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• Create a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Don’t feel like reinstalling an antivirus program every time you boot up your Ubuntu flash drive? We’ll show you how to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive that will remember your settings, installed programs, and more! Previously, we showed you how to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive that would reset to its initial state every time you booted it up. This is great if you’re worried about messing something up, and want to start fresh every time you start tinkering with Ubuntu. However, if you’re using the Ubuntu flash drive to diagnose and solve problems with your PC, you might find that a lot of problems require guess-and-test cycles. It would be great if the settings you change in Ubuntu and the programs you install stay installed the next time you boot it up. Fortunately, Universal USB Installer, a great little program from Pen Drive Linux, can do just that! Note: You will need a USB drive at least 2 GB large. Make sure you back up any files on the flash drive because this process will format the drive, removing any files currently on it. Once Ubuntu has been installed on the flash drive, you can move those files back if there is enough space. Put Ubuntu on your flash drive Universal-USB-Installer.exe does not need to be installed, so just double click on it to run it wherever you downloaded it. Click Yes if you get a UAC prompt, and you will be greeted with this window. Click I Agree. In the drop-down box on the next screen, select Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop i386. Don’t worry if you normally use 64-bit operating systems – the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 will still work fine. Some useful tools do not have 64-bit versions, so unless you’re planning on switching to Ubuntu permanently, the 32-bit version will work best. If you don’t have a copy of the Ubuntu 9.10 CD downloaded, then click on the checkbox to Download the ISO. You’ll be prompted to launch a web browser; click Yes. The download should start immediately. When it’s finished, return the the Universal USB Installer and click on Browse to navigate to the ISO file you just downloaded. Click OK and the text field will be populated with the path to the ISO file. Select the drive letter that corresponds to the flash drive that you would like to use from the dropdown box. If you’ve backed up the files on this drive, we recommend checking the box to format the drive. Finally, you have to choose how much space you would like to set aside for the settings and programs that will be stored on the flash drive. Considering that Ubuntu itself only takes up around 700 MB, 1 GB should be plenty, but we’re choosing 2 GB in this example because we have lots of space on this USB drive. Click on the Create button and then make yourself a sandwich – it will take some time to install no matter how fast your PC is. Eventually it will finish. Click Close. Now you have a flash drive that will boot into a fully capable Ubuntu installation, and any changes you make will persist the next time you boot it up! Boot into Ubuntu If you’re not sure how to set your computer to boot using the USB drive, then check out the How to Boot Into Ubuntu section of our previous article on creating bootable USB drives, or refer to your motherboard’s manual. Once your computer is set to boot using the USB drive, you’ll be greeted with splash screen with some options. Press Enter to boot into Ubuntu. The first time you do this, it may take some time to boot up. Fortunately, we’ve found that the process speeds up on subsequent boots. You’ll be greeted with the Ubuntu desktop. Now, if you change settings like the desktop resolution, or install a program, those changes will be permanently stored on the USB drive! We installed avast! Antivirus, and on the next boot, found that it was still in the Accessories menu where we left it. Conclusion We think that a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive is a great tool to have around in case your PC has problems booting otherwise. By having the changes you make persist, you can customize your Ubuntu installation to be the ultimate computer repair toolkit! Download Universal USB Installer from Pen Drive Linux Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupHow To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday Generate Stunning Tag Clouds With Tagxedo Install, Remove and HIDE Fonts in Windows 7

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• Customizing the processing of ListItems for asp:RadioButtonList with "Flow" layout and "Horizontal"

  - by evovision

  Hi, recently I was asked to add an ability to pad specific elements from each other to a certain distance in RadioButtonList control. Not quite common everyday task I would say :)   Ok, let's get started!   Prerequisites: ASP.NET Page having RadioButtonList control with RepeatLayout="Flow" RepeatDirection="Horizontal" properties set.   Implementation:  The underlying data was coming from another source, so the only fast way to add meta information about padding was the text value itself (yes, not very optimal solution): Id = 1, Name = "This is first element" and for padding we agreed to use <space/> meta tag: Id = 2, Name = "<space padcount="30px"/>This is second padded element"   To handle items rendering in RadioButtonList control I've created custom class and subclassed from it:    public class CustomRadioButtonList : RadioButtonList    {        private Action<ListItem, HtmlTextWriter> _preProcess;         protected override void RenderItem(ListItemType itemType, int repeatIndex, RepeatInfo repeatInfo, HtmlTextWriter writer)        {            if (_preProcess != null)            {                _preProcess(this.Items[repeatIndex], writer);            }             base.RenderItem(itemType, repeatIndex, repeatInfo, writer);        }         public void SetPrePrenderItemFunction(Action<ListItem, HtmlTextWriter> func)        {            _preProcess = func;        }    }   It is pretty straightforward approach, the key is to override RenderItem method. Class has SetPrePrenderItemFunction method which is used to pass custom processing function that takes 2 parameters: ListItem and HtmlTextWriter objects.   Now update existing RadioButtonList control in Default.aspx: add this to beginning of the page:   <%@ Register Namespace="Sample.Controls" TagPrefix="uc1" %>   and update the control to:   <uc1:CustomRadioButtonList ID="customRbl" runat="server" DataValueField="Id" DataTextField="Name"            RepeatLayout="Flow" RepeatDirection="Horizontal"></uc1:CustomRadioButtonList>   Now, from codebehind of the page:   Add regular expression that will be used for parsing:   private Regex _regex = new Regex(@"(?:[<]space padcount\s*?=\s*?(?:'|"")(?<padcount>\d+)(?:(?:\s+)?px)?(?:'|"")\s*?/>)(?<content>.*)?", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled);   and finally setup the processing function in Page_Load:   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        customRbl.DataSource = DataObjects;         customRbl.SetPrePrenderItemFunction((listItem, writer) =>        {            Match match = _regex.Match(listItem.Text);            if (match.Success)            {                writer.Write(string.Format(@"<span style=""padding-left:{0}"">Extreme values: </span>", match.Groups["padcount"].Value + "px"));                 // if you need to pad listitem use code below                //x.Attributes.CssStyle.Add("padding-left", match.Groups["padcount"].Value + "px");                 // remove meta tag from text                listItem.Text = match.Groups["content"].Value;            }        });         customRbl.DataBind();    }   That's it! :)   Run the attached sample application:     P.S.: of course several other approaches could have been used for that purpose including events and the functionality for processing could also be embedded inside control itself. Current solution suits slightly better due some other reasons for situation where it was used, in your case consider this as a kick start for your own implementation :)   Source application: CustomRadioButtonList.zip

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• No, iCloud Isn’t Backing Them All Up: How to Manage Photos on Your iPhone or iPad

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Are the photos you take with your iPhone or iPad backed up in case you lose your device? If you’re just relying on iCloud to manage your important memories, your photos may not be backed up at all. Apple’s iCloud has a photo-syncing feature in the form of “Photo Stream,” but Photo Stream doesn’t actually perform any long-term backups of your photos. iCloud’s Photo Backup Limitations Assuming you’ve set up iCloud on your iPhone or iPad, your device is using a feature called “Photo Stream” to automatically upload the photos you take to your iCloud storage and sync them across your devices. Unfortunately, there are some big limitations here. 1000 Photos: Photo Stream only backs up the latest 1000 photos. Do you have 1500 photos in your Camera Roll folder on your phone? If so, only the latest 1000 photos are stored in your iCloud account online. If you don’t have those photos backed up elsewhere, you’ll lose them when you lose your phone. If you have 1000 photos and take one more, the oldest photo will be removed from your iCloud Photo Stream. 30 Days: Apple also states that photos in your Photo Stream will be automatically deleted after 30 days “to give your devices plenty of time to connect and download them.” Some people report photos aren’t deleted after 30 days, but it’s clear you shouldn’t rely on iCloud for more than 30 days of storage. iCloud Storage Limits: Apple only gives you 5 GB of iCloud storage space for free, and this is shared between backups, documents, and all other iCloud data. This 5 GB can fill up pretty quickly. If your iCloud storage is full and you haven’t purchased any more storage more from Apple, your photos aren’t being backed up. Videos Aren’t Included: Photo Stream doesn’t include videos, so any videos you take aren’t automatically backed up. It’s clear that iCloud’s Photo Stream isn’t designed as a long-term way to store your photos, just a convenient way to access recent photos on all your devices before you back them up for real. iCloud’s Photo Stream is Designed for Desktop Backups If you have a Mac, you can launch iPhoto and enable the Automatic Import option under Photo Stream in its preferences pane. Assuming your Mac is on and connected to the Internet, iPhoto will automatically download photos from your photo stream and make local backups of them on your hard drive. You’ll then have to back up your photos manually so you don’t lose them if your Mac’s hard drive ever fails. If you have a Windows PC, you can install the iCloud Control Panel, which will create a Photo Stream folder on your PC. Your photos will be automatically downloaded to this folder and stored in it. You’ll want to back up your photos so you don’t lose them if your PC’s hard drive ever fails. Photo Stream is clearly designed to be used along with a desktop application. Photo Stream temporarily backs up your photos to iCloud so iPhoto or iCloud Control Panel can download them to your Mac or PC and make a local backup before they’re deleted. You could also use iTunes to sync your photos from your device to your PC or Mac, but we don’t really recommend it — you should never have to use iTunes. How to Actually Back Up All Your Photos Online So Photo Stream is actually pretty inconvenient — or, at least, it’s just a way to temporarily sync photos between your devices without storing them long-term. But what if you actually want to automatically back up your photos online without them being deleted automatically? The solution here is a third-party app that does this for you, offering the automatic photo uploads with long-term storage. There are several good services with apps in the App Store: Dropbox: Dropbox’s Camera Upload feature allows you to automatically upload the photos — and videos — you take to your Dropbox account. They’ll be easily accessible anywhere there’s a Dropbox app and you can get much more free Dropbox storage than you can iCloud storage. Dropbox will never automatically delete your old photos. Google+: Google+ offers photo and video backups with its Auto Upload feature, too. Photos will be stored in your Google+ Photos — formerly Picasa Web Albums — and will be marked as private by default so no one else can view them. Full-size photos will count against your free 15 GB of Google account storage space, but you can also choose to upload an unlimited amount of photos at a smaller resolution. Flickr: The Flickr app is no longer a mess. Flickr offers an Auto Upload feature for uploading full-size photos you take and free Flickr accounts offer a massive 1 TB of storage for you to store your photos. The massive amount of free storage alone makes Flickr worth a look. Use any of these services and you’ll get an online, automatic photo backup solution you can rely on. You’ll get a good chunk of free space, your photos will never be automatically deleted, and you can easily access them from any device. You won’t have to worry about storing local copies of your photos and backing them up manually. Apple should fix this mess and offer a better solution for long-term photo backup, especially considering the limitations aren’t immediately obvious to users. Until they do, third-party apps are ready to step in and take their place. You can also automatically back up your photos to the web on Android with Google+’s Auto Upload or Dropbox’s Camera Upload. Image Credit: Simon Yeo on Flickr     

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• XNA Notes 004

  - by George Clingerman

  The XNA community has been crazy busy again. It always make me fee like such a slacker collecting all of these notes as I see the tremendous output from people all over the world and it’s incredible and humbling. There are some amazingly skilled people working with XNA. On another not, I’m going to take a minute to get on my soapbox and say, if you are developing ANYTHING and are not using some sort of source/revision control, START IMMEDIATELY. This applies to teams of one. Projects for fun. And “I back up my hard drive” or “I use dropbox!” does NOT count as using source control. You’ll be doing yourself a HUGE favor if you find one, learn to use it and integrate it into your everyday workflow. I personally use Subversion. It’s hosted offsite at xp.dev.com and I use TortoiseSVN as my front end to interface with the repository. It’s simple and easy to use and has saved me from myself so many time. Honestly, get setup with some type of source control immediately. If you don’t understand how, grab another developer that does and have them walk you through setup and the basics of using it. Ok, I’m done. On to the notes… The XNA Team Only 14 days left to Submit XNA GS 3.1 Games! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/24/14-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx Shawn Hargreaves shares some great information on Exception Handling best practices on the XNA forums http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73333/448556.aspx#448556 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx XNA MVPs @CatalinZima gives us a peek at Chicken’s Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/games/chickens-cant-fly/ Screen-space deformations in XNA for WP7 from Catalin Zima http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/30313083767357440 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ XNA Developers Going to GDC? Don’t miss the XNA panel hosted by a plethora of well known XNA community names! http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73576/448842.aspx#448842 MasterBlud does an interview with @Xalterax http://twitter.com/MasterBlud/statuses/28510774812999680 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7102 Luke Schneider of Radiangames posts about The Radiangames Style http://radiangames.com/?p=532 Holmade Games had a “vote for the new playable character” poll going on for Hurdle Turtle this past week http://holmadegames.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-level-pack-vote-for-your-favorite.html IGF v0.1.0.0 release post mortem http://indiefreaks.com/2011/01/24/v0-1-0-0-release-post-mortem/ James an Super Dunner post Good Morning Gato #46 and a look at the Vampire Smile box art http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/21/good-morning-gato-46/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/20/vampire-smiles-digital-box-art/ Alfredo Di Napoli creates Cow Pong using XNA and F#! http://alfredodinapoli.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/cow-pong-a-simple-xna-game-in-f/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games Signed In Podcast posts Episode #61 http://www.signedinpodcast.com/?p=559 Gamergeddon posts the January 23rd edition of XBLIG Round Up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/01/23/xbox-indie-games-round-up-january-23rd/ Indie Asylum posts Antipole Review http://www.indieasylum.com/reviews/38-xblig/112-antipole.html 1UPOrPosion Reviews OSR Unhinged http://www.1uporpoison.com/xblig/osr-unhinged/ DarkstarMatryx review Warbirds at Work http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=185 Review of Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/24/xbox-indie-review-aban-hawkins-the-1000-spikes/ XboxHornet reviews Corrupted http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7123 XBLIG 2010: The Best And The Worst http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamieMann/20110121/6840/ Xbox LIVE Arcade Sales Analysis - an interesting read for XBLIG developers wondering how they’re doing compared to arcade.. http://www.gamerbytes.com/2011/01/xbla_sales_analysis_dec_2010.php Best of Indies for January 25th http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/games/best-of-the-indies-25th-january-2011 Decimation X3 appears as an arcade machine in the wild! http://twitter.com/mdoucette/statuses/29605562484260864 XNA Game Development Guiseppe De Francesco (@PinoEire) announced Torque X 4.0 CEV is now in RC phase! http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20779 DrMistry of mstargames shares his struggle (and mistakes) with learning to use the Content Pipeline http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/181-pontent-cipeline-more-like-it.html New Tutorial posted XNA 2D Basic Collision Detection with Rotation from Ioannis Panagopoulos http://www.progware.org/Blog/post/XNA-2D-Basic-Collision-Detection-with-Rotation.aspx Sgt. Conker roars to life! Doing a much better (and prettier) job of collecting XNA news from around the interwebs. http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/dedication-for-captain-boki/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-2/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/indiefreaks-game-framework-0-1-0-0-released/ Offering a little free publicity for XBLIGs http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73465/448321.aspx#448321 Ben Kane writes about building loot tables from Excel using the Content Pipeline http://benkane.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/building-loot-tables-from-excel-using-the-content-pipeline/ Good tips on attracting a game artist AND an offer to create your cover art for FREE http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/72998.aspx If you’re an XBLIG developer keeping your eye on places to release on the PC, might want to be watching the IndieCity blog. Seems like these guys are well on their way to constructing something worth watching. http://www.indiecity.com/blog/ DVMGames spotted a new crowd-funding site for Indies http://twitter.com/DVMGames/statuses/29947274767372289 http://www.8bitfunding.com/ Transmute continues to make progress and there’s a nice dev blog to follow along here http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/

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• Clean up after Visual Studio

  - by psheriff

  As programmer’s we know that if we create a temporary file during the running of our application we need to make sure it is removed when the application or process is complete. We do this, but why can’t Microsoft do it? Visual Studio leaves tons of temporary files all over your hard drive. This is why, over time, your computer loses hard disk space. This blog post will show you some of the most common places where these files are left and which ones you can safely delete..NET Left OversVisual Studio is a great development environment for creating applications quickly. However, it will leave a lot of miscellaneous files all over your hard drive. There are a few locations on your hard drive that you should be checking to see if there are left-over folders or files that you can delete. I have attempted to gather as much data as I can about the various versions of .NET and operating systems. Of course, your mileage may vary on the folders and files I list here. In fact, this problem is so prevalent that PDSA has created a Computer Cleaner specifically for the Visual Studio developer.  Instructions for downloading our PDSA Developer Utilities (of which Computer Cleaner is one) are at the end of this blog entry.Each version of Visual Studio will create “temporary” files in different folders. The problem is that the files created are not always “temporary”. Most of the time these files do not get cleaned up like they should. Let’s look at some of the folders that you should periodically review and delete files within these folders.Temporary ASP.NET FilesAs you create and run ASP.NET applications from Visual Studio temporary files are placed into the <sysdrive>:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework[64]\<vernum>\Temporary ASP.NET Files folder. The folders and files under this folder can be removed with no harm to your development computer. Do not remove the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder itself, just the folders underneath this folder. If you use IIS for ASP.NET development, you may need to run the iisreset.exe utility from the command prompt prior to deleting any files/folder under this folder. IIS will sometimes keep files in use in this folder and iisreset will release the locks so the files/folders can be deleted.Website CacheThis folder is similar to the ASP.NET Temporary Files folder in that it contains files from ASP.NET applications run from Visual Studio. This folder is located in each users local settings folder. The location will be a little different on each operating system. For example on Windows Vista/Windows 7, the folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. If you are running Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. Check these locations periodically and delete all files and folders under this directory.Visual Studio BackupThis backup folder is used by Visual Studio to store temporary files while you develop in Visual Studio. This folder never gets cleaned out, so you should periodically delete all files and folders under this directory. On Windows XP, this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\My Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\Backup Files. On Windows Vista/Windows 7 this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\.Assembly CacheNo, this is not the global assembly cache (GAC). It appears that this cache is only created when doing WPF or Silverlight development with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010. This folder is located in <sysdrive>:\ Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\assembly\dl3 on Windows Vista/Windows 7. On Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly. If you have not done any WPF or Silverlight development, you may not find this particular folder on your machine.Project AssembliesThis is yet another folder where Visual Studio stores temporary files. You will find a folder for each project you have opened and worked on. This folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies on Windows XP. On Microsoft Vista/Windows 7 you will find this folder at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies.Remember not all of these folders will appear on your particular machine. Which ones do show up will depend on what version of Visual Studio you are using, whether or not you are doing desktop or web development, and the operating system you are using.SummaryTaking the time to periodically clean up after Visual Studio will aid in keeping your computer running quickly and increase the space on your hard drive. Another place to make sure you are cleaning up is your TEMP folder. Check your OS settings for the location of your particular TEMP folder and be sure to delete any files in here that are not in use. I routinely clean up the files and folders described in this blog post and I find that I actually eliminate errors in Visual Studio and I increase my hard disk space.NEW! PDSA has just published a “pre-release” of our PDSA Developer Utilities at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities that contains a Computer Cleaner utility which will clean up the above-mentioned folders, as well as a lot of other miscellaneous folders that get Visual Studio build-up. You can download a free trial at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities. If you wish to purchase our utilities through the month of November, 2011 you can use the RSVP code: DUNOV11 to get them for only $39. This is $40 off the regular price.NOTE: You can download this article and many samples like the one shown in this blog entry at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips and Tricks”, then “Developer Machine Clean Up” from the drop down list.Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• JavaOne Afterglow by Simon Ritter

  - by JuergenKress

  Last week was the eighteenth JavaOne conference and I thought it would be a good idea to write up my thoughts about how things went. Firstly thanks to Yoshio Terada for the photos, I didn't bother bringing a camera with me so it's good to have some pictures to add to the words. Things kicked off full-throttle on Sunday.  We had the Java Champions and JUG leaders breakfast, which was a great way to meet up with a lot of familiar faces and start talking all things Java.  At midday the show really started with the Strategy and Technical Keynotes.  This was always going to be tougher job than some years because there was no big shiny ball to reveal to the audience.  With the Java EE 7 spec being finalised a few months ago and Java SE 8, Java ME 8 and JDK8 not due until the start of next year there was not going to be any big announcement.  I thought both keynotes worked really well each focusing on the things most important to Java developers: Strategy One of the things that is becoming more and more prominent in many companies marketing is the Internet of Things (IoT).  We've moved from the conventional desktop/laptop environment to much more mobile connected computing with smart phones and tablets.  The next wave of the internet is not just billions of people connected, but 10s or 100s of billions of devices connected to the network, all generating data and providing much more precise control of almost any process you can imagine.  This ties into the ideas of Big Data and Cloud Computing, but implementation is certainly not without its challenges.  As Peter Utzschneider explained it's about three Vs: Volume, Velocity and Value.  All these devices will create huge volumes of data at very high speed; to avoid being overloaded these devices will need some sort of processing capabilities that can filter the useful data from the redundant.  The raw data then needs to be turned into useful information that has value.  To make this happen will require applications on devices, at gateways and on the back-end servers, all very tightly integrated.  This is where Java plays a pivotal role, write once, run everywhere becomes essential, having nine million developers fluent in the language makes it the defacto lingua franca of IoT.  There will be lots more information on how this will become a reality, so watch this space. Technical How do we make the IoT a reality, technically?  Using the game of chess Mark Reinhold, with the help of people like John Ceccarelli, Jasper Potts and Richard Bair, showed what you could do.  Using Java EE on the back end, Java SE and JavaFX on the desktop and Java ME Embedded and JavaFX on devices they showed a complete end-to-end demo. This was really impressive, using 3D features from JavaFX 8 (that's included with JDK8) to make a 3D animated Duke chess board.  Jasper also unveiled the "DukePad" a home made tablet using a Raspberry Pi, touch screen and accelerometer. Although the Raspberry Pi doesn't have earth shattering CPU performance (about the same level as a mid 1990s Pentium), it does have really quite good GPU performance so the GUI works really well.  The plans are all open sourced and available here.  One small, but very significant announcement was that Java SE will now be included with the NOOB and Raspbian Linux distros provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation (these can be found here).  No more hassle having to download and install the JDK after you've flashed your SD card OS image.  The finale was the Raspberry Pi powered chess playing robot.  Really very, very cool.  I talked to Jasper about this and he told me each of the chess pieces had been 3D printed and then he had to use acetone to give them a glossy finish (not sure what his wife thought of him spending hours in the kitchen in a gas mask!)  The way the robot arm worked was very impressive as it did not have any positioning data (like a potentiometer connected to each motor), but relied purely on carefully calibrated timings to get the arm to the right place.  Having done things like this myself in the past I know how easy it is to find a small error gets magnified into very big mistakes. Here's some pictures from the keynote: The "Dukepad" architecture Nice clear perspex case so you can see the innards. The very nice 3D chess set.  Maya's obviously a great tool. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Simon Ritter,Java One,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• SQLAuthority News – Storing Data and Files in Cloud – Dropbox – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  I thought long and hard about doing a Personal Technology Tips series for this blog.  I have so many tips I’d like to share.  I am on my computer almost all day, every day, so I have a treasure trove of interesting tidbits I like to share if given the chance.  The only thing holding me back – which tip to share first?  The first tip obviously has the weight of seeming like the most important.  But this would mean choosing amongst my favorite tricks and shortcuts.  This is a hard task. Source: Dropbox.com My Dropbox I have finally decided, though, and have determined that the first Personal Technology Tip may not be the most secret or even trickier to master – in fact, it is probably the easiest.  My today’s Personal Technology Tip is Dropbox. I hope that all of you are nodding along in recognition right now.  If you do not use Dropbox, or have not even heard of it before, get on the internet and find their site.  You won’t be disappointed.  A quick recap for those in the dark: Dropbox is an online storage site with a lot of additional syncing and cloud-computing capabilities.  Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore some of my favorite options in Dropbox. Collaborate with All The first thing I love about Dropbox is the ability it gives you to collaborate with others.  You can share files easily with other Dropbox users, and they can alter them, share them with you, all while keeping track of different versions in on easy place.  I’d like to see anyone try to accomplish that key idea – “easily” – using e-mail versions and multiple computers.  It’s even difficult to accomplish using a shared network. Afraid that this kind of ease looks too good to be true?  Afraid that maybe there isn’t enough storage space, or the user interface is confusing?  Think again.  There is plenty of space – you can get 2 GB with just a free account, and upgrades are inexpensive and go up to 100 GB of storage.  And the user interface is so easy that anyone can learn to use it. What I use Dropbox for I love Dropbox because I give a lot of presentations and often they are far from home.  I can keep my presentations on Dropbox and have easy access to them anywhere, without needing to have my whole computer with me.  This is just one small way that you can use Dropbox. You can sync your entire hard drive, or hard drives if you have multiple computers (home, work, office, shared), and you can set Dropbox to automatically sync files on a certain timeline, or whenever Dropbox notices that they’ve been changed. Why I love Dropbox Dropbox has plenty of storage, but 2 GB still has a hard time competing with the average desktop’s storage space.  So what if you want to sync most of your files, but only the ones you use the most and share between work and home, and not all your files (especially large files like pictures and videos)?  You can use selective sync to choose which files to sync. Above all, my favorite feature is LanSync.  Dropbox will search your Local Area Network (LAN) for new files and sync them to Dropbox, as well as downloading the new version to all the shared files across the network.  That means that if move around on different computers at work or at home, you will have the same version of the file every time.  Or, other users on the LAN will have access to the new version, which makes collaboration extremely easy. Ref: rzfeeser.com Dropbox has so many other features that I feel like I could create a Personal Technology Tips series devoted entirely to Dropbox.  I’m going to create a bullet list here to make things shorter, but I strongly encourage you to look further into these into options if it sounds like something you would use. Theft Recover Home Security File Hosting and Sharing Portable Dropbox Sync your iCal calendar Password Storage What is your favorite tool and why? I could go on and on, but I will end here.  In summary – I strongly encourage everyone to investigate Dropbox to see if it’s something they would find useful.  If you use Dropbox and know of a great feature I failed to mention, please share it with me, I’d love to hear how everyone uses this program. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Personal Technology

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• Recovering from apt-get upgrade gone wrong due to a full disk

  - by Peter

  I was performing an apt-get upgrade on an Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS box that hadn't been updated in a little while and the upgrade failed due to 'No space left on device'. After a little while I worked out space meant inodes and I have freed some up but unfortunately things have been left something askew. I have tried manually installing the old versions of packages mentioned using dpkg -i but that doesn't help. I have tried apt-get upgrade and apt-get -f install to no avail. Results are below. Any ideas how to fix things up? FIXED: Installing the earlier versions again manually via dpkg -i and then apt-get -f install has done the trick. Not sure why this didn't work the first time. The packages in question are listed below but they will presumably vary. libssl1.0.0_1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14_i386.deb linux-headers-3.2.0-64-generic-pae_3.2.0-64.97_i386.deb linux-image-generic-pae_3.2.0.64.76_i386.deb linux-headers-3.2.0-64_3.2.0-64.97_all.deb linux-headers-generic-pae_3.2.0.64.76_i386.deb root@unlinked:/tmp# apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run ‘apt-get -f install’ to correct these. The following packages have unmet dependencies. libssl-dev : Depends: libssl1.0.0 (= 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14) but 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.17 is installed linux-generic-pae : Depends: linux-image-generic-pae (= 3.2.0.64.76) but 3.2.0.67.79 is installed Depends: linux-headers-generic-pae (= 3.2.0.64.76) but 3.2.0.67.79 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f. root@unlinked:/tmp# apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: linux-headers-3.2.0-43-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-38-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-41-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-36-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-63-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-58-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-60-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-55-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-40 linux-headers-3.2.0-41 linux-headers-3.2.0-36 linux-headers-3.2.0-37 linux-headers-3.2.0-43 linux-headers-3.2.0-38 linux-headers-3.2.0-44 linux-headers-3.2.0-39 linux-headers-3.2.0-45 linux-headers-3.2.0-51 linux-headers-3.2.0-52 linux-headers-3.2.0-53 linux-headers-3.2.0-48 linux-headers-3.2.0-54 linux-headers-3.2.0-60 linux-headers-3.2.0-55 linux-headers-3.2.0-61 linux-headers-3.2.0-56 linux-headers-3.2.0-57 linux-headers-3.2.0-63 linux-headers-3.2.0-58 linux-headers-3.2.0-59 linux-headers-3.2.0-52-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-44-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-39-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-37-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-59-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-61-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-56-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-53-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-48-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-45-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-40-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-57-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-54-generic-pae linux-headers-3.2.0-51-generic-pae Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: libssl-dev linux-generic-pae The following packages will be upgraded: libssl-dev linux-generic-pae 2 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/1,427 kB of archives. After this operation, 1,024 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libssl-dev: libssl-dev depends on libssl1.0.0 (= 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14); however: Version of libssl1.0.0 on system is 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.17. dpkg: error processing libssl-dev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates it's a follow-up error from a previous failure. dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-generic-pae: linux-generic-pae depends on linux-image-generic-pae (= 3.2.0.64.76); however: Version of linux-image-generic-pae on system is 3.2.0.67.79. linux-generic-pae depends on linux-headers-generic-pae (= 3.2.0.64.76); however: Version of linux-headers-generic-pae on system is 3.2.0.67.79. dpkg: error processing linux-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates it's a follow-up error from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: libssl-dev linux-generic-pae E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

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• Get your content off Blogger.com

  - by Daniel Moth

  Due to blogger.com deprecating FTP users I've decided to move my blog. When I think of the content of a blog, 4 items come to mind: blog posts, comments, binary files that the blog posts linked to (e.g. images, ZIP files) and the CSS+structure of the blog. 1. Binaries The binary files you used in your blog posts are sitting on your own web space, so really blogger.com is not involved with that. Nothing for you to do at this stage, I'll come back to these in another post. 2. CSS and structure In the best case this exists as a separate CSS file on your web space (so no action for now) or in a worst case, like me, your CSS is embedded with the HTML. In the latter case, simply navigate from you dashboard to "Template" then "Edit HTML" and copy paste the contents of the box. Save that locally in a txt file and we'll come back to that in another post. 3. Blog posts and Comments The blog posts and comments exist in all the HTML files on your own web space. Parsing HTML files to extract that can be painful, so it is easier to download the XML files from blogger's servers that contain all your blog posts and comments. 3.1 Single XML file, but incomplete The obvious thing to do is go into your dashboard "Settings" and under the "Basic" tab look at the top next to "Blog Tools". There is a link there to "Export blog" which downloads an XML file with both comments and posts. The problem with that is that it only contains 200 comments - if you have more than that, you will lose the surplus. Also, this XML file has a lot of noise, compared to the better solution described next. (note that a tool I will refer to in a future post deals with either kind of XML file) 3.2 Multiple XML files First you need to find your blog ID. In case you don't know what that is, navigate to the "Template" as described in section 2 above. You will find references to the blog id in the HTML there, but you can also see it as part of the URL in your browser: blogger.com/template-edit.g?blogID=YOUR_NUMERIC_ID. Mine is 7 digits. You can now navigate to these URLs to download the XML for your posts and comments respectively: blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=1 blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/comments/default?max-results=200&start-index=1 Note that you can only get 500 posts at a time and only 200 comments at a time. To get more than that you have to change the URL and download the next batch. To get you started, to get the XML for the next 500 posts and next 200 comments respectively you’d have to use these URLs: blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/posts/default?max-results=500&start-index=501 blogger.com/feeds/YOUR_NUMERIC_ID/comments/default?max-results=200&start-index=201 ...and so on and so forth. Keep all the XML files in the same folder on your local machine (with nothing else in there). 4. Validating the XML aka editing older blog posts The XML files you just downloaded really contain HTML fragments inside for all your blog posts. If you are like me, your blog posts did not conform to XHTML so passing them to an XML parser (which is what we will want to do) will result in the XML parser choking. So the next step is to fix that. This can be no work at all for you, or a huge time sink or just a couple hours of pain (which was my case). The process I followed was to attempt to load the XML files using XmlDocument.Load and wait for the exception to be thrown from my code. The exception would point to the exact offending line and column which would help me fix the issue. Rather than fix it in the XML itself, I would go back and edit the offending blog post and fix it there - recommended! Then I'd repeat the cycle until the XML could be loaded in the XmlDocument. To give you an idea, some of the issues I encountered are: extra or missing quotes in img and href elements, direct usage of chevrons instead of encoding them as &lt;, missing closing tags, mismatched nested pairs of elements and capitalization of html elements. For a full list of things that may go wrong see this. 5. Opportunity for other changes I also found a few posts that did not have a category assigned so I fixed those too. I took the further opportunity to create new categories and tag some of my blog posts with that. Note that I did not remove/change categories of existing posts, but only added.   In an another post we'll see how to use the XML files you stored in the local folder… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• How to Sync Any Folder With SkyDrive on Windows 8.1

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Before Windows 8.1, it was possible to sync any folder on your computer with SkyDrive using symbolic links. This method no longer works now that SkyDrive is baked into Windows 8.1, but there are other tricks you can use. Creating a symbolic link or directory junction inside your SkyDrive folder will give you an empty folder in your SkyDrive cloud storage. Confusingly, the files will appear inside the SkyDrive Modern app as if they were being synced, but they aren’t. The Solution With SkyDrive refusing to understand and accept symbolic links in its own folder, the best option is probably to use symbolic links anyway — but in reverse. For example, let’s say you have a program that automatically saves important data to a folder anywhere on your hard drive — whether it’s C:\Users\USER\Documents\, C:\Program\Data, or anywhere else. Rather than trying to trick SkyDrive into understanding a symbolic link, we could instead move the actual folder itself to SkyDrive and then use a symbolic link at the folder’s original location to trick the original program. This may not work for every single program out there. But it will likely work for most programs, which use standard Windows API calls to access folders and save files. We’re just flipping the old solution here — we can’t trick SkyDrive anymore, so let’s try to trick other programs instead. Moving a Folder and Creating a Symbolic Link First, ensure no program is using the external folder. For example, if it’s a program data or settings folder, close the program that’s using the folder. Next, simply move the folder to your SkyDrive folder. Right-click the external folder, select Cut, go to the SkyDrive folder, right-click and select Paste. The folder will now be located in the SkyDrive folder itself, so it will sync normally. Next, open a Command Prompt window as Administrator. Right-click the Start button on the taskbar or press Windows Key + X and select Command Prompt (Administrator) to open it. Run the following command to create a symbolic link at the original location of the folder: mklink /d “C:\Original\Folder\Location” “C:\Users\NAME\SkyDrive\FOLDERNAME\” Enter the correct paths for the exact location of the original folder and the current location of the folder in your SkyDrive. Windows will then create a symbolic link at the folder’s original location. Most programs should hopefully be tricked by this symbolic location, saving their files directly to SkyDrive. You can test this yourself. Put a file into the folder at its original location. It will be saved to SkyDrive and sync normally, appearing in your SkyDrive storage online. One downside here is that you won’t be able to save a file onto SkyDrive without it taking up space on the same hard drive SkyDrive is on. You won’t be able to scatter folders across multiple hard drives and sync them all. However, you could always change the location of the SkyDrive folder on Windows 8.1 and put it on a drive with a larger amount of free space. To do this, right-click the SkyDrive folder in File Explorer, select Properties, and use the options on the Location tab. You could even use Storage Spaces to combine the drives into one larger drive. Automatically Copy the Original Files to SkyDrive Another option would be to run a program that automatically copies files from another folder on your computer to your SkyDrive folder. For example, let’s say you want to sync copies of important log files that a program creates in a specific folder. You could use a program that allows you to schedule automatic folder-mirroring, configuring the program to regularly copy the contents of your log folder to your SkyDrive folder. This may be a useful alternative for some use cases, although it isn’t the same as standard syncing. You’ll end up with two copies of the files taking up space on your system, which won’t be ideal for large files. The files also won’t be instantly uploaded to your SkyDrive storage after they’re created, but only after the scheduled task runs. There are many options for this, including Microsoft’s own SyncToy, which continues to work on Windows 8. If you were using the symbolic link trick to automatically sync copies of PC game save files with SkyDrive, you could just install GameSave Manager. It can be configured to automatically create backup copies of your computer’s PC game save files on a schedule, saving them to SkyDrive where they’ll be synced and backed up online. SkyDrive support was completely rewritten for Windows 8.1, so it’s not surprising that this trick no longer works. The ability to use symbolic links in previous versions of SkyDrive was never officially supported, so it’s not surprising to see it break after a rewrite. None of the methods above are as convenient and quick as the old symbolic link method, but they’re the best we can do with the SkyDrive integration Microsoft has given us in Windows 8.1. It’s still possible to use symbolic links to easily sync other folders with competing cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive, so you may want to consider switching away from SkyDrive if this feature is critical to you.     

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• [Windows 8] Application bar popup button

  - by Benjamin Roux

  Here is a small control to create an application bar button which will display a content in a popup when the button is clicked. Visually it gives this So how to create this? First you have to use the AppBarPopupButton control below.   namespace Indeed.Controls { public class AppBarPopupButton : Button { public FrameworkElement PopupContent { get { return (FrameworkElement)GetValue(PopupContentProperty); } set { SetValue(PopupContentProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty PopupContentProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("PopupContent", typeof(FrameworkElement), typeof(AppBarPopupButton), new PropertyMetadata(null, (o, e) => (o as AppBarPopupButton).CreatePopup())); private Popup popup; private SerialDisposable sizeChanged = new SerialDisposable(); protected override void OnTapped(Windows.UI.Xaml.Input.TappedRoutedEventArgs e) { base.OnTapped(e); if (popup != null) { var transform = this.TransformToVisual(Window.Current.Content); var offset = transform.TransformPoint(default(Point)); sizeChanged.Disposable = PopupContent.ObserveSizeChanged().Do(_ => popup.VerticalOffset = offset.Y - (PopupContent.ActualHeight + 20)).Subscribe(); popup.HorizontalOffset = offset.X + 24; popup.DataContext = this.DataContext; popup.IsOpen = true; } } private void CreatePopup() { popup = new Popup { IsLightDismissEnabled = true }; popup.Closed += (o, e) => this.GetParentOfType<AppBar>().IsOpen = false; popup.ChildTransitions = new Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.Animation.TransitionCollection(); popup.ChildTransitions.Add(new Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.Animation.PopupThemeTransition()); var container = new Grid(); container.Children.Add(PopupContent); popup.Child = container; } } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The ObserveSizeChanged method is just an extension method which observe the SizeChanged event (using Reactive Extensions - Rx-Metro package in Nuget). If you’re not familiar with Rx, you can replace this line (and the SerialDisposable stuff) by a simple subscription to the SizeChanged event (using +=) but don’t forget to unsubscribe to it ! public static IObservable<Unit> ObserveSizeChanged(this FrameworkElement element) { return Observable.FromEventPattern<SizeChangedEventHandler, SizeChangedEventArgs>( o => element.SizeChanged += o, o => element.SizeChanged -= o) .Select(_ => Unit.Default); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The GetParentOfType extension method just retrieve the first parent of type (it’s a common extension method that every Windows 8 developer should have created !). You can of course tweak to control (for example if you want to center the content to the button or anything else) to fit your needs. How to use this control? It’s very simple, in an AppBar control just add it and define the PopupContent property. <ic:AppBarPopupButton Style="{StaticResource RefreshAppBarButtonStyle}" HorizontalAlignment="Left"> <ic:AppBarPopupButton.PopupContent> <Grid> [...] </Grid> </ic:AppBarPopupButton.PopupContent> </ic:AppBarPopupButton> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } When the button is clicked the popup is displayed. When the popup is closed, the app bar is closed too. I hope this will help you !

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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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• Doing unit and integration tests with the Web API HttpClient

  - by cibrax

  One of the nice things about the new HttpClient in System.Net.Http is the support for mocking responses or handling requests in a http server hosted in-memory. While the first option is useful for scenarios in which we want to test our client code in isolation (unit tests for example), the second one enables more complete integration testing scenarios that could include some more components in the stack such as model binders or message handlers for example.   The HttpClient can receive a HttpMessageHandler as argument in one of its constructors. public class HttpClient : HttpMessageInvoker { public HttpClient(); public HttpClient(HttpMessageHandler handler); public HttpClient(HttpMessageHandler handler, bool disposeHandler); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } For the first scenario, you can create a new HttpMessageHandler that fakes the response, which you can use in your unit test. The only requirement is that you somehow inject an HttpClient with this custom handler in the client code. public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } In an unit test, you can do something like this. var fakeResponse = new HttpResponse(); var fakeHandler = new FakeHttpMessageHandler(fakeResponse); var httpClient = new HttpClient(fakeHandler); var customerService = new CustomerService(httpClient); // Do something // Asserts .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } CustomerService in this case is the class under test, and the one that receives an HttpClient initialized with our fake handler. For the second scenario in integration tests, there is a In-Memory host “System.Web.Http.HttpServer” that also derives from HttpMessageHandler and you can use with a HttpClient instance in your test. This has been discussed already in these two great posts from Pedro and Filip. 

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• SQLCMD Mode: give it one more chance

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

    - Click on me. Choose me. - asked one forgotten feature when some bored DBA was purposelessly wondering through the Management Studio menu at the end of her long and busy working day. - Why would I use you? I have heard of no one who does. What are you for? - perplexedly wondered aged and wise DBA. At least that DBA thought she was aged and wise though each day tried to prove to her that she wasn't. - I know you. You are quite lazy. Why would you do additional clicks to move from window to window? From Tool to tool ? This is irritating, isn't it? I can run windows system commands, sql statements and much more from the same script, from the same query window! - I have all my tools that I‘m used to, I have Management Studio, Cmd, Powershell. They can do anything for me. I don’t need additional tools. - I promise you, you will like me. – the thing continued to whine . - All right, show me. – she gave up. It’s always this way, she thought sadly, - easier to agree than to explain why you don’t want. - Enable me and then think about anything that you always couldn’t do through the management studio and had to use other tools. - Ok. Google for me the list of greatest features of SQL SERVER 2012. - Well... I’m not sure... Think about something else. - Ok, here is something easy for you. I want to check if file folder exists or if file is there. Though, I can easily do this using xp_cmdshell … - This is easy for me. – rejoiced the feature. By the way, having the items of the menu talking to you usually means you should stop working and go home. Or drink coffee. Or both. Well, aged and wise dba wasn’t thinking about the weirdness of the situation at that moment. - After enabling me, – said unfairly forgotten feature (it was thinking of itself in such manner) – after enabling me you can use all command line commands in the same management studio query window by adding two exclamation marks !! at the beginning of the script line to denote that you want to use cmd command: -Just keep in mind that when using this feature, you are actually running the commands ON YOUR computer and not on SQL server that query window is connected to. This is main difference from using xp_cmdshell which is executing commands on sql server itself. Bottomline, use UNC path instead of local path. - Look, there are much more than that. - The SQLCMD feature was getting exited.- You can get IP of your servers, create, rename and drop folders. You can see the contents of any file anywhere and even start different tools from the same query window: Not so aged and wise DBA was getting interested: - I also want to run different scripts on different servers without changing connection of the query window. - Sure, sure! Another great feature that CMDmode is providing us with and giving more power to querying. Use “:” to use additional features, like :connect that allows you to change connection: - Now imagine, you have one script where you have all your changes, like creating staging table on the DWH staging server, adding fact table to DWH itself and updating stored procedures in the server where reporting database is located. - Now, give me more challenges! - Script out a list of stored procedures into the text files. - You can do it easily by using command :out which will write the query results into the specified text file. The output can be the code of the stored procedure or any data. Actually this is the same as changing the query output into the file instead of the grid. - Now, take all of the scripts and run all of them, one by one, on the different server.  - Easily - Come on... I’m sure that you can not... -Why not? Naturally, I can do it using :r commant which is opening a script and executing it. Look, I can also use :setvar command to define an environment variable in SQLCMD mode. Just note that you have to leave the empty string between :r commands, otherwise it’s not working although I have no idea why. - Wow.- She was really impressed. - Ok, I’ll go to try all those… -Wait, wait! I know how to google the SQL SERVER features for you! This example will open chrome explorer with search results for the “SQL server 2012 top features” ( change the path to suit your PC): “Well, this can be probably useful stuff, maybe this feature is really unfairly forgotten”, thought the DBA while going through the dark empty parking lot to her lonely car. “As someone really wise once said: “It is what we think we know that keeps us from learning. Learn, unlearn and relearn”.

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• Populate a WCF syndication podcast using MP3 ID3 metadata tags

  - by brian_ritchie

  In the last post, I showed how to create a podcast using WCF syndication.  A podcast is an RSS feed containing a list of audio files to which users can subscribe.  The podcast not only contains links to the audio files, but also metadata about each episode.  A cool approach to building the feed is reading this metadata from the ID3 tags on the MP3 files used for the podcast. One library to do this is TagLib-Sharp.  Here is some sample code: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 2: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 3: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 4: { 5: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 6: size = fileInfo.Length, 7: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 8: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 9: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 10: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 11: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 12: id = fileInfo.Name 13: }; 14: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 15: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); This reads the ID3 tags into an object for later use in creating the syndication feed.  When the MP3 is created, these tags are set...or they can be set after the fact using the Properties dialog in Windows Explorer.  The only "hack" is that there isn't an easily accessible tag for "subtitle" or "published date" so I used other tags in this example. Feel free to change this to meet your purposes.  You could remove the subtitle & use the file modified data for example. That takes care of the episodes, for the feed level settings we'll load those from an XML file: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <iTunesPodcastFeed 3: baseUrl ="" 4: title="" 5: subTitle="" 6: description="" 7: copyright="" 8: category="" 9: ownerName="" 10: ownerEmail="" 11: mediaType="audio/mp3" 12: mediaFiles="*.mp3" 13: imageUrl="" 14: link="" 15: /> Here is the full code put together. Read the feed XML file and deserialize it into an iTunesPodcastFeed classLoop over the files in a directory reading the ID3 tags from the audio files .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, Monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 1: public static iTunesPodcastFeed CreateFeedFromFiles(string podcastDirectory, string podcastFeedFile) 2: { 3: XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(iTunesPodcastFeed)); 4: iTunesPodcastFeed feed; 5: using (var fs = File.OpenRead(Path.Combine(podcastDirectory, podcastFeedFile))) 6: { 7: feed = (iTunesPodcastFeed)serializer.Deserialize(fs); 8: } 9: foreach (var f in Directory.GetFiles(podcastDirectory, feed.mediaFiles)) 10: { 11: try 12: { 13: var taggedFile = TagLib.File.Create(f); 14: var fileInfo = new FileInfo(f); 15: var item = new iTunesPodcastItem() 16: { 17: title = taggedFile.Tag.Title, 18: size = fileInfo.Length, 19: url = feed.baseUrl + fileInfo.Name, 20: duration = taggedFile.Properties.Duration, 21: mediaType = feed.mediaType, 22: summary = taggedFile.Tag.Comment, 23: subTitle = taggedFile.Tag.FirstAlbumArtist, 24: id = fileInfo.Name 25: }; 26: if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(taggedFile.Tag.Album)) 27: item.publishedDate = DateTimeOffset.Parse(taggedFile.Tag.Album); 28: feed.Items.Add(item); 29: } 30: catch 31: { 32: // ignore files that can't be accessed successfully 33: } 34: } 35: return feed; 36: } Usually putting a "try...catch" like this is bad, but in this case I'm just skipping over files that are locked while they are being uploaded to the web site.Here is the code from the last couple of posts.  

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• Implementing synchronous MediaTypeFormatters in ASP.NET Web API

  - by cibrax

  One of main characteristics of MediaTypeFormatter’s in ASP.NET Web API is that they leverage the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for reading or writing an model into an stream. When you derive your class from the base class MediaTypeFormatter, you have to either implement the WriteToStreamAsync or ReadFromStreamAsync methods for writing or reading a model from a stream respectively. These two methods return a Task, which internally does all the serialization work, as it is illustrated bellow. public abstract class MediaTypeFormatter { public virtual Task WriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, Stream writeStream, HttpContent content, TransportContext transportContext); public virtual Task<object> ReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, Stream readStream, HttpContent content, IFormatterLogger formatterLogger); }   .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } However, most of the times, serialization is a safe operation that can be done synchronously. In fact, many of the serializer classes you will find in the .NET framework only provide sync methods. So the question is, how you can transform that synchronous work into a Task ?. Creating a new task using the method Task.Factory.StartNew for doing all the serialization work would be probably the typical answer. That would work, as a new task is going to be scheduled. However, that might involve some unnecessary context switches, which are out of our control and might be affect performance on server code specially.   If you take a look at the source code of the MediaTypeFormatters shipped as part of the framework, you will notice that they actually using another pattern, which uses a TaskCompletionSource class. public Task WriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, Stream writeStream, HttpContent content, TransportContext transportContext) {   var tsc = new TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid>(); tsc.SetResult(default(AsyncVoid));   //Do all the serialization work here synchronously   return tsc.Task; }   /// <summary> /// Used as the T in a "conversion" of a Task into a Task{T} /// </summary> private struct AsyncVoid { } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } They are basically doing all the serialization work synchronously and using a TaskCompletionSource for returning a task already done. To conclude this post, this is another approach you might want to consider when using serializers that are not compatible with an async model. Update: Henrik Nielsen from the ASP.NET team pointed out the existence of a built-in media type formatter for writing sync formatters. BufferedMediaTypeFormatter http://t.co/FxOfeI5x

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• Can't remove the libpcap0.8 package

  - by Yogesh

  I am getting error when running apt-get remove root@System:~/Downloads# sudo apt-get remove The following packages have unmet dependencies: libpcap0.8 : Breaks: libpcap0.8:i386 (!= 1.4.0-2) but 1.5.3-2 is installed libpcap0.8:i386 : Breaks: libpcap0.8 (!= 1.5.3-2) but 1.4.0-2 is installed libpcap0.8-dev : Depends: libpcap0.8 (= 1.5.3-2) but 1.4.0-2 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f. and when I ran apt-get remove -f this is what happens: root@System:~/Downloads# sudo apt-get remove -f The following extra packages will be installed: libpcap0.8 The following packages will be upgraded: libpcap0.8 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 365 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/110 kB of archives. After this operation, 13.3 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 163539 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb ... Unpacking libpcap0.8:amd64 (1.5.3-2) over (1.4.0-2) ... dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb (--unpack): trying to overwrite shared '/usr/share/man/man7/pcap-filter.7.gz', which is different from other instances of package libpcap0.8:amd64 dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe) Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1) ... Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) root@System:~/Downloads# clear root@System:~/Downloads# sudo apt-get remove -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: libpcap0.8 The following packages will be upgraded: libpcap0.8 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 365 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/110 kB of archives. After this operation, 13.3 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 163539 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb ... Unpacking libpcap0.8:amd64 (1.5.3-2) over (1.4.0-2) ... dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb (--unpack): trying to overwrite shared '/usr/share/man/man7/pcap-filter.7.gz', which is different from other instances of package libpcap0.8:amd64 dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe) Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1) ... Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) root@System:~/Downloads# root@System:~/Downloads# sudo apt-get check Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these. The following packages have unmet dependencies: libpcap0.8 : Breaks: libpcap0.8:i386 (!= 1.4.0-2) but 1.5.3-2 is installed libpcap0.8:i386 : Breaks: libpcap0.8 (!= 1.5.3-2) but 1.4.0-2 is installed libpcap0.8-dev : Depends: libpcap0.8 (= 1.5.3-2) but 1.4.0-2 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f. root@System:~/Downloads# apt-cache policy libpcap0.8:amd64 libpcap0.8 libpcap0.8-dev libpcap0.8: Installed: 1.4.0-2 Candidate: 1.5.3-2 Version table: 1.5.3-2 0 500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages *** 1.4.0-2 0 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status libpcap0.8: Installed: 1.4.0-2 Candidate: 1.5.3-2 Version table: 1.5.3-2 0 500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages *** 1.4.0-2 0 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status libpcap0.8-dev: Installed: 1.5.3-2 Candidate: 1.5.3-2 Version table: *** 1.5.3-2 0 500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status root@System:~/Downloads# root@System:~/Downloads# sudo apt-get -f remove libpcap0.8 libpcap0.8-dev libpcap0.8-dev:i386 libpcap0.8:i386 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package 'libpcap0.8-dev:i386' is not installed, so not removed. Did you mean 'libpcap0.8-dev'? You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libpcap-dev : Depends: libpcap0.8-dev but it is not going to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). root@System:~/Downloads# sudo apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following extra packages will be installed: libpcap0.8 The following packages will be upgraded: libpcap0.8 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 365 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/110 kB of archives. After this operation, 13.3 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 163539 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb ... Unpacking libpcap0.8:amd64 (1.5.3-2) over (1.4.0-2) ... dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb (--unpack): trying to overwrite shared '/usr/share/man/man7/pcap-filter.7.gz', which is different from other instances of package libpcap0.8:amd64 dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe) Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1) ... Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/libpcap0.8_1.5.3-2_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) root@System:~/Downloads#

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• The first day of JavaOne is already over!

  - by delabassee

  In the past Sunday used to be a more relaxing day with ‘just’ some JavaOne activities going on. Sunday used to be a soft day to prepare yourself for an exhausting week. This is now over as JavaOne is expanding; Sunday is now an integral part of the conference. One of the side effect of this extra day is that some activities related to JavaOne and OpenWorld such as MySQL Connect are being push to start a day earlier on Saturday (can you spot the pattern here?). On the GlassFish front, Sunday was a very busy day! It started at the Moscone Center with the annual GlassFish Community Event where the Java EE 7 and GF 4 roadmaps were presented and discussed. During the event, different GlassFish users such as ZeroTurnaround (the JRebel guys), Grupo RBS and IDR Solutions shared their views on GF, why they like GF but also what could be improved. The event was also a forum for the GF community to exchange with some of the key Java EE / GlassFish Oracle Executives and the different GF team members. The Strategy keynote and the Technical keynote were held in the Masonic Auditorium later in the after-noon. Oracle executives have presented the plans for Java SE, Java FX and Java EE. As on-demand replays will be available soon, I will not summarize several hours of content but here are some personal takeaways from those keynotes. Modularity Modularity is a big deal. We know by now that Project Jigsaw will not be ready for Java SE 8 but in any case, it is already possible (and encouraged) to test Jigsaw today. In the future, Java EE plan to rely on the modularity features provided by Java SE, so Project Jigsaw is also relevant for Java EE developers. Shorter term, to cover some of the modular requirements, Java SE will adopt the approach that was used for Java EE 6 and the notion of Profiles. This approach does not define a module system per say; Profiles is a way to clearly define different subsets of Java SE to fulfill different needs (e.g. the full JRE is not required for a headless application). The introduction of different Profiles, from the Base profile (10mb) to the Full Profile (+50mb), has been proposed for Java SE 8. Embedded Embedded is a strong theme going forward for the Java Plaform. There is now a dedicated program : Java Embedded @ JavaOne Java by nature (e.g. platform independence, built-in security, ability easily talks to any back-end systems, large set of skills available on the market, etc.) is probably the most suited platform for the Internet of Things. You can quickly be up-to-speed and develop services and applications for that space just by using your current Java skills. All you need to start developing on ARM is a 35$ Raspberry Pi ARM board (25$ if you are cheap and can live without an ethernet connection) and the recently released JDK for Linux/ARM. Obviously, GlassFish runs on Raspberry Pi. If you wan to go further in the embedded space, you should take a look Java SE Embedded, an optimized, low footprint, Java environment that support the major embedded architectures (ARM, PPC and x86). Finally, Oracle has recently introduced Java Embedded Suite, a new solution that brings modern middleware capabilities to the embedded space. Java Embedded Suite is an optimized solution that leverage Java SE Embedded but also GlassFish, Jersey and JavaDB to deploy advanced value added capabilities (eg. sensor data filtering and) deeper in the network, closer to the devices. JavaFX JavaFX is going strong! Starting from Java SE 7u6, JavaFX is bundled with the JDK. JavaFX is now available for all the major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). JavaFX is now also available, in developer preview, for low end device running Linux/ARM. During the keynote, JavaFX was shown running on a Raspberry Pi! And as announced during the keynote, JavaFX should be fully open-sourced by the end of the year; contributions are welcome!. There is a strong momentum around JavaFX, it’s the ideal client solution for the Java platform. A client layer that works perfectly with GlassFish on the back-end. If you were not convince by JavaFX, it’s time to reconsider it! As an old Chinese proverb say “One tweet is worth a thousand words!” HTML5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 HTML5 got a lot of airtime too, it was covered during the Java EE 7 section of the keynote. Some details about Project Avatar, Oracle’s incubator project for a TSA (Thin Server Architecture) solution, were diluted and shown during the keynote. On the tooling side, Project Easel running on NetBeans 7.3 beta was demo’ed, including a cool NetBeans debugging session running in Chrome! HTML 5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 deserve separate posts... Feedback We need your feedback! There are many projects, JSRs and products cooking : GlassFish 4, Project Jigsaw, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236), OpenJFX, OpenJDK to name just a few. Those projects, those specifications will have a profound impact on the Java platform for the years to come! So if you have the opportunity, download, install, learn, tests them and give feedback! Remember, you can "Make the Future Java!" Finally, the traditional GlassFish Party at the Thirsty Bear concluded the first JavaOne day. This party is another place where the community can freely exchange with the GlassFish team in a more relaxed, more friendly (but sometime more noisy) atmosphere. Arun has posted a set of pictures to reflect the atmosphere of the keynotes and the GlassFish party. You can find more details on the others Java EE and GlassFish activities here.

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• Highlights from the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our customers create the best possible customer experience. This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer. The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise. The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to 5,000. Alignment and Logic Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG, Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned. To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our customers and for our long-term cooperation and success. Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker ? always provocative and popular. The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at each of the stops around the lifecycle. Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better customer experience. John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with experts and peers and construct some real takeaways. From left to right: Brian Curran, John Kembel, Seth Godin, and George Kembel The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these ideas. Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive. I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps. David VapGroup Vice PresidentOracle Applications Product Development

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 2

  - by Simon Cooper

  Before we look any further at the CLR metadata, we need a quick diversion to understand how the metadata is actually stored. Encoding table information As an example, we'll have a look at a row in the TypeDef table. According to the spec, each TypeDef consists of the following: Flags specifying various properties of the class, including visibility. The name of the type. The namespace of the type. What type this type extends. The field list of this type. The method list of this type. How is all this data actually represented? Offset & RID encoding Most assemblies don't need to use a 4 byte value to specify heap offsets and RIDs everywhere, however we can't hard-code every offset and RID to be 2 bytes long as there could conceivably be more than 65535 items in a heap or more than 65535 fields or types defined in an assembly. So heap offsets and RIDs are only represented in the full 4 bytes if it is required; in the header information at the top of the #~ stream are 3 bits indicating if the #Strings, #GUID, or #Blob heaps use 2 or 4 bytes (the #US stream is not accessed from metadata), and the rowcount of each table. If the rowcount for a particular table is greater than 65535 then all RIDs referencing that table throughout the metadata use 4 bytes, else only 2 bytes are used. Coded tokens Not every field in a table row references a single predefined table. For example, in the TypeDef extends field, a type can extend another TypeDef (a type in the same assembly), a TypeRef (a type in a different assembly), or a TypeSpec (an instantiation of a generic type). A token would have to be used to let us specify the table along with the RID. Tokens are always 4 bytes long; again, this is rather wasteful of space. Cutting the RID down to 2 bytes would make each token 3 bytes long, which isn't really an optimum size for computers to read from memory or disk. However, every use of a token in the metadata tables can only point to a limited subset of the metadata tables. For the extends field, we only need to be able to specify one of 3 tables, which we can do using 2 bits: 0x0: TypeDef 0x1: TypeRef 0x2: TypeSpec We could therefore compress the 4-byte token that would otherwise be needed into a coded token of type TypeDefOrRef. For each type of coded token, the least significant bits encode the table the token points to, and the rest of the bits encode the RID within that table. We can work out whether each type of coded token needs 2 or 4 bytes to represent it by working out whether the maximum RID of every table that the coded token type can point to will fit in the space available. The space available for the RID depends on the type of coded token; a TypeOrMethodDef coded token only needs 1 bit to specify the table, leaving 15 bits available for the RID before a 4-byte representation is needed, whereas a HasCustomAttribute coded token can point to one of 18 different tables, and so needs 5 bits to specify the table, only leaving 11 bits for the RID before 4 bytes are needed to represent that coded token type. For example, a 2-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token with the value 0x0321 has the following bit pattern: 0 3 2 1 0000 0011 0010 0001 The first two bits specify the table - TypeRef; the other bits specify the RID. Because we've used the first two bits, we've got to shift everything along two bits: 000000 1100 1000 This gives us a RID of 0xc8. If any one of the TypeDef, TypeRef or TypeSpec tables had more than 16383 rows (2^14 - 1), then 4 bytes would need to be used to represent all TypeDefOrRef coded tokens throughout the metadata tables. Lists The third representation we need to consider is 1-to-many references; each TypeDef refers to a list of FieldDef and MethodDef belonging to that type. If we were to specify every FieldDef and MethodDef individually then each TypeDef would be very large and a variable size, which isn't ideal. There is a way of specifying a list of references without explicitly specifying every item; if we order the MethodDef and FieldDef tables by the owning type, then the field list and method list in a TypeDef only have to be a single RID pointing at the first FieldDef or MethodDef belonging to that type; the end of the list can be inferred by the field list and method list RIDs of the next row in the TypeDef table. Going back to the TypeDef If we have a look back at the definition of a TypeDef, we end up with the following reprensentation for each row: Flags - always 4 bytes Name - a #Strings heap offset. Namespace - a #Strings heap offset. Extends - a TypeDefOrRef coded token. FieldList - a single RID to the FieldDef table. MethodList - a single RID to the MethodDef table. So, depending on the number of entries in the heaps and tables within the assembly, the rows in the TypeDef table can be as small as 14 bytes, or as large as 24 bytes. Now we've had a look at how information is encoded within the metadata tables, in the next post we can see how they are arranged on disk.

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• My Red Gate Experience

  - by Colin Rothwell

  I’m Colin, and I’ve been an intern working with Mike in publishing on Simple-Talk and SQLServerCentral for the past ten weeks. I’ve mostly been working “behind the scenes”, making improvements to the spam filtering, along with various other small tweaks. When I arrived at Red Gate, one of the first things Mike asked me was what I wanted to get out of the internship. It wasn’t a question I’d given a great deal of thought to, but my immediate response was the same as almost anybody: to support my growing family. Well, ok, not quite that, but money was certainly a motivator, along with simply making sure that I didn’t get bored over the summer. Three months is a long time to fill, and many of my friends end up getting bored, or worse, knitting obsessively. With the arrogance which seems fairly common among Cambridge people, I wasn’t expecting to really learn much here! In my mind, the part of the year where I am at Uni is the part where I learn things, whilst Red Gate would be an opportunity to apply what I’d learnt. Thankfully, the opposite is true: I’ve learnt a lot during my time here, and there has been a definite positive impact on the way I write code. The first thing I’ve really learnt is that test-driven development is, in general, a sensible way of working. Before coming, I didn’t really get it: how could you test something you hadn’t yet written? It didn’t make sense! My problem was seeing a test as having to test all the behaviour of a given function. Writing tests which test the bare minimum possible and building them up is a really good way of crystallising the direction the code needs to grow in, and ensures you never attempt to write too much code at time. One really good experience of this was early on in my internship when Mike and I were working on the query used to list active authors: I’d written something which I thought would do the trick, but by starting again using TDD we grew something which revealed that there were several subtle mistakes in the query I’d written. I’ve also been awakened to the value of pair programming. Whilst I could sort of see the point before coming, I also thought that it was impossible that two people would ever get more done at the same computer than if they were working separately. I still think that this is true for projects with pieces that developers can easily work on independently, and with developers who both know the codebase, but I’ve found that pair programming can be really good for learning a code base, and for building up small projects to the point where you can start working on separate components, as well as solving particularly difficult problems. Later on in my internship, for my down tools week project, I was working on adding Python support to Glimpse. Another intern and I we pair programmed the entire project, using ping pong pair programming as much as possible. One bonus that this brought which I wasn’t expecting was that I found myself less prone to distraction: with someone else peering over my shoulder, I didn’t have the ever-present temptation to open gmail, or facebook, or yammer, or twitter, or hacker news, or reddit, and so on, and so forth. I’m quite proud of this project: I think it’s some of the best code I’ve written. I’ve also been really won over to the value of descriptive variables names. In my pre-Red Gate life, as a lone-ranger style cowboy programmer, I’d developed a tendency towards laziness in variable names, sometimes abbreviating or, worse, using acronyms. I’ve swiftly realised that this is a bad idea when working with a team: saving a few key strokes is inevitably not worth it when it comes to reading code again in the future. Longer names also mean you can do away with a majority of comments. I appreciate that if you’ve come up with an O(n*log n) algorithm for something which seemed O(n^2), you probably want to explain how it works, but explaining what a variable name means is a big no no: it’s so very easy to change the behaviour of the code, whilst forgetting about the comments. Whilst at Red Gate, I took the opportunity to attend a code retreat, which really helped me to solidify all the things I’d learnt. To be completely free of any existing code base really lets you focus on best practises and think about how you write code. If you get a chance to go on a similar event, I’d highly recommend it! Cycling to Red Gate, I’ve also become much better at fitting inner tubes: if you’re struggling to get the tube out, or re-fit the tire, letting a bit of air out usually helps. I’ve also become quite a bit better at foosball and will miss having a foosball table! I’d like to finish off by saying thank you to everyone at Red Gate for having me. I’ve really enjoyed working with, and learning from, the team that brings you this web site. If you meet any of them, buy them a drink!

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• Displaying text letter by letter

  - by Evi

  I am planing to Write a Text adventure and I don't know how to make the text draw letter by letter in any other way than changing the variable from h to he to hel to hell to hello That would be a terrible amount of work since there are tons of dialogue. Here is the source code so far { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Texture2D sampleBG; Texture2D TextBG; SpriteFont defaultfont; KeyboardState keyboardstate; public bool spacepress = false; public bool mspress = false; public int textheight = 425; public int rowspace = 40; public string namebox = "(null)"; public string Row1 = "(null)"; public string Row2 = "(null)"; public string Row3 = "(null)"; public string Row4 = "(null)"; public int Dialogue = 0; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 600; graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 800; IsMouseVisible = true; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); // TODO: use this.Content to load your game content here sampleBG = Content.Load <Texture2D>("SampleBG"); defaultfont = Content.Load<SpriteFont>("SpriteFont1"); TextBG = Content.Load<Texture2D>("textbg"); } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { KeyboardState keyboardstate = Keyboard.GetState(); MouseState mousestate = Mouse.GetState(); // Changes Dialgue by pressing Left Mouse Button or Space #region Dialogue changer if (mousestate.LeftButton == ButtonState.Pressed && mspress == false) { mspress = true; Dialogue = Dialogue + 1; } if (mousestate.LeftButton == ButtonState.Released && mspress == true) { mspress = false; } if (keyboardstate.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space) && spacepress == false) { spacepress = true; Dialogue = Dialogue + 1; } if (keyboardstate.IsKeyUp(Keys.Space) && spacepress == true) { spacepress = false; } #endregion // ------------------------------------------------------ // Dialgue Content #region Dialgue if (Dialogue == 1) { Row1 = "Input Text 1 Here."; Row2 = "Input Text 2 Here."; Row3 = "Input Text 3 Here."; Row4 = "Input Text 4 Here."; } if (Dialogue == 2) { Row1 = "Text 1"; Row2 = "Text 2"; Row3 = "Text 3"; Row4 = "Text 4"; } #endregion // ------------------------------------------------------ base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); // TODO: Add your drawing code here spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.Draw(sampleBG, new Rectangle(0, 0, 800, 600), Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw(TextBG, new Rectangle(0, 400, 800, 200), Color.White); spriteBatch.DrawString(defaultfont, Row1, new Vector2(10, (textheight + (rowspace * 0))), Color.Black); spriteBatch.DrawString(defaultfont, Row2, new Vector2(10, (textheight + (rowspace * 1))), Color.Black); spriteBatch.DrawString(defaultfont, Row3, new Vector2(10, (textheight + (rowspace * 2))), Color.Black); spriteBatch.DrawString(defaultfont, Row4, new Vector2(10, (textheight + (rowspace * 3))), Color.Black); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } }

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• XNA RTS A* pathfinding issues

  - by Slayter

  I'm starting to develop an RTS game using the XNA framework in C# and am still in the very early prototyping stage. I'm working on the basics. I've got unit selection down and am currently working on moving multiple units. I've implemented an A* pathfinding algorithm which works fine for moving a single unit. However when moving multiple units they stack on top of each other. I tried fixing this with a variation of the boids flocking algorithm but this has caused units to sometimes freeze and get stuck trying to move but going no where. Ill post the related methods for moving the units below but ill only post a link to the pathfinding class because its really long and i don't want to clutter up the page. These parts of the code are in the update method for the main controlling class: if (selectedUnits.Count > 0) { int indexOfLeader = 0; for (int i = 0; i < selectedUnits.Count; i++) { if (i == 0) { indexOfLeader = 0; } else { if (Vector2.Distance(selectedUnits[i].position, destination) < Vector2.Distance(selectedUnits[indexOfLeader].position, destination)) indexOfLeader = i; } selectedUnits[i].leader = false; } selectedUnits[indexOfLeader].leader = true; foreach (Unit unit in selectedUnits) unit.FindPath(destination); } foreach (Unit unit in units) { unit.Update(gameTime, selectedUnits); } These three methods control movement in the Unit class: public void FindPath(Vector2 destination) { if (path != null) path.Clear(); Point startPoint = new Point((int)position.X / 32, (int)position.Y / 32); Point endPoint = new Point((int)destination.X / 32, (int)destination.Y / 32); path = pathfinder.FindPath(startPoint, endPoint); pointCounter = 0; if (path != null) nextPoint = path[pointCounter]; dX = 0.0f; dY = 0.0f; stop = false; } private void Move(List<Unit> units) { if (nextPoint == position && !stop) { pointCounter++; if (pointCounter <= path.Count - 1) { nextPoint = path[pointCounter]; if (nextPoint == position) stop = true; } else if (pointCounter >= path.Count) { path.Clear(); pointCounter = 0; stop = true; } } else { if (!stop) { map.occupiedPoints.Remove(this); Flock(units); // Move in X ********* TOOK OUT SPEED ********** if ((int)nextPoint.X > (int)position.X) { position.X += dX; } else if ((int)nextPoint.X < (int)position.X) { position.X -= dX; } // Move in Y if ((int)nextPoint.Y > (int)position.Y) { position.Y += dY; } else if ((int)nextPoint.Y < (int)position.Y) { position.Y -= dY; } if (position == nextPoint && pointCounter >= path.Count - 1) stop = true; map.occupiedPoints.Add(this, position); } if (stop) { path.Clear(); pointCounter = 0; } } } private void Flock(List<Unit> units) { float distanceToNextPoint = Vector2.Distance(position, nextPoint); foreach (Unit unit in units) { float distance = Vector2.Distance(position, unit.position); if (unit != this) { if (distance < space && !leader && (nextPoint != position)) { // create space dX += (position.X - unit.position.X) * 0.1f; dY += (position.Y - unit.position.Y) * 0.1f; if (dX > .05f) nextPoint.X = nextPoint.X - dX; else if (dX < -.05f) nextPoint.X = nextPoint.X + dX; if (dY > .05f) nextPoint.Y = nextPoint.Y - dY; else if (dY < -.05f) nextPoint.Y = nextPoint.Y + dY; if ((dX < .05f && dX > -.05f) && (dY < .05f && dY > -.05f)) stop = true; path[pointCounter] = nextPoint; Console.WriteLine("Make Space: " + dX + ", " + dY); } else if (nextPoint != position && !stop) { dX = speed; dY = speed; Console.WriteLine(dX + ", " + dY); } } } } And here's the link to the pathfinder: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_Cqt6txUDkddU40QXBMeTR1djA I hope this post wasn't too long. Also please excuse the messiness of the code. As I said before this is early prototyping. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 2

  - by Dave Campbell

  Today's Review (alphabetic order): GooNews, Grocery Shopping List, Need for Speed, SurfCube, and United Nations News. I'm a day late if these are going to be 'Monday' posts, but there are lots of apps, lots of goodness, and lots of email, so I might try to do 2 a week, we'll see. So once again I've got a small review of 5 apps that are either on my phone or have been. Disclaimers at the end. In this Issue:   GooNews is a very cool app from Shawn Wildermuth (AgiliTrain). I don't know if he uses this as a demo during his instruction, but it definitely serves a purpose... wanna pick up the top news items from Google on a never-ending basis? ... this is it. You can add your own keyword searches, and send stories to InstaPaper or share via email. I like this because it brings me the news quickly and updated, and works great. GooNews is by AgiliTrain and is Free This was a request by the author, and actually surprised me. I'm a big one for lists, but I would have just done a OneNote list to SkyDrive and to my phone. This app is a lot more than that, but will take you some setup to make it be 'yours'. For obvious reasons, there are no unit prices on things, so you have to set that up to get some idea of the cost of what you're shopping for. But if you do that, you'll get a nice total. Lots of thought went into the various categories and you can add your own. There's a bit of animation on the category selection that's nice. He seems to have covered all the bases necessary to use this, even shopping 'plans' that can be saved, and emailing of lists. As I said, I'm more of a raw list person, but if you take the time to set this up, it should work very nicely for you. Grocery Shopping List is by Grocery Shopper and is $0.99 ($1.99 after Feb 1) with a free trial. This was my 2nd commercial game I bought, and the one I've played the most. I ran the trial, thought it worked great, and bought it. I've had a lot of fun with this... there's no gas pedal.. your foot is in the carbeurator from the GO!, and unless you wanna tap the screen and brake like a little girl, just hang onto the steering wheel (the phone), and guide your way through. Hours of fun and challenges here. I like this because it's got some challenge to it, and the cars seem to be very realistic in their reactions. Need for Speed Undercover is by Electronic Arts is $4.99 and has a free trial. SurfCube Browser is another app by the folks that did the GuitarTuner I reviewed on Monday. You have to see SurfCube to believe it. You've probably seen the YouTube video, if not check SilverlightCream number 1017. The app works very solid, and just as the video demonstrates. I downloaded and tried this, and it immediately did 2 things: bought it, and pinned it to my start page. I like this because it's fun to work with, and it works great as a browser. I'm about *this* close to replacing the IE tile on my front page with SurfCube. SurfCube Browser is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $1.99 and has a free trial. Coming in with another News app is United Nations News by Justin Angel. This is definitely a news aggregator for 'grown ups'... news, photos, videos, and radio broadcsts from the international community all in one very slick app. This is an amazingly well thought-out and complete app. Even better yet, Justin has the code on CodePlex. A very well-done International news aggregator. United Nations News is by Justin Angel and is Free. A few disclaimers: Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week (twice if I find time), and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. I'm still playing with the format, comments are welcome. I decided I should alphabetize the list today... so there's no order implied Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Can't Install php5-msql

  - by user210445

  Hello friends I'm finishing the process of installing Apache/Php/mysql installations but this shows up: # sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-msql Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package php5-msql After some adjustments this happened: angel@Voix:~$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done mysql-server is already the newest version. php5-mysql is already the newest version. The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: gir1.2-ubuntuoneui-3.0 libubuntuoneui-3.0-1 thunderbird-globalmenu Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: mysql-server-5.5 Suggested packages: tinyca mailx The following packages will be upgraded: mysql-server-5.5 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 4 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/8,827 kB of archives. After this operation, 32.7 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable (Reading database ... dpkg: warning: files list file for package `mysql-server-5.5' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed. (Reading database ... 172971 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace mysql-server-5.5 5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack): subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1 debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) angel@Voix:~$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.5 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: gir1.2-ubuntuoneui-3.0 libubuntuoneui-3.0-1 thunderbird-globalmenu Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. Suggested packages: tinyca mailx The following packages will be upgraded: mysql-server-5.5 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 4 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/8,827 kB of archives. After this operation, 32.7 MB of additional disk space will be used. debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable (Reading database ... dpkg: warning: files list file for package `mysql-server-5.5' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed. (Reading database ... 172971 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace mysql-server-5.5 5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack): subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1 debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) angel@Voix:~$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done mysql-server is already the newest version. php5-mysql is already the newest version. The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: gir1.2-ubuntuoneui-3.0 libubuntuoneui-3.0-1 thunderbird-globalmenu Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: mysql-server-5.5 Suggested packages: tinyca mailx The following packages will be upgraded: mysql-server-5.5 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 4 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/8,827 kB of archives. After this operation, 32.7 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable (Reading database ... dpkg: warning: files list file for package `mysql-server-5.5' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed. (Reading database ... 172971 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace mysql-server-5.5 5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb (--unpack): subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1 debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/mysql-server-5.5_5.5.34-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

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