, it was no more possible to connect by means of remote console or by means of the console of the XenCentre, it was still possible from the network to use the shared folder of the VM and the programs on it (2 db and a GIS program), but the print server didn't work any more and I couldn't give remote reboot from other domain controller hosts. I couldn't stop the virtual machine neither from the XenCentre, neither from the command line of the host also forcing the reboot. I had to reboot the host server. Yesterday it has been worst. I installed a template of another VM, CentOS 5.3 and then, put the DVD in the drive of the host. Then, before the install and after the boot I checked for defect the DVD and the W2003 VM began to respond slowly (I was connected by means of an administration remote console) the task manager showed only mid or low load, it is, only the first of the 3 vcpu was loaded (about 70%), while the other two were about at 20% and also the disk I/O was not so heavy. Then the users were not so happy because they couldn't any more use the MS word docs on the server. I immediately stopped the check of the DVD (to do that I had to force the stop of such Centos 5.3 VM), then some users could again use their docs, but other had still problems, so I decided to reboot the VM, but it doesn't stopped, neither from XenCenter, neither from command line, neither forcing the reboot. Then I tried to reboot of the host, but it didn't worked, neither from the XenCentre, neither from the host prompt (shutdown -r now as root: it told that it was shutting down, but then it didn't did that). So I had to power off by means of the power button of the server (before I tried some Magic SyS REQ, but I saw that Xen isn't compiled with this option enabled). What could you suggest about my problem, what can I look, search and see? In the W2003 VM logs there are no errors or warning to explain what happened. Some more exciting, amusing and inspiring words of poetry (the facts happened around 11 am): \# egrep -i 'err|warning' xensource.log [20100219 10:32:05.597|debug|culo|6301 unix-RPC|VBD.plug R:c81bcda701f6|xenops] watch: watching xenstore paths: [ /xapi/0/frontend/vbd/51712/hotplug; /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/0/51712/tapdisk-error ] with timeout 1200.000000 seconds [20100219 10:32:05.597|debug|culo|6301 unix-RPC|VBD.plug R:c81bcda701f6|xenops] watch: fired on /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/0/51712/tapdisk-error [20100219 10:32:14.314|debug|culo|6335 unix-RPC|VBD.unplug R:9258f54578d6|xenops] watch: watching xenstore paths: [ /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/0/51712/shutdown-done; /local/domain/0/error/device/vbd/51712/error ] with timeout 1200.000000 seconds [20100219 10:32:14.337|debug|culo|6335 unix-RPC|VBD.unplug R:9258f54578d6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/vbd/0 [20100219 10:32:14.337|debug|culo|6335 unix-RPC|VBD.unplug R:9258f54578d6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/device/vbd/51712 [20100219 10:32:14.338|debug|culo|6335 unix-RPC|VBD.unplug R:9258f54578d6|xenops] watch: fired on /local/domain/0/error/device/vbd/51712/error [20100219 10:53:48.903|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|helpers] Ignoring exception: INTERNAL_ERROR: [ Xb.Noent ] while Vmops.destroy_domain: Destroying domid 14 guest session [20100219 10:53:52.048|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/tap/14 [20100219 10:53:52.048|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/14/error/device/vbd/51744 [20100219 10:53:52.085|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/tap/14 [20100219 10:53:52.086|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/14/error/device/vbd/51728 [20100219 10:53:52.122|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/tap/14 [20100219 10:53:52.122|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/14/error/device/vbd/51712 [20100219 10:53:52.127|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/vbd/14 [20100219 10:53:52.128|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/14/error/device/vbd/51760 [20100219 10:53:52.496|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] Device.Vif.hard_shutdown about to blow away backend and error paths [20100219 10:53:52.497|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/vif/14 [20100219 10:53:52.497|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/14/error/device/vif/0 [20100219 10:53:53.385|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] Device.Vif.hard_shutdown about to blow away backend and error paths [20100219 10:53:53.386|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/vif/14 [20100219 10:53:53.386|debug|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/14/error/device/vif/1 [20100219 10:53:53.389| warn|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|hotplug] Warning, deleting 'vif' entry from /xapi/14/hotplug/vif/0 [20100219 10:53:53.391| warn|culo|6418|Async.VM.hard_shutdown R:88d2095678f7|hotplug] Warning, deleting 'vif' entry from /xapi/14/hotplug/vif/1 [20100219 11:20:49.766|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|helpers] Ignoring exception: INTERNAL_ERROR: [ Xb.Noent ] while Vmops.destroy_domain: Destroying domid 11 guest session [20100219 11:20:50.339|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/tap/11 [20100219 11:20:50.339|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/11/error/device/vbd/832 [20100219 11:20:50.360|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/tap/11 [20100219 11:20:50.360|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/11/error/device/vbd/768 [20100219 11:20:50.366|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/vbd/11 [20100219 11:20:50.366|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/11/error/device/vbd/5696 [20100219 11:20:50.753|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] Device.Vif.hard_shutdown about to blow away backend and error paths [20100219 11:20:50.754|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/0/error/backend/vif/11 [20100219 11:20:50.754|debug|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|xenops] xenstore-rm /local/domain/11/error/device/vif/1 [20100219 11:20:50.757| warn|culo|6484|Async.VM.clean_shutdown R:78d3c3e28cb6|hotplug] Warning, deleting 'vif' entry from /xapi/11/hotplug/vif/1 [20100219 11:28:13.803|debug|culo|6610 inet-RPC|Connection to VM console R:e9f8b76e8975|console] error: INTERNAL_ERROR: [ Unix.Unix_error(63, "connect", "") ]

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