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• Personal Technology – Laptop Screen Blank – No Post – No BIOS – No Boot

  - by Pinal Dave

  If your laptop Screen is Blank and there is no POST, BIOS or boot, you can follow the steps mentioned here and there are chances that it will work if there is no hardware failure inside. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Those, who care about how I come up with this not SQL related blog post, here is the very funny true story. If you are a married man, you will know what I am going to describe next. May be you have faced the same situation or at least you feel and understand my situation. My wife’s computer suddenly stops working when she was searching for my daughter’s mathematics worksheets online. While the fatal accident happened with my wife’s computer (which was my loyal computer for over 4 years before she got it), I was working in my home office, fixing a high priority issue (live order’s database was corrupted) with one of the largest eCommerce websites.  While I was working on production server where I was fixing database corruption, my wife ran to my home office. Here is how the conversation went: Wife: This computer does not work. I: Restart it. Wife: It does not start. I: What did you do with it? Wife: Nothing, it just stopped working. I: Okey, I will look into it later, working on the very urgent issue. Wife: I was printing my daughter’s worksheet. I: Hm.. Okey. Wife: It was the mathematics worksheet, which you promised you will teach but you never get around to do it, so I am doing it myself. I: Thanks. I appreciate it. I am very busy with this issue as million dollar transaction are not happening as the database got corrupted and … Wife: So what … umm… You mean to say that you care about this customer more than your daughter. You know she got A+ in every other class but in mathematics she got only A. She missed that extra credit question. I: She is only 4, it is okay. Wife: She is 4.5 years old not 4. So you are not going to fix this computer which does not start at all. I think our daughter next time will even get lower grades as her dad is busy fixing something. I: Alright, I give up bring me that computer. Our daughter who was listening everything so far she finally decided to speak up. Daughter: Dad, it is a laptop not computer. I: Yes, sweety get that laptop here and your dad is going to fix the this small issue of million dollar issue later on. I decided to pay attention to my wife’s computer. She was right. No matter what I do, it will not boot up, it will not start, no BIOS, no POST screen. The computer starts for a second but nothing comes up on the screen. The light indicating hard drive comes up for a second and goes off. Nothing happens. I removed every single USB drive from the laptop but it still would not start. It was indeed no fun for me. Finally I remember my days when I was not married and used to study in University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I remembered that I used to have very old second (or maybe third or fourth) hand computer with me. In polite words, I had pre-owned computer and it used to face very similar issues again and again. I had small routine I used to follow to fix my old computer and I had decided to follow the same steps again with this computer. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Once I followed above process, her computer worked. I was very delighted, that now I can go back to solving the problem where millions of transactions were waiting as I was fixing corrupted database and it the current state of the database was in emergency mode. Once I fixed the computer, I looked at my wife and asked. I: Well, now this laptop is back online, can I get guaranteed that she will get A+ in mathematics in this week’s quiz? Wife: Sure, I promise. I: Fantastic. After saying that I started to look at my database corruption and my wife interrupted me again. Wife: Btw, I forgot to tell you. Our daughter had got A in mathematics last week but she had another quiz today and she already have received A+ there. I kept my promise. I looked at her and she started to walk outside room, before I say anything my phone rang. DBA from eCommerce company had called me, as he was wondering why there is no activity from my side in last 10 minutes. DBA: Hey bud, are you still connected. I see um… no activity in last 10 minutes. I: Oh, well, I was just saving the world. I am back now. After two hours I had fixed the database corruption and everything was normal. I was outsmarted by my wife but honestly I still respect and love her the same as she is the one who spends countless hours with our daughter so she does not miss me and I can continue writing blogs and keep on doing technology evangelism. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Thoughts on Build 2013

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/06/30/153294.aspxAnd so another Build conference has come to an end. Below are my thoughts/perspectives on various aspects of the event. I’ll do a separate blog post on my thoughts of the Build message for developers. The Good Moscone center was a great venue for Build! Easy to get around, easy to get to, and well maintained, it was a very comfortable conference venue. Yeah, the free swag was nice. Build has built up an expectation that attendees will always get something; it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft maintains this expectation over the next few Build events. I still maintain that free swag should never be the main reason one attends an event, and for me this was definitely just an added bonus. I’m planning on trying to use the Surface as a dedicated 2nd device at work for meetings, I’ll share my experiences over the next few months. The hackathon event was a great idea, although personally I couldn’t justify spending the money on a conference registration just to spend the entire conference coding. Still, the apps that were created were really great and there was a lot of passion and excitement around the hackathon. I wonder if they couldn’t have had the hackathon on the Monday/Tuesday for those that wanted to participate so they didn’t miss any of the actual conference over Wed/Thurs. San Francisco was a great city to host Build. Getting from hotels to the conference center was very easy (well especially for me, I was only 3 blocks away) and the city itself felt very safe. However, if I never have to fly into SFO again I’ll be alright with that! Delays going into and out of SFO and both apparently were due to the airport itself. The Bad Build is one of those oddities on the conference landscape where people will pay to commit to attending an event without knowing anything about the sessions. We got our list of conference sessions when we registered on Tuesday, not before. And even then, we only got titles and not descriptions (those were eventually made available via the conference’s mobile application). I get it…they’re going to make announcements and they don’t want to give anything away through the session titles. But honestly, there wasn’t anything in the session titles that I would have considered a surprise. Breakfasts were brutal. High-carb pastries, donuts, and muffins with fruit and hard boiled eggs does not a conference breakfast make. I can’t believe that the difference between a continental breakfast per person and a hot breakfast buffet would have been a huge impact to a conference fee that was already around $2000. The vendor area was anemic. I don’t know why Microsoft forces the vendors into cookie-cutter booth areas (this year they were all made of plywood material). WPC, TechEd – booth areas there allow the vendors to be creative with their displays. Not so much for Build. Really odd was the lack of Microsoft’s own representation around Bing. In the day 1 keynote Microsoft made a big deal about Bing as an API. Yet there was nobody in the vendor area set up to provide more information or have discussions with about the Bing API. The Ugly Our name badges were NFC enabled. The purpose of this, beyond the vendors being able to scan your info, wasn’t really made clear. An attendee I talked to showed how you could get a reader app on your phone so you can scan other members cards and collect their contact info – which is a kewl idea; business cards are so 1990’s. But I was *shocked* at the amount of information that was on our name badges! Here’s what’s displayed on our name badge: - Name - Company - Twitter Handle I’m ok with that. But here’s what actually gets read: - Name - Company - Address Used for Registration - Phone Number Used for Registration So sharing that info with another attendee, they get way more of my info than just how to find me on Twitter! Microsoft, you need to fix this for the future. If vendors want to collect information on attendees, they should be able to collect an ID from the badge, then get a report with corresponding records afterwards. My personal information should not be so readily available, and without my knowledge! Final Verdict Maybe its my older age, maybe its where I’m at in life with family, maybe its where I’m at in my career, but when I consider whether a conference experience was valuable I get to the core reason I attend: opportunities to learn, opportunities to network, opportunities to engage with Microsoft. Opportunities to Learn:  Sessions I attended were generally OK, with some really stand out ones on Day 2. I would love to see Microsoft adopt the Dojo format for a portion of their sessions. Hands On Labs are dull, lecture style sessions are great for information sharing. But a guided hands-on coding session (Read: Dojo) provides the best of both worlds. Being that all content is publically available online to everyone (Build attendee or not), the value of attending the conference sessions is decreased. The value though is in the discussions that take part in person afterwards, which leads to… Opportunities to Network: I enjoyed getting together with old friends and connecting with Twitter friends in person for the first time. I also had an opportunity to meet total strangers. So from a networking perspective, Build was fantastic! I still think it would have been great to have an area for ad-hoc discussions – where speakers could announce they’d be available for more questions after their sessions, or attendees who wanted to discuss more in depth on a topic with other attendees could arrange space. Some people have no problems being outgoing and making these things happen, but others are not and a structured model is more attractive. Opportunities to Engage with Microsoft: Hit and miss on this one. Outside of the vendor area, unless you cornered or reached out to a speaker, there wasn’t any defined way to connect with blue badges. And as I mentioned above, Microsoft didn’t have full representation in the vendor area (no Bing). All in all, Build was a fun party where I was informed about some new stuff and got some free swag. Was it worth the time away from home and the hit to my PD budget? I’d say Somewhat. Build is a great informational conference, but I wouldn’t call it a learning conference. Considering that TechEd seems to be moving to more of an IT Pro focus, independent developer conferences seem to be the best value for those looking to learn and not just be informed. With the rapid development cycle Microsoft is embracing, we’re already seeing Build happening twice within a 12 month period. If that continues, the value of attending Build in person starts to diminish – especially with so much content available online. If Microsoft wants Build to be a must-attend event in the future, they need to start incorporating aspects of Tech Ed, past PDCs, and other conferences so those that want to leave with more than free swag have something to attract them.

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• 10 tape technology features that make you go hmm.

  - by Karoly Vegh

  A week ago an Oracle/StorageTek Tape Specialist, Christian Vanden Balck, visited Vienna, and agreed to visit customers to do techtalks and update them about the technology boom going around tape. I had the privilege to attend some of his sessions and noted the information and features that took the customers by surprise and made them think. Allow me to share the top 10: I. StorageTek as a brand: StorageTek is one of he strongest names in the Tape field. The brand itself was valued so much by customers that even after Sun Microsystems acquiring StorageTek and the Oracle acquiring Sun the brand lives on with all the Oracle tapelibraries are officially branded StorageTek.See http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/overview/index.html II. Disk information density limitations: Disk technology struggles with information density. You haven't seen the disk sizes exploding lately, have you? That's partly because there are physical limits on a disk platter. The size is given, the number of platters is limited, they just can't grow, and are running out of physical area to write to. Now, in a T10000C tape cartridge we have over 1000m long tape. There you go, you have got your physical space and don't need to stuff all that data crammed together. You can write in a reliable pattern, and have space to grow too. III. Oracle has a market share of 62% worldwide in recording head manufacturing. That's right. If you are running LTO drives, with a good chance you rely on StorageTek production. That's two out of three LTO recording heads produced worldwide.  IV. You can store 1 Exabyte data in a single tape library. Yes, an Exabyte. That is 1000 Petabytes. Or, a million Terabytes. A thousand million GigaBytes. You can store that in a stacked StorageTek SL8500 tapelibrary. In one SL8500 you can put 10.000 T10000C cartridges, that store 10TB data (compressed). You can stack 10 of these SL8500s together. Boom. 1000.000 TB.(n.b.: stacking means interconnecting the libraries. Yes, cartridges are moved between the stacked libraries automatically.)  V. EMC: 'Tape doesn't suck after all. We moved on.': Do you remember the infamous 'Tape sucks, move on' Datadomain slogan? Of course they had to put it that way, having only had disk products. But here's a fun fact: on the EMCWorld 2012 there was a major presence of a Tape-tech company - EMC, in a sudden burst of sanity is embracing tape again. VI. The miraculous T10000C: Oracle StorageTek has developed an enterprise-grade tapedrive and cartridge, the T10000C. With awesome numbers: The Cartridge: Native 5TB capacity, 10TB with compression Over a kilometer long tape within the cartridge. And it's locked when unmounted, no rattling of your data.  Replaced the metalparticles datalayer with BaFe (bariumferrite) - metalparticles lose around 7% of magnetism within 30 days. BaFe does not. Yes we employ solid-state physicists doing R&D on demagnetisation in our labs. Can be partitioned, storage tiering within the cartridge!  The Drive: 2GB Cache Encryption implemented in HW - no performance hit 252 MB/s native sustained data rate, beats disk technology by far. Not to mention peak throughput.  Leading the tape while never touching the data side of it, protecting your data physically too Data integritiy checking (CRC recalculation) on tape within the drive without having to read it back to the server reordering data from tape-order, delivering it back in application-order  writing 32 tracks at once, reading them back for CRC check at once VII. You only use 20% of your data on a regular basis. The rest 80% is just lying around for years. On continuously spinning disks. Doubly consuming energy (power+cooling), blocking diskstorage capacity. There is a solution called SAM (Storage Archive Manager) that provides you a filesystem unifying disk and tape, moving data on-demand and for clients transparently between the different storage tiers. You can share these filesystems with NFS or CIFS for clients, and enjoy the low TCO of tape. Tapes don't spin. They sit quietly in their slots, storing 10TB data, using no energy, producing no heat, automounted when a client accesses their data.See: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/storage-software/storage-archive-manager/overview/index.html VIII. HW supported for three decades: Did you know that the original PowderHorn library was released in '87 and has been only discontinued in 2010? That is over two decades of supported operation. Tape libraries are - just like the data carrying on tapecartridges - built for longevity. Oh, and the T10000C cartridge has 30-year archival life for long-term retention.  IX. Tape is easy to manage: Have you heard of Tape Storage Analytics? It is a central graphical tool to summarize, monitor, analyze dataflow, health and performance of drives and libraries, see: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/tape-storage/tape-analytics/overview/index.html X. The next generation: The T10000B drives were able to reuse the T10000A cartridges and write on them even more data. On the same cartridges. We call this investment protection, and this is very important for Oracle for the future too. We usually support two generations of cartridges together. The current drive is a T10000C. (...I know I promised to enlist 10, but I got still two more I really want to mention. Allow me to work around the problem: ) X++. The TallBots, the robots moving around the cartridges in the StorageTek library from tapeslots to the drives are cableless. Cables, belts, chains running to moving parts in a library cause maintenance downtimes. So StorageTek eliminated them. The TallBots get power, commands, even firmwareupgrades through the rails they are running on. Also, the TallBots don't just hook'n'pull the tapes out of their slots, they actually grip'n'lift them out. No friction, no scratches, no zillion little plastic particles floating around in the library, in the drives, on your data. (X++)++: Tape beats SSDs and Disks. In terms of throughput (252 MB/s), in terms of TCO: disks cause around 290x more power and cooling, in terms of capacity: 10TB on a single media and soon more.  So... do you need to store large amounts of data? Are you legally bound to archive it for dozens of years? Would you benefit from automatic storage tiering? Have you got large mediachunks to be streamed at times? Have you got power and cooling issues in the growing datacenters? Do you find EMC's 180° turn of tape attitude interesting, but appreciate it at the same time? With all that, you aren't alone. The most data on this planet is stored on tape. Tape is coming. Big time.

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• REST to Objects in C#

  RESTful interfaces for web services are all the rage for many Web 2.0 sites.  If you want to consume these in a very simple fashion, LINQ to XML can do the job pretty easily in C#.  If you go searching for help on this, youll find a lot of incomplete solutions and fairly large toolkits and frameworks (guess how I know this) this quick article is meant to be a no fluff just stuff approach to making this work. POCO Objects Lets assume you have a Model that you want to suck data into from a RESTful web service.  Ideally this is a Plain Old CLR Object, meaning it isnt infected with any persistence or serialization goop.  It might look something like this: public class Entry { public int Id; public int UserId; public DateTime Date; public float Hours; public string Notes; public bool Billable;   public override string ToString() { return String.Format("[{0}] User: {1} Date: {2} Hours: {3} Notes: {4} Billable {5}", Id, UserId, Date, Hours, Notes, Billable); } } Not that this isnt a completely trivial object.  Lets look at the API for the service.  RESTful HTTP Service In this case, its TickSpots API, with the following sample output: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <entries type="array"> <entry> <id type="integer">24</id> <task_id type="integer">14</task_id> <user_id type="integer">3</user_id> <date type="date">2008-03-08</date> <hours type="float">1.00</hours> <notes>Had trouble with tribbles.</notes> <billable>true</billable> # Billable is an attribute inherited from the task <billed>true</billed> # Billed is an attribute to track whether the entry has been invoiced <created_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</created_at> <updated_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</updated_at> # The following attributes are derived and provided for informational purposes: <user_email>[email protected]</user_email> <task_name>Remove converter assembly</task_name> <sum_hours type="float">2.00</sum_hours> <budget type="float">10.00</budget> <project_name>Realign dilithium crystals</project_name> <client_name>Starfleet Command</client_name> </entry> </entries> Im assuming in this case that I dont necessarily care about all of the data fields the service is returning I just need some of them for my applications purposes.  Thus, you can see there are more elements in the <entry> XML than I have in my Entry class. Get The XML with C# The next step is to get the XML.  The following snippet does the heavy lifting once you pass it the appropriate URL: protected XElement GetResponse(string uri) { var request = WebRequest.Create(uri) as HttpWebRequest; request.UserAgent = ".NET Sample"; request.KeepAlive = false;   request.Timeout = 15 * 1000;   var response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;   if (request.HaveResponse == true && response != null) { var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()); return XElement.Parse(reader.ReadToEnd()); } throw new Exception("Error fetching data."); } This is adapted from the Yahoo Developer article on Web Service REST calls.  Once you have the XML, the last step is to get the data back as your POCO. Use LINQ-To-XML to Deserialize POCOs from XML This is done via the following code: public IEnumerable<Entry> List(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) { string additionalParameters = String.Format("start_date={0}&end_date={1}", startDate.ToShortDateString(), endDate.ToShortDateString()); string uri = BuildUrl("entries", additionalParameters);   XElement elements = GetResponse(uri);   var entries = from e in elements.Elements() where e.Name.LocalName == "entry" select new Entry { Id = int.Parse(e.Element("id").Value), UserId = int.Parse(e.Element("user_id").Value), Date = DateTime.Parse(e.Element("date").Value), Hours = float.Parse(e.Element("hours").Value), Notes = e.Element("notes").Value, Billable = bool.Parse(e.Element("billable").Value) }; return entries; }   For completeness, heres the BuildUrl method for my TickSpot API wrapper: // Change these to your settings protected const string projectDomain = "DOMAIN.tickspot.com"; private const string authParams = "[email protected]&password=MyTickSpotPassword";   protected string BuildUrl(string apiMethod, string additionalParams) { if (projectDomain.Contains("DOMAIN")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your domain in ProjectRepository.cs."); } if (authParams.Contains("MyTickSpotPassword")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your email and password in ProjectRepository.cs."); } return string.Format("https://{0}/api/{1}?{2}&{3}", projectDomain, apiMethod, authParams, additionalParams); } Thats it!  Now go forth and consume XML and map it to classes you actually want to work with.  Have fun! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Advice for a distracted, unhappy, recently graduated programmer? [closed]

  - by Re-Invent

  I graduated 4 months ago. I had offers from a few good places to work at. At the same time I wanted to stick to building a small software business of my own, still have some ideas with good potential, some half done projects frozen in my github. But due to social pressures, I chose a job, the pay is great, but I am half-passionate about it. A small team of smart folks building useful product, working out contracts across the world. I've started finding it extremely boring. Boring to the extent that I skip 2-3 days a week together not doing work. Neither do I spend that time progressing any of my own projects. Yes, I feel stupid at the way I'm wasting time, but I don't understand exactly why is it happening. It's as if all the excitement has been drained. What can I do about it? Long version: School - I was in third standard. Only students, 6th grade had access to computer labs. I once peeked into the lab from the little door opening. No hard-disks, MS DOS on 5 1/2 inch floppies. I asked a senior student to play some sound in BASIC. He used PLAY to compose a tune. Boy! I was so excited, I was jumping from within. Back home, asked my brother to teach me some programming. We bought a book "MODERN All About GW-BASIC for Schools & Colleges". The book had everything, right from printing, to taking input, file i/o, game programming, machine level support, etc. I was in 6th standard, wrote my first game - a wheel of fortune, rotated the wheel by manipulating 16 color palette's definition. Got internet soon, got hooked to QuickBasic programming community. Made some more games "007 in Danger", "Car Crush 2" for submission to allbasiccode archives. I was extremely excited about all this. My interests now swayed into "hacking" (computer security). Taught myself some perl, found it annoying, learnt PHP and a bit of SQL. Also taught myself Visual Basic one of the winters and wrote a pacman clone with Direct X. By the time I was in 10th standard, I created some evil tools using visual basic, php and mysql and eventually landed myself into an unpaid side-job at a government facility, building evil tools for them. It was a dream come true for crackers of that time. And so was I, still very excited. Things changed soon, last two years of school were not so great as I was balancing preps for college, work at govt. and studies for school at same time. College - College was opposite of all I had wished it to be. I imagined it to be a place where I'd spend my 4 years building something awesome. It was rather an epitome of rote learning, attendance, rules, busy schedules, ban on personal laptops, hardly any hackers surrounding you and shit like that. We had to take permissions to even introduce some cultural/creative activities in our annual schedule. The labs won't be open on weekends because the lab employees had to have their leaves. Yes, a horrible place for someone like me. I still managed to pull out a project with a friend over 2 months. Showed it to people high in the academia hierarchy. They were immensely impressed, we proposed to allow personal computers for students. They made up half-assed reasons and didn't agree. We felt frustrated. And so on, I still managed to teach myself new languages, do new projects of my own, do an intern at the same govt. facility, start a small business for sometime, give a talk at a conference I'm passionate about, win game-dev and hacking contest at most respected colleges, solve good deal of programming contest problems, etc. At the same time I was not content with all these restrictions, great emphasis on rote learning, and sheer wastage of time due to college. I never felt I was overdoing, but now I feel I burnt myself out. During my last days at college, I did an intern at a bigco. While I spent my time building prototypes for certain LBS, the other interns around me, even a good friend, was just skipping time. I thought maybe, in a few weeks he would put in some serious efforts at work assigned to him, but all he did was to find creative ways to skip work, hide his face from manager, engage people in talks if they try to question his progress, etc. I tried a few time to get him on track, but it seems all he wanted was to "not to work hard at all and still reap the fruits". I don't know how others take such people, but I find their vicinity very very poisonous to one's own motivation and productivity. Over that, the place where I come from, HRs don't give much value to what have you done past 4 years. So towards the end of out intern, we all were offered work at the bigco, but the slacker, even after not writing more than 200 lines of code was made a much better offer. I felt enraged instantly - "Is this how the corp world treats someone who does fruitful, if not extra-ordinary work form them for past 6 months?". Yes, I did try to negotiate and debate. The bigcos seem blind due to departmentalization of responsibilities and many layers of management. I decided not to be in touch with any characters of that depressing play. Probably the busy time I had at college, ignoring friends, ignoring fun and squeezing every bit of free time for myself is also responsible. Probably this is what has drained all my willingness to work for anyone. I find my day job boring, at the same time I with to maintain it for financial reasons. I feel a bit burnt out, unsatisfied and at the same time an urge to quit working for someone else and start finishing my frozen side-projects (which may be profitable). Though I haven't got much to support myself with food, office, internet bills, etc in savings. I still have my day job, but I don't find it very interesting, even though the pay is higher than the slacker, I don't find money to be a great motivator here. I keep comparing myself to my past version. I wonder how to get rid of this and reboot myself back to the way I was in school days - excited about it, tinkering, building, learning new things daily, and NOT BORED?

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• Alcatel-Lucent: Enterprise 2.0: The Top 5 Things I would Do Over

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Happy Monday! Does anyone else feel as if the weekend went entirely too quickly? At least for those of us in the United States, we have the 4th of July Holiday next week to look forward to This week on the blog, we are going to focus on "WebCenter by Example" and highlight best practices from customers and partners. I recently came across this article and I think this is a great example of how we can learn from one another when it comes to social collaboration adoption. Do you agree with Jem? What things or best practices have you learned in your organizations?  By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent  Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over? #5 Define your analytics solution from the start There is so much to do when you launch a community and initially growing it without complete chaos is quite a task.  It doesn’t take too long to get to a point where you want to focus your continued efforts in growing company collaboration.  Do people truly talk across regional boundaries or have we shifted siloed conversations to a new platform.  Is there one organization that doesn’t interact with another? If you are lucky you’ll have someone in your community team well versed in the world of databases and SQL queries, but it takes time to figure out what backend analytics data actually means. Professional support can be expensive and it may be hard to justify later as it typically has the community manager as the only main customer.  Figure out what you think you’ll want to know and how to get it early on. The sooner the better even if it doesn’t seem that critical at the time. #4 Lobbies guide you to the right places One piece of feedback that comes up more and more as we keep growing Engage is it’s hard to find stuff, or new people are not sure where to start. Something we’re doing now is defining some general topic areas of interest to be like “lobbies” into the platform and some common hashtags to go with them. I liken this to walking into a large medical or professional building for the first time.  There are hundreds of offices, and you look to a sign in the lobby to get guided to the right place for you.  We’re building that sign for members now, but again we missed the boat as the majority of the company has had their initial Engage experience. #3 Clean up, clean up, clean up Knowledge work and folksonomies are messy! The day we opened the doors to Engage I would have said we should keep everything ever created in Engage with an argument that it was a window into our collective knowledge so nothing should go.  Well, 6000+ groups and 200,000+ pieces of content later, I’ve changed my mind.  As previously mentioned, with too much “stuff” the system can be overwhelming to new members and it makes it harder to get what you’re looking for.   Do we need that help document about a tool we no longer have? NO!  Do we need that group that had 1 document and 2 discussions in the last two years? NO! Should we only have one group about a given topic instead of 4?  YES! Last fall, Engage defined a cleanup process for groups not used for a long time.  We also formed a volunteer cleaning army who are extra eyes on the hunt for “stuff” that should be updated, merged, or deleted.  It’s better late than never, but in line with what’s becoming a theme I wish these efforts had started earlier. #2 Communications & local community management One of the most important aspects of my job is to make sure people who should be talking to each other are actually doing it.  Connecting people to the other people they should know, the groups they should join, a piece of content that shouldn’t be missed.   I have worked both inside and outside of communications teams, and they are the best informed people in your company.  They know when something big is coming, how it impacts employees, how it fits with strategy, who else knows more, etc.  Having communications professionals who are power users can help scale up community management because they are already so well connected.  They also need to have the platform skills to pay attention without suffering email overload, how to grab someone’s attention, etc.  I wish I’d had figured this out much earlier.  If I had I would have groomed more communications colleagues into advocates and power members right at the start. #1 Grooming advocates vs. natural advocates I’ve just alluded to this above already. The very best advocates are those who naturally embrace your platform and automatically start to see new ways to work within it.  Those advocates seem to come out of the woodwork naturally since some of them are early adopters.  Not surprisingly, our best advocates today are those same people who were willing to come kick the tires when the community was completely empty.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get a global spread of those natural advocates.  I did ask around when we first launched for other people who might be good candidates, but didn’t push too hard as there were so many other things to get ready.  That was a mistake.  If I could get a redo I would have formally asked for people to be assigned where there were gaps and groomed them into an advocate.  Today as we find new advocates to fill the gaps, people are hesitant as the initial set has three years of practice are ahead of the curve power members; it definitely would have been easier earlier on. As fairly early adopters to corporate scale enterprise collaboration, there hasn’t been a roadmap to follow as we’ve grown Engage, which is part of the fun! It’s clear a lot of issues are more easily tackled the earlier you identify and begin to correct them, and I’ve identified the main five I wish I could redo.  In the spirit of collaboration, I hope someone else learns from my mistakes! View the original article by Jem here. 

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• Metrics - A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing (or 'Why you're not clever enough to interpret metrics data')

  - by Jason Crease

  At RedGate Software, I work on a .NET obfuscator  called SmartAssembly.  Various features of it use a database to store various things (exception reports, name-mappings, etc.) The user is given the option of using either a SQL-Server database (which requires them to have Microsoft SQL Server), or a Microsoft Access MDB file (which requires nothing). MDB is the default option, but power-users soon switch to using a SQL Server database because it offers better performance and data-sharing. In the fashionable spirit of optimization and metrics, an obvious product-management question is 'Which is the most popular? SQL Server or MDB?' We've collected data about this fact, using our 'Feature-Usage-Reporting' technology (available as part of SmartAssembly) and more recently our 'Application Metrics' technology: Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 28 19.0 8115 8115 MDB 114 77.6 1449 1449 (As a disclaimer, please note than SmartAssembly has far more than 132 users . This data is just a selection of one build) So, it would appear that SQL-Server is used by fewer users, but more often. Great. But here's why these numbers are useless to me: Only the original developers understand the data What does a single 'usage' of 'MDB' mean? Does this happen once per run? Once per option change? On clicking the 'Obfuscate Now' button? When running the command-line version or just from the UI version? Each question could skew the data 10-fold either way, and the answers only known by the developer that instrumented the application in the first place. In other words, only the original developer can interpret the data - product-managers cannot interpret the data unaided. Most of the data is from uninterested users About half of people who download and run a free-trial from the internet quit it almost immediately. Only a small fraction use it sufficiently to make informed choices. Since the MDB option is the default one, we don't know how many of those 114 were people CHOOSING to use the MDB, or how many were JUST HAPPENING to use this MDB default for their 20-second trial. This is a problem we see across all our metrics: Are people are using X because it's the default or are they using X because they want to use X? We need to segment the data further - asking what percentage of each percentage meet our criteria for an 'established user' or 'informed user'. You end up spending hours writing sophisticated and dubious SQL queries to segment the data further. Not fun. You can't find out why they used this feature Metrics can answer the when and what, but not the why. Why did people use feature X? If you're anything like me, you often click on random buttons in unfamiliar applications just to explore the feature-set. If we listened uncritically to metrics at RedGate, we would eliminate the most-important and more-complex features which people actually buy the software for, leaving just big buttons on the main page and the About-Box. "Ah, that's interesting!" rather than "Ah, that's actionable!" People do love data. Did you know you eat 1201 chickens in a lifetime? But just 4 cows? Interesting, but useless. Often metrics give you a nice number: '5.8% of users have 3 or more monitors' . But unless the statistic is both SUPRISING and ACTIONABLE, it's useless. Most metrics are collected, reviewed with lots of cooing. and then forgotten. Unless a piece-of-data could change things, it's useless collecting it. People get obsessed with significance levels The first things that lots of people do with this data is do a t-test to get a significance level ("Hey! We know with 99.64% confidence that people prefer SQL Server to MDBs!") Believe me: other causes of error/misinterpretation in your data are FAR more significant than your t-test could ever comprehend. Confirmation bias prevents objectivity If the data appears to match our instinct, we feel satisfied and move on. If it doesn't, we suspect the data and dig deeper, plummeting down a rabbit-hole of segmentation and filtering until we give-up and move-on. Data is only useful if it can change our preconceptions. Do you trust this dodgy data more than your own understanding, knowledge and intelligence?  I don't. There's always multiple plausible ways to interpret/action any data Let's say we segment the above data, and get this data: Post-trial users (i.e. those using a paid version after the 14-day free-trial is over): Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 13 9.0 1115 1115 MDB 5 4.2 449 449 Trial users: Parameter Number of users % of total users Number of sessions Number of usages SQL Server 15 10.0 7000 7000 MDB 114 77.6 1000 1000 How do you interpret this data? It's one of: Mostly SQL Server users buy our software. People who can't afford SQL Server tend to be unable to afford or unwilling to buy our software. Therefore, ditch MDB-support. Our MDB support is so poor and buggy that our massive MDB user-base doesn't buy it.  Therefore, spend loads of money improving it, and think about ditching SQL-Server support. People 'graduate' naturally from MDB to SQL Server as they use the software more. Things are fine the way they are. We're marketing the tool wrong. The large number of MDB users represent uninformed downloaders. Tell marketing to aggressively target SQL Server users. To choose an interpretation you need to segment again. And again. And again, and again. Opting-out is correlated with feature-usage Metrics tends to be opt-in. This skews the data even further. Between 5% and 30% of people choose to opt-in to metrics (often called 'customer improvement program' or something like that). Casual trial-users who are uninterested in your product or company are less likely to opt-in. This group is probably also likely to be MDB users. How much does this skew your data by? Who knows? It's not all doom and gloom. There are some things metrics can answer well. Environment facts. How many people have 3 monitors? Have Windows 7? Have .NET 4 installed? Have Japanese Windows? Minor optimizations.  Is the text-box big enough for average user-input? Performance data. How long does our app take to start? How many databases does the average user have on their server? As you can see, questions about who-the-user-is rather than what-the-user-does are easier to answer and action. Conclusion Use SmartAssembly. If not for the metrics (called 'Feature-Usage-Reporting'), then at least for the obfuscation/error-reporting. Data raises more questions than it answers. Questions about environment are the easiest to answer.

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• REST to Objects in C#

  RESTful interfaces for web services are all the rage for many Web 2.0 sites.  If you want to consume these in a very simple fashion, LINQ to XML can do the job pretty easily in C#.  If you go searching for help on this, youll find a lot of incomplete solutions and fairly large toolkits and frameworks (guess how I know this) this quick article is meant to be a no fluff just stuff approach to making this work. POCO Objects Lets assume you have a Model that you want to suck data into from a RESTful web service.  Ideally this is a Plain Old CLR Object, meaning it isnt infected with any persistence or serialization goop.  It might look something like this: public class Entry { public int Id; public int UserId; public DateTime Date; public float Hours; public string Notes; public bool Billable;   public override string ToString() { return String.Format("[{0}] User: {1} Date: {2} Hours: {3} Notes: {4} Billable {5}", Id, UserId, Date, Hours, Notes, Billable); } } Not that this isnt a completely trivial object.  Lets look at the API for the service.  RESTful HTTP Service In this case, its TickSpots API, with the following sample output: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <entries type="array"> <entry> <id type="integer">24</id> <task_id type="integer">14</task_id> <user_id type="integer">3</user_id> <date type="date">2008-03-08</date> <hours type="float">1.00</hours> <notes>Had trouble with tribbles.</notes> <billable>true</billable> # Billable is an attribute inherited from the task <billed>true</billed> # Billed is an attribute to track whether the entry has been invoiced <created_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</created_at> <updated_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</updated_at> # The following attributes are derived and provided for informational purposes: <user_email>[email protected]</user_email> <task_name>Remove converter assembly</task_name> <sum_hours type="float">2.00</sum_hours> <budget type="float">10.00</budget> <project_name>Realign dilithium crystals</project_name> <client_name>Starfleet Command</client_name> </entry> </entries> Im assuming in this case that I dont necessarily care about all of the data fields the service is returning I just need some of them for my applications purposes.  Thus, you can see there are more elements in the <entry> XML than I have in my Entry class. Get The XML with C# The next step is to get the XML.  The following snippet does the heavy lifting once you pass it the appropriate URL: protected XElement GetResponse(string uri) { var request = WebRequest.Create(uri) as HttpWebRequest; request.UserAgent = ".NET Sample"; request.KeepAlive = false;   request.Timeout = 15 * 1000;   var response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;   if (request.HaveResponse == true && response != null) { var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()); return XElement.Parse(reader.ReadToEnd()); } throw new Exception("Error fetching data."); } This is adapted from the Yahoo Developer article on Web Service REST calls.  Once you have the XML, the last step is to get the data back as your POCO. Use LINQ-To-XML to Deserialize POCOs from XML This is done via the following code: public IEnumerable<Entry> List(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) { string additionalParameters = String.Format("start_date={0}&end_date={1}", startDate.ToShortDateString(), endDate.ToShortDateString()); string uri = BuildUrl("entries", additionalParameters);   XElement elements = GetResponse(uri);   var entries = from e in elements.Elements() where e.Name.LocalName == "entry" select new Entry { Id = int.Parse(e.Element("id").Value), UserId = int.Parse(e.Element("user_id").Value), Date = DateTime.Parse(e.Element("date").Value), Hours = float.Parse(e.Element("hours").Value), Notes = e.Element("notes").Value, Billable = bool.Parse(e.Element("billable").Value) }; return entries; }   For completeness, heres the BuildUrl method for my TickSpot API wrapper: // Change these to your settings protected const string projectDomain = "DOMAIN.tickspot.com"; private const string authParams = "[email protected]&password=MyTickSpotPassword";   protected string BuildUrl(string apiMethod, string additionalParams) { if (projectDomain.Contains("DOMAIN")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your domain in ProjectRepository.cs."); } if (authParams.Contains("MyTickSpotPassword")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your email and password in ProjectRepository.cs."); } return string.Format("https://{0}/api/{1}?{2}&{3}", projectDomain, apiMethod, authParams, additionalParams); } Thats it!  Now go forth and consume XML and map it to classes you actually want to work with.  Have fun! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

  - by ToStringTheory

  One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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• Consuming ASP.NET Web API services from PHP script

  - by DigiMortal

  I introduced ASP.NET Web API in some of my previous posts. Although Web API is easy to use in ASP.NET web applications you can use Web API also from other platforms. This post shows you how to consume ASP.NET Web API from PHP scripts. Here are my previous posts about Web API: How content negotiation works? ASP.NET Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats Query string based content formatting Although these posts cover content negotiation they give you some idea about how Web API works. Test application On Web API side I use the same sample application as in previous Web API posts – very primitive web application to manage contacts. Listing contacts On the other machine I will run the following PHP script that works against my Web API application: <?php   // request list of contacts from Web API $json = file_get_contents('http://vs2010dev:3613/api/contacts/'); // deserialize data from JSON $contacts = json_decode($json); ?> <html> <head>     <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> </head> <body>     <table>     <?php      foreach($contacts as $contact)     {         ?>         <tr>             <td valign="top">                 <?php echo $contact->FirstName ?>             </td>             <td valign="top">                 <?php echo $contact->LastName ?>             </td>             <td valign="middle">                 <form method="POST">                     <input type="hidden" name="id"                          value="<?php echo $contact-/>Id ?>" />                     <input type="submit" name="cmd"                          value="Delete"/>                 </form>             </td>         </tr>         <?php     }     ?>     </table> </body> </html> Notice how easy it is to handle JSON data in PHP! My PHP script produces the following output: Looks like data is here as it should be. Deleting contacts Now let’s write code to delete contacts. Add this block of code before any other code in PHP script. if(@$_POST['cmd'] == 'Delete') {     $errno = 0;     $errstr = '';     $id = @$_POST['id'];          $params = array('http' => array(               'method' => 'DELETE',               'content' => ""             ));     $url = 'http://vs2010dev:3613/api/contacts/'.$id;     $ctx = stream_context_create($params);     $fp = fopen($url, 'rb', false, $ctx);       if (!$fp) {         $res = false;       } else {         $res = stream_get_contents($fp);       }     fclose($fp);     header('Location: /json.php');     exit; } Again simple code. If we write also insert and update methods we may want to bundle those operations to single class. Conclusion ASP.NET Web API is not only ASP.NET fun. It is available also for all other platforms. In this posting we wrote simple PHP client that is able to communicate with our Web API application. We wrote only some simple code, nothing complex. Same way we can use also platforms like Java, PERL and Ruby.

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• OS8- AK8- The bad news...

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Ok I told you I would give you the bad news of AK8 to go along with all the cool new stuff, so here it is. It's not that bad, really, just things you need to be aware of. First, the 2013.1 code is being called OS8, AK8 and 2013.1 by different people. I mean different people INSIDE Oracle!! It was supposed to be easy, but it never is. So for the rest of this blog entry, I'm calling it AK8. AK8 is not compatible with the 7x10 series. Ever. The 7x10 series is not supported with AK8, and if you try to upgrade one, it will fail at the healthcheck. All 7x20 series, all of them regardless of age, are supported with AK8. Drive trays. Let's talk about drive trays and SAS cards. The older drive trays for the 7x20 series were called the "Riverwalk 2" or "DS2" trays. They were technically the "J4410" series JBODs that Sun used to sell a la carte before we stopped selling JBODs. Don't get me started on that, it still makes me mad. We used these for many years, and you can still buy them right now until December 15th, 2013, when they will no longer be sold. The DS2 tray only came as a 4u, 24 drive shelf. It held 3.5" drives, and you had a choice of 2TB, 3TB, 300GB or 600GB drives. The SAS HBA in the 7x20 series was called a "Thebe" card, with a part # of 7105394. The 7420, for example, came standard with two of these "Thebe" cards for connecting to the disk trays. Two Thebe cards could handle up to 12 trays, so one would add two more cards to go to 24 trays, or have up to six Thebe cards to handle 36 trays. This card was for external SAS only. It did not connect to the internal OS drives or the Readzillas, both of which used the internal SCSI controller of the server. These Riverwalk 2 trays ARE supported with AK8. You can upgrade your older 7420 or 7320, no problem, as-is. The much older Riverwalk 1 trays or J4400 trays are NOT supported by AK8. However, they were only used by the 7x10 series, and we already said that the 7x10 series was not supported. Here's where it gets tricky. Since last January, we have been selling the new style disk trays. We call them the "DE2-24P" and the "DE2-24C" trays. The "C" tray is for capacity drives, which are 3.5" 3TB or 4TB drives. The "P" trays are for performance drives, which are 2.5" 300GB and 900GB drives. These trays are NOT Riverwalk 2 trays, even though the "C" series may kind of look like it. Different manufacturer and different firmware. They are not new. Like I said, we've been selling them with the 7x20 series since last January. They are the only disk trays we will be selling going forward. Of course, AK8 supports them. So what's the problem? The problem is going to be for people who have to mix drive trays. Remember, your older 7x20 series has Thebe SAS2 HBAs. These have 2 SAS ports per card.  The new ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 systems, however, have the new "Thebe2" SAS2 HBAs. These Thebe2 cards have 4 ports per card. This is very cool, as we can now do more SAS channels with less cards. Instead of needing 4 SAS cards to grow to 24 trays like we did with the old Thebe cards, I can now do 24 trays with only 2 Thebe2 cards. This means more IO slots for fun things like Infiniband and 10G. So far, so good, right? These Thebe2 cards work with any disk tray. You can even mix older DS2 trays with the newer DE2 trays in the same system, as long as you have Thebe2 cards. Ah, there's your problem. You don't have Thebe2 cards in your old 7420, do you? Well, I told you the bad news wasn't that bad, right? We can take out your Thebe cards and replace them with Thebe2. You can then plug your older DS2 trays right back in, and also now get newer DE2 trays going forward. However, it's important that the trays are on different SAS channels. You can mix them in the same system, but not on the same channel. Ask your local SC if you need help with the new cable layout. By the way, the new ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 systems also include a new IO card called "Erie" cards. These are for INTERNAL SAS to the OS drives and the Readzillas. So those are now SAS2 instead of SATA like the older models. Yes, the Erie card uses an IO slot, but that's OK, because the Thebe2 cards allow us to use less SAS HBAs to grow the system, right? That's it. Not too much bad news and really not that bad. AK8 does not support the 7x10 series, and you may need new Thebe2 cards in your older systems if you want to add on newer DE2 trays. I think we can all agree that there are worse things out there. Like our Congress.   Next up.... More good news and cool AK8 tricks. Such as virtual NICS. 

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• How to begin? Windows 8 Development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I convinced you in my last post to do some Win8 development. You want a piece of that cake, or whatever your reasons may be. Good! Welcome to the club! Now let me ask you a question: what are you going to write? Ah. That’s the big one, isn’t it? What indeed? If you have been creating applications for computers before you’re in for quite a shock. The way people perceive apps on a tablet is quite different from what we know as applications. There’s a reason we call them apps instead of applications! Yes, technically they are applications but we don’t call them apps only because it sounds cool. The abbreviated form of the word applications itself is a pointer. Apps are small. Apps are focused. Apps are more lightweight. Apps do one thing but they do that one thing extremely good. In the ‘old’ days we wrote huge systems. We build ecosystems of services, screens, databases and more to create a system that provides value for the user. Think about it: what application do you use most at work? Can you in one sentence describe what it is, or what it does and yet still distinctively describe its purpose? I doubt you can. Let’s have a look at Outlouk. We all know it and we all love or hate it. But what is it? A mail program? No, there’s so much more there: calendar, contacts, RSS feeds and so on. Some call it a ‘collaboration’  application but that’s not really true as well. After all, why should a collaboration application give me my schedule for the day? I think the best way to describe Outlook is “client for Exchange”  although that isn’t accurate either. Anyway: Outlook is a great application but it’s not an ‘app’ and therefor not very suitable for WinRT. Ok. Disclaimer here: yes, you can write big applications for WinRT. Some will. But that’s not what 99.9% of the developers will do. So I am stating here that big applications are not meant for WinRT. If 0.01% of the developers think that this is nonsense then they are welcome to go ahead but for the majority here this is not what we’re talking about. So: Apps are small, lightweight and good at what they do but only at that. If you’re a Phone developer you already know that: Phone apps on any platform fit the description I have above. If you’ve ever worked in a large cooperation before you might have seen one of these before: the Mission Statement. It’s supposed to be a oneliner that sums up what the company is supposed to do. Funny enough: although this doesn’t work for large companies it does work for defining your app. A mission statement for an app describes what it does. If it doesn’t fit in the mission statement then your app is going to get to big and will fail. A statement like this should be in the following style “<your app name> is the best app to <describe single task>” Fill in the blanks, write it and go! Mmm.. not really. There are some things there we need to think about. But the statement is a very, very important one. If you cannot fit your app in that line you’re preparing to fail. Your app will become to big, its purpose will be unclear and it will be hard to use. People won’t download it and those who do will give it a bad rating therefor preventing that huge success you’ve been dreaming about. Stick to the statement! Ok, let’s give it a try: “PlanesAreCool” is the best app to do planespotting in the field. You might have seen these people along runways of airports: taking photographs of airplanes and noting down their numbers and arrival- and departure times. We are going to help them out with our great app! If you look at the statement, can you guess what it does? I bet you can. If you find out it isn’t clear enough of if it’s too broad, refine it. This is probably the most important step in the development of your app so give it enough time! So. We’ve got the statement. Print it out, stick it to the wall and look at it. What does it tell you? If you see this, what do you think the app does? Write that down. Sit down with some friends and talk about it. What do they expect from an app like this? Write that down as well. Brainstorm. Make a list of features. This is mine: Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. Now, I must make it clear that I am not a planespotter nor do I know what one does. So if the above list makes no sense, I apologize. There is a lesson: write apps for stuff you know about…. First of all, let’s look at our statement and then go through the list of features. Remove everything that has nothing to do with that statement! If you end up with an empty list, try again with both steps. Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. That's better. The things I removed could be pretty useful to a plane spotter and could be fun to write. But do they match the statement? I said that the app is for spotting in the field, so “look up airfields” doesn’t belong there: I know where I am so why look it up? And the same goes for inviting friends or looking up the weather conditions for tomorrow. I am at the airfield right now, looking through my binoculars at the planes. I know the weather now and I don’t care about tomorrow. If you feel the items you’ve crossed out are valuable, then why not write another app? One that says “SpotNoter” is the best app for preparing a day of spotting with my friends. That’s a different app! Remember: Win8 apps are small and very good at doing ONE thing, and one thing only! If you have made that list, it’s time to prepare the navigation of your app. The navigation is how users see your app and how they use it. We’ll do that next time!

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• VNIC - New feature of AK8 - Working with VNICs

  - by Steve Tunstall

  One of the important new features of the AK8 code is the ability to use multiple IP addresses on the same physical network port. This feature is called VNICs, or Virtual NICs. This allows us to no longer "burn" a whole port in a cluster when one cluster peer owns a network port. Traditionally, we have had to leave Net0 empty on controller 2, because it was used for managing controller 1. Vise-versa for Net1 on Controller 1. Then, if you have data going over 10GigE ports, you probably only had half of your ports running at any given time, and the partner 10GigE port on the other controller just sat there, doing nothing, unless the first controller went down. What a waste. Those days are over.  I want to thank and give a big shout-out to our good partner, OnX Enterprise Solutions, for allowing me to come into their lab and play around with their 7320 to do this demo. They let me make a big mess of their lab for the day as I played around with VNICs. If you're looking for a partner who knows Oracle well and can also piece together a solution from multiple vendors to get you what you need, OnX is a good choice. If you would like to talk to your local OnX rep, you can contact Scott Gill at [email protected] and he can point you in the right direction for your area.  Here we go: Here is what your Datalinks window looks like BEFORE you upgrade to AK8. Here's what the same screen looks like after you upgrade. See the new box? So here is my current network setup. I have my 4 physical interfaces setup each with an IP address. If I ping them, no problems.  So I can ping 180, 181, 251, and 252. However, if I try to ping 240, it does not work, as the 240 address is not being used by any of these interfaces, right?Let's change that. Here, I'm going to make a new Datalink by clicking the Datalink "Plus sign" button. I will check the VNIC box and tell it to use igb2, even though another interface is already using it. Now, I will create a new Interface, and choose "v_dl2" for it's datalink. My new network screen looks like this. A few things to take note of here. First, when I click the "igb2" device, it only highlights dl2 and int2. It does not highlight v_dl2 or v_int2.I think it should, but OK, it looks like VNICs don't highlight when you click the device. Second, note how the underscore character in v_dl2 and v_int2 do not seem to show on this screen. You can see it plainly if you go in and edit them, but from here it looks like a space instead of an underscore. Just a cosmetic bug, but something to be aware of. Now, if I click the VNIC datalink "v_dl2", on the other hand, it DOES highlight the device it belongs to, as it should. Seen here: Note that it did not, however, highlight int2 with it, even though int2 is connected to igb2. That's because we clicked v_dl2, which int2 has nothing to do with. So I'm OK with that. So let's try pinging 240 now. Of course, it works great.  So I now make another VNIC, and call it v_dl3 using igb3, and v_int3 with an address of 241. I then setup three shares, using ports 251, 240, and 241.Remember that IP 251 and 240 both are using the same physical port of igb2, and IP 241 is using port igb3. Next, I copy a folder full of stuff over to all three shares at the same time. I have analytics going so I can see the traffic. My top chart is showing the logical interfaces, and the bottom chart is showing the physical ports.Sure enough, look at the igb2 and vnic1 interfaces. They equal the traffic going over the igb2 physical port on the second chart. VNIC2, on the other hand, gets igb3 all to itself. This would work the same way with 10Gig or Infiniband ports. You can now have multiple IP addresses and even completely different subnets sharing the same physical ports. You may need to make route table entries for that. This allows us to use all of the ports you paid for with no more waste.  Very, very cool.  One small "bug" I found when doing this. It's really not a bug, it was designed to do this when VNICs were not around. But now that we have NVIC capability, they should probably change this. I've alerted the engineering team about this and they're looking into it, so perhaps it will be fixed in a later code. Here it is. Remember when we made the new VNIC datalink, I specifically said to click on the "Plus Sign" button to create it? I don't always do that. I really like to use the drag-and-drop method to create my datalinks in the network screen.HOWEVER, if you were to do that for building a VNIC, it will mess you up a little. Watch this. Here, I'm dragging igb3 over to make a new datalink. igb3 is already being used by dl3, but I'm going to make this a VNIC, so who cares, right? Well, the ZFSSA does not KNOW you are going to make it a VNIC, now does it? So... it works as designed and REMOVES the igb3 device from the current dl3 datalink in the background. See how it's now missing? At the same time, the dl3 datalink choice is missing from my list of possible VNICs for me to choose from!!!! Hey!!! I wanted to pick dl3. Why isn't it on the list??? Well, it can't be on this list because dl3 no longer has a device associated with it. Bummer for you. When you click cancel, the device is still missing from dl3. The fix is easy. Just edit dl3 by clicking the pencil button, do absolutely nothing, and click "Apply". The device will magically come back. Now, make the VNIC datalink by clicking the "Plus Sign" button. Sure enough, once you check the VNIC box, dl3 is a valid choice. No problem.  That's it for now. Have fun with VNICs.

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• SSH service will not start on fresh Cygwin 1.7.15 install

  - by Coder6841

  OS: Windows 7 x64 Cygwin: 1.7.15-1 OpenSSH: 6.0p1-1 I'm attempting to install an SSH server on Windows 7. The tutorial that I'm following to do this is here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/41560/how-to-get-ssh-command-line-access-to-windows-7-using-cygwin/ The issue is that upon executing the net start sshd command I get the following output:The CYGWIN sshd service is starting. The CYGWIN sshd service could not be started. The service did not report an error. More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3534. Here is the full output of the setup: AdminUser@ThisComputer ~ $ ssh-host-config *** Info: Generating /etc/ssh_host_key *** Info: Generating /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key *** Info: Generating /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key *** Info: Generating /etc/ssh_host_ecdsa_key *** Info: Creating default /etc/ssh_config file *** Info: Creating default /etc/sshd_config file *** Info: Privilege separation is set to yes by default since OpenSSH 3.3. *** Info: However, this requires a non-privileged account called 'sshd'. *** Info: For more info on privilege separation read /usr/share/doc/openssh/README.privsep. *** Query: Should privilege separation be used? (yes/no) yes *** Info: Note that creating a new user requires that the current account have *** Info: Administrator privileges. Should this script attempt to create a *** Query: new local account 'sshd'? (yes/no) yes *** Info: Updating /etc/sshd_config file *** Query: Do you want to install sshd as a service? *** Query: (Say "no" if it is already installed as a service) (yes/no) yes *** Query: Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [] *** Info: On Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and above, the *** Info: SYSTEM account cannot setuid to other users -- a capability *** Info: sshd requires. You need to have or to create a privileged *** Info: account. This script will help you do so. *** Info: You appear to be running Windows XP 64bit, Windows 2003 Server, *** Info: or later. On these systems, it's not possible to use the LocalSystem *** Info: account for services that can change the user id without an *** Info: explicit password (such as passwordless logins [e.g. public key *** Info: authentication] via sshd). *** Info: If you want to enable that functionality, it's required to create *** Info: a new account with special privileges (unless a similar account *** Info: already exists). This account is then used to run these special *** Info: servers. *** Info: Note that creating a new user requires that the current account *** Info: have Administrator privileges itself. *** Info: No privileged account could be found. *** Info: This script plans to use 'cyg_server'. *** Info: 'cyg_server' will only be used by registered services. *** Query: Do you want to use a different name? (yes/no) no *** Query: Create new privileged user account 'cyg_server'? (yes/no) yes *** Info: Please enter a password for new user cyg_server. Please be sure *** Info: that this password matches the password rules given on your system. *** Info: Entering no password will exit the configuration. *** Query: Please enter the password: *** Query: Reenter: *** Info: User 'cyg_server' has been created with password '[CENSORED]'. *** Info: If you change the password, please remember also to change the *** Info: password for the installed services which use (or will soon use) *** Info: the 'cyg_server' account. *** Info: Also keep in mind that the user 'cyg_server' needs read permissions *** Info: on all users' relevant files for the services running as 'cyg_server'. *** Info: In particular, for the sshd server all users' .ssh/authorized_keys *** Info: files must have appropriate permissions to allow public key *** Info: authentication. (Re-)running ssh-user-config for each user will set *** Info: these permissions correctly. [Similar restrictions apply, for *** Info: instance, for .rhosts files if the rshd server is running, etc]. *** Info: The sshd service has been installed under the 'cyg_server' *** Info: account. To start the service now, call `net start sshd' or *** Info: `cygrunsrv -S sshd'. Otherwise, it will start automatically *** Info: after the next reboot. *** Info: Host configuration finished. Have fun! AdminUser@ThisComputer ~ $ net start sshd The CYGWIN sshd service is starting. The CYGWIN sshd service could not be started. The service did not report an error. More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3534. Note that on the line *** Query: Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [] I haven't entered anything. Tutorials often say to use ntsec or ntsec tty here but those options are removed from the latest version of OpenSSH. I've tried using them anyway and the result is the same. The file /var/log/sshd.log is empty. If I try just running the command /usr/sbin/sshd I get the output /var/empty must be owned by root and not group or world-writable.. The /var/empty directory has the following permissions: drwxr-xr-x+ 1 cyg_server root 0 May 29 15:28 empty. Google searches on this error did not turn up any working fixes. One person seems to have solved it by using the command chown SYSTEM /var/empty but that did not fix it in my case.

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• Mercurial hg clone on Windows via ssh with copSSH issue

  - by Kyle Tolle

  I have a Windows Server 2008 machine (iis7) that has CopSSH set up on it. To connect to it, I have a Windows 7 machine with Mercurial 1.5.1 (and TortoiseHg) installed. I can connect to the server using PuTTY with a non-standard ssh port and a .ppk file just fine. So I know the server can be SSH'd into. Next, I wanted to use the CLI to connect via hg clone to get a private repo. I've seen elsewhere that you need to have ssh configured in your mercurial.ini file, so my mercurial.ini has a line: ssh = plink.exe -ssh -C -l username -P #### -i "C:/Program Files/PuTTY/Key Files/KyleKey.ppk" Note: username is filled in with the username I set up via copSSH. #### is filled in with the non-standard ssh port I've defined for copSSH. I try to do the command hg clone ssh://inthom.com but I get this error: remote: bash: inthom.com: command not found abort: no suitable response from remote hg! It looks like hg or plink parses the hostname such that it thinks that inthom.com is a command instead of the server to ssh to. That's really odd. Next, I tried to just use plink to connect by plink -P #### ssh://inthom.com, and I am then prompted for my username, and next password. I enter them both and then I get this error: bash: ssh://inthom.com: No such file or directory So now it looks like plink doesn't parse the hostname correctly. I fiddled around for a while trying to figure out how to do call hg clone with an empty ssh:// field and eventually figured out that this command allows me to reach the server and clone a test repo on the inthom.com server: hg clone ssh://!/Repos/test ! is the character I've found that let's me leave the hostname blank, but specify the repo folder to clone. What I really don't understand is how plink knows what server to ssh to at all. neither my mercurial.ini nor the command specify a server. None of the hg clone examples I've seen have a ! character. They all use an address, which makes sense, so you can connect to any repo via ssh that you want to clone. My only guess is that it somehow defaults to the last server I used PuTTY to SSH to, but I SSH'd into another server, and then tried to use plink to get to it, but plink still defaults to inthom.com (verified with the -v arg to plink). So I am at a loss as to how plink gets this server value at all. For "fun", I tried using TortoiseHg and can only clone a repo when I use ssh://!/Repos/test as the Source. Now, you can see that, since plink doesn't parse the hostname correctly, I had to specify the port number and username in the mercurial.ini file, instead of in the hostname like [email protected]:#### like you'd expect to. Trying to figure this out at first drove me insane, because I would get errors that the host couldn't be reached, which I knew shouldn't be the case. My question is how can I configure my setup so that ssh://[email protected]:####/Repos/test is parsed correctly as the username, hostname, port number, and repo to copy? Is it something wrong with the version of plink that I'm using, or is there some setting I may have messed up? If it is plink's fault, is there an alternative tool I can use? I'm going to try to get my friend set up to connect to this same repo, so I'd like to have a clean solution instead of this ! business. Especially when I have no idea how plink gets this default server, so I'm not sure if he'd even be able to get to inthom.com correctly. PS. I've had to use a ton of different tutorials to even get to this stage. Therefore, I haven't tried pushing any changes to the server yet. Hopefully I'll get this figured out and then I can try pushing changes to the repo.

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• Streaming a webcam from Silverlight 4 (Beta)

  - by Ken Smith

  The new webcam stuff in Silverlight 4 is darned cool. By exposing it as a brush, it allows scenarios that are way beyond anything that Flash has. At the same time, accessing the webcam locally seems like it's only half the story. Nobody buys a webcam so they can take pictures of themselves and make funny faces out of them. They buy a webcam because they want other people to see the resulting video stream, i.e., they want to stream that video out to the Internet, a lay Skype or any of the dozens of other video chat sites/applications. And so far, I haven't figured out how to do that with It turns out that it's pretty simple to get a hold of the raw (Format32bppArgb formatted) bytestream, as demonstrated here. But unless we want to transmit that raw bytestream to a server (which would chew up way too much bandwidth), we need to encode that in some fashion. And that's more complicated. MS has implemented several codecs in Silverlight, but so far as I can tell, they're all focused on decoding a video stream, not encoding it in the first place. And that's apart from the fact that I can't figure out how to get direct access to, say, the H.264 codec in the first place. There are a ton of open-source codecs (for instance, in the ffmpeg project here), but they're all written in C, and they don't look easy to port to C#. Unless translating 10000+ lines of code that look like this is your idea of fun :-) const int b_xy= h->mb2b_xy[left_xy[i]] + 3; const int b8_xy= h->mb2b8_xy[left_xy[i]] + 1; *(uint32_t*)h->mv_cache[list][cache_idx ]= *(uint32_t*)s->current_picture.motion_val[list][b_xy + h->b_stride*left_block[0+i*2]]; *(uint32_t*)h->mv_cache[list][cache_idx+8]= *(uint32_t*)s->current_picture.motion_val[list][b_xy + h->b_stride*left_block[1+i*2]]; h->ref_cache[list][cache_idx ]= s->current_picture.ref_index[list][b8_xy + h->b8_stride*(left_block[0+i*2]>>1)]; h->ref_cache[list][cache_idx+8]= s->current_picture.ref_index[list][b8_xy + h->b8_stride*(left_block[1+i*2]>>1)]; The mooncodecs folder within the Mono project (here) has several audio codecs in C# (ADPCM and Ogg Vorbis), and one video codec (Dirac), but they all seem to implement just the decode portion of their respective formats, as do the java implementations from which they were ported. I found a C# codec for Ogg Theora (csTheora, http://www.wreckedgames.com/forum/index.php?topic=1053.0), but again, it's decode only, as is the jheora codec on which it's based. Of course, it would presumably be easier to port a codec from Java than from C or C++, but the only java video codecs that I found were decode-only (such as jheora, or jirac). So I'm kinda back at square one. It looks like our options for hooking up a webcam (or microphone) through Silverlight to the Internet are: (1) Wait for Microsoft to provide some guidance on this; (2) Spend the brain cycles porting one of the C or C++ codecs over to Silverlight-compatible C#; (3) Send the raw, uncompressed bytestream up to a server (or perhaps compressed slightly with something like zlib), and then encode it server-side; or (4) Wait for someone smarter than me to figure this out and provide a solution. Does anybody else have any better guidance? Have I missed something that's just blindingly obvious to everyone else? (For instance, does Silverlight 4 somewhere have some classes I've missed that take care of this?)

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• overriding ctype<wchar_t>

  - by Potatoswatter

  I'm writing a lambda calculus interpreter for fun and practice. I got iostreams to properly tokenize identifiers by adding a ctype facet which defines punctuation as whitespace: struct token_ctype : ctype<char> { mask t[ table_size ]; token_ctype() : ctype<char>( t ) { for ( size_t tx = 0; tx < table_size; ++ tx ) { t[tx] = isalnum( tx )? alnum : space; } } }; (classic_table() would probably be cleaner but that doesn't work on OS X!) And then swap the facet in when I hit an identifier: locale token_loc( in.getloc(), new token_ctype ); … locale const &oldloc = in.imbue( token_loc ); in.unget() >> token; in.imbue( oldloc ); There seems to be surprisingly little lambda calculus code on the Web. Most of what I've found so far is full of unicode ? characters. So I thought to try adding Unicode support. But ctype<wchar_t> works completely differently from ctype<char>. There is no master table; there are four methods do_is x2, do_scan_is, and do_scan_not. So I did this: struct token_ctype : ctype< wchar_t > { typedef ctype<wchar_t> base; bool do_is( mask m, char_type c ) const { return base::do_is(m,c) || (m&space) && ( base::do_is(punct,c) || c == L'?' ); } const char_type* do_is (const char_type* lo, const char_type* hi, mask* vec) const { base::do_is(lo,hi,vec); for ( mask *vp = vec; lo != hi; ++ vp, ++ lo ) { if ( *vp & punct || *lo == L'?' ) *vp |= space; } return hi; } const char_type *do_scan_is (mask m, const char_type* lo, const char_type* hi) const { if ( m & space ) m |= punct; hi = do_scan_is(m,lo,hi); if ( m & space ) hi = find( lo, hi, L'?' ); return hi; } const char_type *do_scan_not (mask m, const char_type* lo, const char_type* hi) const { if ( m & space ) { m |= punct; while ( * ( lo = base::do_scan_not(m,lo,hi) ) == L'?' && lo != hi ) ++ lo; return lo; } return base::do_scan_not(m,lo,hi); } }; (Apologies for the flat formatting; the preview converted the tabs differently.) The code is WAY less elegant. I does better express the notion that only punctuation is additional whitespace, but that would've been fine in the original had I had classic_table. Is there a simpler way to do this? Do I really need all those overloads? (Testing showed do_scan_not is extraneous here, but I'm thinking more broadly.) Am I abusing facets in the first place? Is the above even correct? Would it be better style to implement less logic?

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• Getting values from Dynamic elements.

  - by nCdy

  I'm adding some dynamic elements to my WebApp this way : (Language used is Nemerele (It has a simple C#-like syntax)) unless (GridView1.Rows.Count==0) { foreach(index with row = GridView1.Rows[index] in [0..GridView1.Rows.Count-1]) { row.Cells[0].Controls.Add ({ def TB = TextBox(); TB.EnableViewState = false; unless(row.Cells[0].Text == "&nbsp;") { TB.Text = row.Cells[0].Text; row.Cells[0].Text = ""; } TB.ID=TB.ClientID; TB.Width = 60; TB }); row.Cells[0].Controls.Add ({ def B = Button(); B.EnableViewState = false; B.Width = 80; B.Text = "?????????"; B.UseSubmitBehavior=false; // Makes no sense //B.OnClientClick="select(5);"; // HERE I CAN KNOW ABOUT TB.ID //B.Click+=EventHandler(fun(_,_) : void { }); // POST BACK KILL THAT ALL B }); } } This textboxes must make first field of GridView editable so ... but now I need to save a values. I can't do it on server side because any postback will Destroy all dynamic elements so I must do it without Post Back. So I try ... <script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> function CallPageMethod(methodName, onSuccess, onFail) { var args = ''; var l = arguments.length; if (l > 3) { for (var i = 3; i < l - 1; i += 2) { if (args.length != 0) args += ','; args += '"' + arguments[i] + '":"' + arguments[i + 1] + '"'; } } var loc = window.location.href; loc = (loc.substr(loc.length - 1, 1) == "/") ? loc + "Report.aspx" : loc; $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: loc + "/" + methodName, data: "{" + args + "}", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", dataType: "json", success: onSuccess, fail: onFail }); } function select(index) { var id = $("#id" + index).html(); CallPageMethod("SelectBook", success, fail, "id",id); } function success(response) { alert(response.d); } function fail(response) { alert("&#1054;&#1096;&#1080;&#1073;&#1082;&#1072;."); } </script> So... here is a trouble string : var id = $("#id" + index).html(); I know what is ID here : TB.ID=TB.ClientID; (when I add it) but I have no idea how to send it on Web Form. If I can add something like this div : <div id="Result" onclick="select(<%= " TB.ID " %>);"> Click here. </div> from the code it will be really goal, but I can't add this element as from CodeBehind as a dynamic element. So how can I transfer TB.ID or TB.ClientID to some static div Or how can I add some clickable dynamic element without PostBack to not destroy all my dynamic elements. Thank you.

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• What would cause ANY .NET application to crash immediately... except a project I create and Debug in

  - by blak3r

  My software recently got deployed to a customer who said that the application was crashing immediately after it started. After some initial debugging, the customer provided me remote access to one of the computers which was unable to run the application. I found that the crash wasn't specific to my application. Any application which depended on the .NET framework crashed immediately. Conveniently, Visual Studio 2008 was installed so I created a quick hello world application on it and clicked Debug. The application worked fine. But, then when I tried to execute the generated binaries in the /bin/Debug/HelloWorld.exe directory outside of visual studio it crashed. List of things i've tried (UPDATED): I checked that "Everyone" has Read&Execute permissions for c:\Windows. To test that the problem was with the .NET Framework (and not my application), I attempted to download Paint .NET on to the computers. The setup frontend crashed in the same manner. Performed a repair of the .NET framework as outlined in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908077 (Boy was this fun and time consuming). No luck. Installed .NET 3.5 SP1 (before it just had .NET 3.5) Note: my application targets 2.0 so I did this more as a long shot... but i learned in the process that .NET 3.5 SP1 also updates the underlying frameworks. Ran Aaron Stebner's .NET Setup Verification Tool. This tool indicated that .NET was successfully installed. (I forget if i checked all the versions but at least 2.0 worked). Tested some mini hello world applications which were targeted for .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 and both crashed in the same way. Tried launching .NET apps via windbg cmd line. Doing this did allow me invoke my simple hello world applications. So, simple .NET hello world works when invoked by windbg or by launching via debug in visual studio... but doesn't if i try to execute it standalone. I created a dump file using WinDbg. It wasn't all that revealing to me. FAULTING_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h EXCEPTION_RECORD: 0012f710 -- (.exr 0x12f710) ExceptionAddress: 79f4ff9d (mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x00000021) ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) ExceptionFlags: 00000000 NumberParameters: 2 Parameter[0]: 00000000 Parameter[1]: 00000010 Attempt to read from address 00000010 FAULTING_THREAD: 00000b44 PROCESS_NAME: MyProcess.exe ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0x80000003 - {EXCEPTION} Breakpoint A breakpoint has been reached. EXCEPTION_CODE: (HRESULT) 0x80000003 (2147483651) - One or more arguments are invalid DETOURED_IMAGE: 1 NTGLOBALFLAG: 0 APPLICATION_VERIFIER_FLAGS: 0 MANAGED_STACK: !dumpstack -EE OS Thread Id: 0xb44 (0) Current frame: ChildEBP RetAddr Caller,Callee EXCEPTION_OBJECT: !pe cb10b4 Exception object: 00cb10b4 Exception type: System.ExecutionEngineException Message: <none> InnerException: <none> StackTrace (generated): <none> StackTraceString: <none> HResult: 80131506 MANAGED_OBJECT_NAME: System.ExecutionEngineException CONTEXT: 0012f72c -- (.cxr 0x12f72c) eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecx=00000000 edx=0000000e esi=001a1490 edi=00000001 eip=79f4ff9d esp=0012f9f8 ebp=0012fa1c iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na pe nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010246 mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21: 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h ds:0023:00000010=?? Resetting default scope READ_ADDRESS: 00000010 FOLLOWUP_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h BUGCHECK_STR: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN PRIMARY_PROBLEM_CLASS: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 79ef02b5 to 79f4ff9d STACK_TEXT: 79f4ff9d mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21 79ef02b5 mscorwks!PEFile::GetEntryPointToken+0xa0 79eefeaf mscorwks!SystemDomain::ExecuteMainMethod+0xd4 79fb9793 mscorwks!ExecuteEXE+0x59 79fb96df mscorwks!_CorExeMain+0x15c 7900b1b3 mscoree!_CorExeMain+0x2c 7c817077 kernel32!BaseProcessStart+0x23 SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0 SYMBOL_NAME: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner MODULE_NAME: mscorwks IMAGE_NAME: mscorwks.dll DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 471ef729 STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0012F72C ; kb ; dds 12f9f8 ; kb FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_80000003_mscorwks.dll!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken BUCKET_ID: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_DETOURED_mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 WATSON_STAGEONE_URL: http://watson.microsoft.com/StageOne/MyProcess_exe/2_4_4_39/4a8a192c/unknown/0_0_0_0/bbbbbbb4/80000003/00000000.htm?Retriage=1 Followup: MachineOwner Edit 1:The event log details for this error say it's a .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A097706)(80131506). Edit 2 (10-7-09): This issue is still active. Edit 3 (3-29-10): This update is to let everyone know that I never did successfully solve the problem. The customer who's machine this was on lost interest in solving it and just reimaged the machine :(. Thanks for all the contributions though.

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• Parallax backgrounds in OpenGL ES on the iPhone

  - by Scott

  I've got basically a 2d game on the iPhone and I'm trying to set up multiple backgrounds that scroll at different speeds (known as parallax backgrounds). So my thought was to just stick the backgrounds BEHIND the foreground using different z-coordinate planes, and just make them bigger than the foreground (in size) to accommodate, so that the whole thing can be scrolled (just at a different speed). And (as far as I know) I basically implemented that. The only problem is that it seems to entirely ignore whatever z-value I give it, or rather it just zeroes all of them. I see the background (I've only tested ONE background so far, to keep it simple...so for now I just have a foreground and I want one background scrolling at a different speed), but it scrolls 1:1 with my foreground, so it obviously doesn't look right, and most of it is cut off (cause it's bigger). And I've tried various z-values for the background and various near/far clipping planes...it's always the same. I'm probably just doing one simple thing wrong, but I can't figure it out. I'm wondering if it has to do with me using only 2 coordinates in glVertexPointer for the foreground? (Of course for the background I AM passing in 3) I'll post some code: This is some initial setup: glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glOrthof(-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.5f, 1.5f, -10.0f, 10.0f); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); //glEnableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); //transparency glEnable (GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc (GL_ONE, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); A little bit about my foreground's float array....it's interleaved. For my foreground it goes vertex x, vertex y, texture x, texture y, repeat. This all works just fine. This is my FOREGROUND rendering: glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 4*sizeof(GLfloat), texes); <br> glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 4*sizeof(GLfloat), (GLvoid*)texes + 2*sizeof(GLfloat)); <br> glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, indexCount / 4); BACKGROUND rendering: Same drill here except this time it goes vertex x, vertex y, vertex z, texture x, texture y, repeat. Note the z value this time. I did make sure the data in this array was correct while debugging (getting the right z values). And again, it shows up...it's just not going far back in the distance like it should. glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 5*sizeof(GLfloat), b1Texes); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 5*sizeof(GLfloat), (GLvoid*)b1Texes + 3*sizeof(GLfloat)); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, b1IndexCount / 5); And to move my camera, I just do a simple glTranslatef(x, y, 0.0f); I'm not understanding what I'm doing wrong cause this seems like the most basic 3D function imaginable...things further away are smaller and don't move as fast when the camera moves. Not the case for me. Seems like it should be pretty basic and not even really be affected by my projection and all that (though I've even tried doing glFrustum just for fun, no success). Please help, I feel like it's just one dumb thing. I will post more code if necessary.

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• Get Asynchronous HttpResponse through Silverlight (F#)

  - by jack2010

  I am a newbie with F# and SL and playing with getting asynchronous HttpResponse through Silverlight. The following is the F# code pieces, which is tested on VS2010 and Window7 and works well, but the improvement is necessary. Any advices and discussion, especially the callback part, are welcome and great thanks. module JSONExample open System open System.IO open System.Net open System.Text open System.Web open System.Security.Authentication open System.Runtime.Serialization [<DataContract>] type Result<'TResult> = { [<field: DataMember(Name="code") >] Code:string [<field: DataMember(Name="result") >] Result:'TResult array [<field: DataMember(Name="message") >] Message:string } // The elements in the list [<DataContract>] type ChemicalElement = { [<field: DataMember(Name="name") >] Name:string [<field: DataMember(Name="boiling_point") >] BoilingPoint:string [<field: DataMember(Name="atomic_mass") >] AtomicMass:string } //http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2007/10/11/introducing-f-asynchronous-workflows.aspx //http://lorgonblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!701679AD17B6D310!194.entry type System.Net.HttpWebRequest with member x.GetResponseAsync() = Async.FromBeginEnd(x.BeginGetResponse, x.EndGetResponse) type RequestState () = let mutable request : WebRequest = null let mutable response : WebResponse = null let mutable responseStream : Stream = null member this.Request with get() = request and set v = request <- v member this.Response with get() = response and set v = response <- v member this.ResponseStream with get() = responseStream and set v = responseStream <- v let allDone = new System.Threading.ManualResetEvent(false) let getHttpWebRequest (query:string) = let query = query.Replace("'","\"") let queryUrl = sprintf "http://api.freebase.com/api/service/mqlread?query=%s" "{\"query\":"+query+"}" let request : HttpWebRequest = downcast WebRequest.Create(queryUrl) request.Method <- "GET" request.ContentType <- "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" request let GetAsynResp (request : HttpWebRequest) (callback: AsyncCallback) = let myRequestState = new RequestState() myRequestState.Request <- request let asyncResult = request.BeginGetResponse(callback, myRequestState) () // easy way to get it to run syncrnously w/ the asynch methods let GetSynResp (request : HttpWebRequest) : HttpWebResponse = let response = request.GetResponseAsync() |> Async.RunSynchronously downcast response let RespCallback (finish: Stream -> _) (asynchronousResult : IAsyncResult) = try let myRequestState : RequestState = downcast asynchronousResult.AsyncState let myWebRequest1 : WebRequest = myRequestState.Request myRequestState.Response <- myWebRequest1.EndGetResponse(asynchronousResult) let responseStream = myRequestState.Response.GetResponseStream() myRequestState.ResponseStream <- responseStream finish responseStream myRequestState.Response.Close() () with | :? WebException as e -> printfn "WebException raised!" printfn "\n%s" e.Message printfn "\n%s" (e.Status.ToString()) () | _ as e -> printfn "Exception raised!" printfn "Source : %s" e.Source printfn "Message : %s" e.Message () let printResults (stream: Stream)= let result = try use reader = new StreamReader(stream) reader.ReadToEnd(); finally () let data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(result); let stream = new MemoryStream() stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length); stream.Position <- 0L let JsonSerializer = Json.DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof<Result<ChemicalElement>>) let result = JsonSerializer.ReadObject(stream) :?> Result<ChemicalElement> if result.Code<>"/api/status/ok" then raise (InvalidOperationException(result.Message)) else result.Result |> Array.iter(fun element->printfn "%A" element) let test = // Call Query (w/ generics telling it you wand an array of ChemicalElement back, the query string is wackyJSON too –I didn’t build it don’t ask me! let request = getHttpWebRequest "[{'type':'/chemistry/chemical_element','name':null,'boiling_point':null,'atomic_mass':null}]" //let response = GetSynResp request let response = GetAsynResp request (AsyncCallback (RespCallback printResults)) () ignore(test) System.Console.ReadLine() |> ignore

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• How to Access a descendant object's internal method in C#

  - by Giovanni Galbo

  I'm trying to access a method that is marked as internal in the parent class (in its own assembly) in an object that inherits from the same parent. Let me explain what I'm trying to do... I want to create Service classes that return IEnumberable with an underlying List to non-Service classes (e.g. the UI) and optionally return an IEnumerable with an underlying IQueryable to other services. I wrote some sample code to demonstrate what I'm trying to accomplish, shown below. The example is not real life, so please remember that when commenting. All services would inherit from something like this (only relevant code shown): public class ServiceBase<T> { protected readonly ObjectContext _context; protected string _setName = String.Empty; public ServiceBase(ObjectContext context) { _context = context; } public IEnumerable<T> GetAll() { return GetAll(false); } //These are not the correct access modifiers.. I want something //that is accessible to children classes AND between descendant classes internal protected IEnumerable<T> GetAll(bool returnQueryable) { var query = _context.CreateQuery<T>(GetSetName()); if(returnQueryable) { return query; } else { return query.ToList(); } } private string GetSetName() { //Some code... return _setName; } } Inherited services would look like this: public class EmployeeService : ServiceBase<Employees> { public EmployeeService(ObjectContext context) : base(context) { } } public class DepartmentService : ServiceBase<Departments> { private readonly EmployeeService _employeeService; public DepartmentService(ObjectContext context, EmployeeService employeeService) : base(context) { _employeeService = employeeService; } public IList<Departments> DoSomethingWithEmployees(string lastName) { //won't work because method with this signature is not visible to this class var emps = _employeeService.GetAll(true); //more code... } } Because the parent class lives is reusable, it would live in a different assembly than the child services. With GetAll(bool returnQueryable) being marked internal, the children would not be able to see each other's GetAll(bool) method, just the public GetAll() method. I know that I can add a new internal GetAll method to each service (or perhaps an intermediary parent class within the same assembly) so that each child service within the assembly can see each other's method; but it seems unnecessary since the functionality is already available in the parent class. For example: internal IEnumerable<Employees> GetAll(bool returnIQueryable) { return base.GetAll(returnIQueryable); } Essentially what I want is for services to be able to access other service methods as IQueryable so that they can further refine the uncommitted results, while everyone else gets plain old lists. Any ideas? EDIT You know what, I had some fun playing a little code golf with this... but ultimately I wouldn't be able to use this scheme anyway because I pass interfaces around, not classes. So in my example GetAll(bool returnIQueryable) would not be in the interface, meaning I'd have to do casting, which goes against what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm not sure if I had a brain fart or if I was just too excited trying to get something that I thought was neat to work. Either way, thanks for the responses.

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• Need help with BOOST_FOREACH/compiler bug

  - by Jacek Lawrynowicz

  I know that boost or compiler should be last to blame, but I can't see another explanation here. I'm using msvc 2008 SP1 and boost 1.43. In the following code snippet execution never leaves third BOOST_FOREACH loop typedef Graph<unsigned, unsigned>::VertexIterator Iter; Graph<unsigned, unsigned> g; g.createVertex(0x66); // works fine Iter it = g.getVertices().first, end = g.getVertices().second; for(; it != end; ++it) ; // fine std::pair<Iter, Iter> p = g.getVertices(); BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, p) ; // fine unsigned vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) vertex_count++; // oops, infinite loop vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) vertex_count++; vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) vertex_count++; // ... last block repeated 7 times Iterator code: class Iterator : public boost::iterator_facade<Iterator, unsigned const, boost::bidirectional_traversal_tag> { public: Iterator() : list(NULL), handle(INVALID_ELEMENT_HANDLE) {} explicit Iterator(const VectorElementsList &list, unsigned handle = INVALID_ELEMENT_HANDLE) : list(&list), handle(handle) {} friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream &s, const Iterator &it) { s << "[list: " << it.list <<", handle: " << it.handle << "]"; return s; } private: friend class boost::iterator_core_access; void increment() { handle = list->getNext(handle); } void decrement() { handle = list->getPrev(handle); } unsigned const& dereference() const { return handle; } bool equal(Iterator const& other) const { return handle == other.handle && list == other.list; } const VectorElementsList<T> *list; unsigned handle; }; Some ASM fun: vertex_count = 0; BOOST_FOREACH(unsigned handle, g.getVertices()) // initialization 013E1369 mov edi,dword ptr [___defaultmatherr+8 (13E5034h)] // end iterator handle: 0xFFFFFFFF 013E136F mov ebp,dword ptr [esp+0ACh] // begin iterator handle: 0x0 013E1376 lea esi,[esp+0A8h] // begin iterator list pointer 013E137D mov ebx,esi 013E137F nop // forever loop begin 013E1380 cmp ebp,edi 013E1382 jne main+238h (13E1388h) 013E1384 cmp ebx,esi 013E1386 je main+244h (13E1394h) 013E1388 lea eax,[esp+18h] 013E138C push eax // here iterator is incremented in ram 013E138D call boost::iterator_facade<detail::VectorElementsList<Graph<unsigned int,unsigned int>::VertexWrapper>::Iterator,unsigned int const ,boost::bidirectional_traversal_tag,unsigned int const &,int>::operator++ (13E18E0h) 013E1392 jmp main+230h (13E1380h) vertex_count++; // forever loop end It's easy to see that iterator handle is cached in EBP and it never gets incremented despite of a call to iterator operator++() function. I've replaced Itarator implmentation with one deriving from std::iterator and the issue persisted, so this is not iterator_facade fault. This problem exists only on msvc 2008 SP1 x86 and amd64 release builds. Debug builds on msvc 2008 and debug/release builds on msvc 2010 and gcc 4.4 (linux) works fine. Furthermore the BOOST_FOREACH block must be repeaded exacly 10 times. If it's repeaded 9 times, it's all OK. I guess that due to BOOST_FOREACH use of template trickery (const auto_any), compiler assumes that iterator handle is constant and never reads its real value again. I would be very happy to hear that my code is wrong, correct it and move on with BOOST_FOREACH, which I'm very found of (as opposed to BOOST_FOREVER :). May be related to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1275852/why-does-boost-foreach-not-work-sometimes-with-c-strings

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• What is the coolest thing you can do in <10 lines of simple code? Help me inspire beginners!

  - by Tom Ritter

  I'm looking for the coolest thing you can do in a few lines of simple code. I'm sure you can write a Mandelbrot set in Haskell in 15 lines but it's difficult to follow. My goal is to inspire students that programming is cool. We know that programming is cool because you can create anything you imagine - it's the ultimate creative outlet. I want to inspire these beginners and get them over as many early-learning humps as I can. Now, my reasons are selfish. I'm teaching an Intro to Computing course to a group of 60 half-engineering, half business majors; all freshmen. They are the students who came from underprivileged High schools. From my past experience, the group is generally split as follows: a few rock-stars, some who try very hard and kind of get it, the few who try very hard and barely get it, and the few who don't care. I want to reach as many of these groups as effectively as I can. Here's an example of how I'd use a computer program to teach: Here's an example of what I'm looking for: a 1-line VBS script to get your computer to talk to you: CreateObject("sapi.spvoice").Speak InputBox("Enter your text","Talk it") I could use this to demonstrate order of operations. I'd show the code, let them play with it, then explain that There's a lot going on in that line, but the computer can make sense of it, because it knows the rules. Then I'd show them something like this: 4(5*5) / 10 + 9(.25 + .75) And you can see that first I need to do is (5*5). Then I can multiply for 4. And now I've created the Object. Dividing by 10 is the same as calling Speak - I can't Speak before I have an object, and I can't divide before I have 100. Then on the other side I first create an InputBox with some instructions for how to display it. When I hit enter on the input box it evaluates or "returns" whatever I entered. (Hint: 'oooooo' makes a funny sound) So when I say Speak, the right side is what to Speak. And I get that from the InputBox. So when you do several things on a line, like: x = 14 + y; You need to be aware of the order of things. First we add 14 and y. Then we put the result (what it evaluates to, or returns) into x. That's my goal, to have a bunch of these cool examples to demonstrate and teach the class while they have fun. I tried this example on my roommate and while I may not use this as the first lesson, she liked it and learned something. Some cool mathematica programs that make beautiful graphs or shapes that are easy to understand would be good ideas and I'm going to look into those. Here are some complicated actionscript examples but that's a bit too advanced and I can't teach flash. What other ideas do you have?

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• JavaScript issues

  - by Michael

  My java scirpt is not working right. It is simple pre-vailidation form and I can not get the script to work. It is supposed to validate each field but I can not get it to validate past the first name. I stripped out all of the other garbage so the code would not be confusing Should be a copy paste to notepad. Little help please <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> <!-- function validateForm(theForm) { var name = theForm.firstname.value; var name = theForm.lastname.value; var email = theForm.email.value; if (name == "") { alert("Please fill in your First Name."); theForm.firstname.focus(); return false; } if (name == "") { alert("Please fill in your Last Name."); theForm.lastname.focus(); return false; } if (email == "") { alert("Please fill in your email address."); theForm.email.focus(); return false; } return true; } //--> </script> if (!theForm.myCheckbox1.checked { alert("Please check the honor box."); return false; } </head> <body> </script> <fieldset> <legend>Fun in the Sun With JavaScirpt</legend> <ul> <form action="blah.cgi" method="post" onSubmit="return validateForm(this);"> First name: <input type="text" name="firstname"> <font color="#FF0000" size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>*</strong></font> <br><br> Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname"> <font color="#FF0000" size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>*</strong></font> <br><br> Email address: <input type="text" name="email"> <font color="#FF0000" size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>*</strong></font> <br><br> Phone Number: <input type="text" name="phone"><br><br> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit"> </form> <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckbox" value="someValue"><font color="#FF0000" size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>*</strong></font> <P>By checking this Box you are confirming the data is accurate</p> <p>(* indicates a required field)</p> </body> </html>

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