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• How to resize an openGL window created with wglCreateContext?

  - by Nick

  Is it possible to resize an openGL window (or device context) created with wglCreateContext without disabling it? If so how? Right now I have a function which resizes the DC but the only way I could get it to work was to call DisableOpenGL and then re-enable. This causes any textures and other state changes to be lost. I would like to do this without the disable so that I do not have to go through the tedious task of recreating the openGL DC state. HWND hWnd; HDC hDC; void View_setSizeWin32(int width, int height) { // resize the window LPRECT rec = malloc(sizeof(RECT)); GetWindowRect(hWnd, rec); SetWindowPos( hWnd, HWND_TOP, rec->left, rec->top, rec->left+width, rec->left+height, SWP_NOMOVE ); free(rec); // sad panda DisableOpenGL( hWnd, hDC, hRC ); EnableOpenGL( hWnd, &hDC, &hRC ); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glOrtho(-(width/2), width/2, -(height/2), height/2, -1.0, 1.0); // have fun recreating the openGL state.... } void EnableOpenGL(HWND hWnd, HDC * hDC, HGLRC * hRC) { PIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR pfd; int format; // get the device context (DC) *hDC = GetDC( hWnd ); // set the pixel format for the DC ZeroMemory( &pfd, sizeof( pfd ) ); pfd.nSize = sizeof( pfd ); pfd.nVersion = 1; pfd.dwFlags = PFD_DRAW_TO_WINDOW | PFD_SUPPORT_OPENGL | PFD_DOUBLEBUFFER; pfd.iPixelType = PFD_TYPE_RGBA; pfd.cColorBits = 24; pfd.cDepthBits = 16; pfd.iLayerType = PFD_MAIN_PLANE; format = ChoosePixelFormat( *hDC, &pfd ); SetPixelFormat( *hDC, format, &pfd ); // create and enable the render context (RC) *hRC = wglCreateContext( *hDC ); wglMakeCurrent( *hDC, *hRC ); } void DisableOpenGL(HWND hWnd, HDC hDC, HGLRC hRC) { wglMakeCurrent( NULL, NULL ); wglDeleteContext( hRC ); ReleaseDC( hWnd, hDC ); }

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• bad file descriptor with close() socket (c++)

  - by user321246

  hi everybody! I'm running out of file descriptors when my program can't connect another host. The close() system call doesn't work, the number of open sockets increases. I can se it with cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr Print from console: connect: No route to host close: Bad file descriptor connect: No route to host close: Bad file descriptor .. Code: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <sys/socket.h> #include <netinet/in.h> #include <netdb.h> #include <string.h> #include <iostream> using namespace std; #define PORT 1238 #define MESSAGE "Yow!!! Are we having fun yet?!?" #define SERVERHOST "192.168.9.101" void write_to_server (int filedes) { int nbytes; nbytes = write (filedes, MESSAGE, strlen (MESSAGE) + 1); if (nbytes < 0) { perror ("write"); } } void init_sockaddr (struct sockaddr_in *name, const char *hostname, uint16_t port) { struct hostent *hostinfo; name->sin_family = AF_INET; name->sin_port = htons (port); hostinfo = gethostbyname (hostname); if (hostinfo == NULL) { fprintf (stderr, "Unknown host %s.\n", hostname); } name->sin_addr = *(struct in_addr *) hostinfo->h_addr; } int main() { for (;;) { sleep(1); int sock; struct sockaddr_in servername; /* Create the socket. */ sock = socket (PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); if (sock < 0) { perror ("socket (client)"); } /* Connect to the server. */ init_sockaddr (&servername, SERVERHOST, PORT); if (0 > connect (sock, (struct sockaddr *) &servername, sizeof (servername))) { perror ("connect"); sock = -1; } /* Send data to the server. */ if (sock > -1) write_to_server (sock); if (close (sock) != 0) perror("close"); } return 0; }

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• Get data from aspx.cs page to aspx page.

  - by Brad8118

  So I am using a jquery plug in that allows me to change the order of things in a list by dragging and dropping them. So my goal is to be able to grab a list of my objects (AlertInfo) and using it in a javascript function. I was able to use a json webservice call in a test project to pass the data to the page. But we don't have a webservice page now so I tried to grab it from a aspx.cs page and it hasn't worked. ///Aspx page: $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "~/Alerts/GetAlerts", data: "{}", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", dataType: "json", success: function (msg) { var data = eval("(" + msg.d + ")"); jQuery.each(data, function (rec) { AlertList[AlertList.length] = new objAlert(this.id, this.title, this.details, JSONDateSerializationFix(this.startdate), JSONDateSerializationFix(this.enddate)); UpdateDisplayList(); }) }, error: function (msg) { alert("BRAD" + msg); } The issue is that the Alerts page in "URL /Alerts/GetAlerts" is Alerts.aspx.cs. I can't figure out if I can use this ajax command to call a method in a aspx.cs page. //Code behind page aspx.cs [WebMethod] //[ScriptMethod(ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)] public string GetAlerts() { List list = AlertInfo.GetTestAlerts(); return new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize(list); } public List GetAlertsList() { List list = AlertInfo.GetTestAlerts(); return list; ; } So I was hoping that I could load data into an asp control (dataList) and then grab the data //code behind page protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { dataListAlertList.DataSource = GetAlertsList(); dataListAlertList.DataBind(); } public static List<AlertInfo> GetTestAlerts() { List<AlertInfo> list = new List<AlertInfo>(); list.Add(new AlertInfo("0", "Alert 1 Title", "Alert 1 Detail", "10/10/2010", "10/10/2011")); list.Add(new AlertInfo("1", "Alert 2 Title", "Alert 2 Detail", "10/10/2010", "10/10/2011")); return list; } //.aspx page $(document).ready(function () { var a1 = $("#dataListAlertList").val(); // do fun stuff now. } But I keep getting undefined....

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• urgent..haskell mini interpreter

  - by mohamed elshikh

  i'm asked to implement this project and i have problems in part b which is the eval function this is the full describtion of the project You are required to implement an interpreter for mini-Haskell language. An interpreter is dened in Wikipedia as a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language. The interpreter should be able to evaluate functions written in a special notation, which you will dene. A function is dened by: Function name Input Parameters : dened as a list of variables. The body of the function. The body of the function can be any of the following statements: a) Variable: The function may return any of the input variables. b) Arithmetic Expressions: The arithmetic expressions include input variables and addition, sub- traction, multiplication, division and modulus operations on arithmetic expressions. c) Boolean Expressions: The Boolean expressions include the ordering of arithmetic expressions (applying the relationships: <, =<, , = or =) and the anding, oring and negation of Boolean expressions. d) If-then-else statements: where the if keyword is followed by a Boolean expression. The then and else parts may be followed by any of the statements described here. e) Guarded expressions: where each case consists of a boolean expression and any of the statements described here. The expression consists of any number of cases. The rst case whose condition is true, its body should be evaluated. The guarded expression has to terminate with an otherwise case. f) Function calls: the body of the function may have a call to another function. Note that all inputs passed to the function will be of type Int. The output of the function can be of type Int or Bool. To implement the interpreter, you are required to implement the following: a) Dene a datatype for the following expressions: Variables Arithmetic expressions Boolean expressions If-then-else statements Guarded expressions Functions b) Implement the function eval which evaluates a function. It takes 3 inputs: The name of a function to be evaluated represented as a string. A list of inputs to that function. The arguments will always be of datatype Int. A list of functions. Each function is represented as instance of the datatype that you have created for functions. c) Implement the function get_type that returns the type of the function (as a string). The input to this function is the same as in part b. here is what i've done data Variable = v(char) data Arth= va Variable | Add Arth Arth | Sub Arth Arth | Times Arth Arth | Divide Arth Arth data Bol= Great Arth Arth | Small Arth Arth | Geq Arth Arth | Seq Arth Arth | And Bol Bol | Or Bol Bol | Neg Bol data Cond = data Guard = data Fun =cons String [Variable] Body data Body= bodycons(String) |Bol |Cond |Guard |Arth

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• Simple RSA encryption (Java)

  - by jake blue

  This is simply for fun. This will not be used for any actual encryption. I'm only first year comp sci student and love cryptography. This took a long time to get working. At approximately N = 18, it begins breaking down. It won't encrypt messages properly after that point. I'm not sure why. Any insights? I'd also appreciate any links you could provide me to tutorials or interesting reading about Cryptography. import java.math.BigInteger; import java.security.SecureRandom; /** * Cryptography. * * Generates public and private keys used in encryption and * decryption * */ public class RSA { private final static BigInteger one = new BigInteger("1"); private final static SecureRandom random = new SecureRandom(); // prime numbers private BigInteger p; private BigInteger q; // modulus private BigInteger n; // totient private BigInteger t; // public key private BigInteger e; // private key private BigInteger d; private String cipherText; /** * Constructor for objects of class RSA */ public RSA(int N) { p = BigInteger.probablePrime(N/2, random); q = BigInteger.probablePrime(N/2, random); // initialising modulus n = p.multiply(q); // initialising t by euclid's totient function (p-1)(q-1) t = (p.subtract(one)).multiply(q.subtract(one)); // initialising public key ~ 65537 is common public key e = new BigInteger("65537"); } public int generatePrivateKey() { d = e.modInverse(t); return d.intValue(); } public String encrypt(String plainText) { String encrypted = ""; int j = 0; for(int i = 0; i < plainText.length(); i++){ char m = plainText.charAt(i); BigInteger bi1 = BigInteger.valueOf(m); BigInteger bi2 = bi1.modPow(e, n); j = bi2.intValue(); m = (char) j; encrypted += m; } cipherText = encrypted; return encrypted; } public String decrypt() { String decrypted = ""; int j = 0; for(int i = 0; i < cipherText.length(); i++){ char c = cipherText.charAt(i); BigInteger bi1 = BigInteger.valueOf(c); BigInteger bi2 = bi1.modPow(d, n); j = bi2.intValue(); c = (char) j; decrypted += c; } return decrypted; } }

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• Database schema for simple stats project

  - by Bubnoff

  Backdrop: I have a file hierarchy of cvs files for multiple locations named by dates they cover ...by month specifically. Each cvs file in the folder is named after the location. eg', folder name: 2010-feb contains: location1.csv location2.csv Each CSV file holds records like this: 2010-06-28, 20:30:00 , 0 2010-06-29, 08:30:00 , 0 2010-06-29, 09:30:00 , 0 2010-06-29, 10:30:00 , 0 2010-06-29, 11:30:00 , 0 meaning of record columns ( column names ): Date, time, # of sessions I have a perl script that pulls the data from this mess and originally I was going to store it as json files, but am thinking a database might be more appropriate long term ...comparing year to year trends ...fun stuff like that. Pt 2 - My question/problem: So I now have a REST service that coughs up json with a test database. My question is [ I suck at db design ], how best to design a database backend for this? I am thinking the following tables would suffice and keep it simple: Location: (PK)location_code, name session: (PK)id, (FK)location_code, month, hour, num_sessions I need to be able to average sessions (plus min and max) for each hour across days of week in addition to days of week in a given month or months. I've been using perl hashes to do this and am trying to decide how best to implement this with a database. Do you think stored procedures should be used? As to the database, depending on info gathered here, it will be postgresql or sqlite. If there is no compelling reason for postgresql I'll stick with sqlite. How and where should I compare the data to hours of operation. I am storing the hours of operation in a yaml file. I currently 'match' the hour in the data to a hash from the yaml to do this. Would a database open simpler methods? I am thinking I would do this comparison as I do now then insert the data. Can be recalled with: SELECT hour, num_sessions FROM session WHERE location_code=LOC1 Since only hours of operation are present, I do not need to worry about it. Should I calculate all results as I do now then store as a stats table for different 'reports'? This, rather than processing on demand? How would this look? Anyway ...I ramble. Thanks for reading! Bubnoff

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• Translate parse_git_branch function to zsh from bash (for prompt)

  - by yar

  I am using this function in Bash function parse_git_branch { git_status="$(git status 2> /dev/null)" pattern="^# On branch ([^${IFS}]*)" if [[ ! ${git_status}} =~ "working directory clean" ]]; then state="*" fi # add an else if or two here if you want to get more specific if [[ ${git_status} =~ ${pattern} ]]; then branch=${BASH_REMATCH[1]} echo "(${branch}${state})" fi } but I'm determined to use zsh. While I can use this perfectly as a shell script (even without a shebang) in my .zshrc the error is a parse error on this line if [[ ! ${git_status}}... What do I need to do to get it ready for zshell? Edit: The "actual error" I'm getting is " parse error near } and it refers to the line with the strange double }}, which works on Bash. Edit: Here's the final code, just for fun: parse_git_branch() { git_status="$(git status 2> /dev/null)" pattern="^# On branch ([^[:space:]]*)" if [[ ! ${git_status} =~ "working directory clean" ]]; then state="*" fi if [[ ${git_status} =~ ${pattern} ]]; then branch=${match[1]} echo "(${branch}${state})" fi } setopt PROMPT_SUBST PROMPT='$PR_GREEN%n@$PR_GREEN%m%u$PR_NO_COLOR:$PR_BLUE%2c$PR_NO_COLOR%(!.#.$)' RPROMPT='$PR_GREEN$(parse_git_branch)$PR_NO_COLOR' Thanks to everybody for your patience and help. Edit: The best answer has schooled us all: git status is porcelain (UI). Good scripting goes against GIT plumbing. Here's the final function: parse_git_branch() { in_wd="$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree 2>/dev/null)" || return test "$in_wd" = true || return state='' git diff-index HEAD --quiet 2>/dev/null || state='*' branch="$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null)" test -z "$branch" && branch='<detached-HEAD>' echo "(${branch#refs/heads/}${state})" } PROMPT='$PR_GREEN%n@$PR_GREEN%m%u$PR_NO_COLOR:$PR_BLUE%2c$PR_NO_COLOR%(!.#.$)' RPROMPT='$PR_GREEN$(parse_git_branch)$PR_NO_COLOR' Note that only the prompt is zsh-specific. In Bash it would be your prompt plus "\$(parse_git_branch)". This might be slower (more calls to GIT, but that's an empirical question) but it won't be broken by changes in GIT (they don't change the plumbing). And that is very important for a good script moving forward. Days Later: Ugh, it turns out that diff-index HEAD is NOT the same as checking status against working directory clean. So will this mean another plumbing call? I surely don't have time/expertise to write my own porcelain....

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• PHP, MySQL - My own version of SALT (I call salty) - Login Issue

  - by Fabio Anselmo

  Ok I wrote my own version of SALT I call it salty lol don't make fun of me.. Anyway the registration part of my script as follows is working 100% correctly. //generate SALTY my own version of SALT and I likes me salt.. lol function rand_string( $length ) { $chars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuwxyz1234567890"; $size = strlen( $chars ); for( $i = 0; $i < $length; $i++ ) { $str .= $chars[ rand( 0, $size - 1 ) ]; } return $str; } $salty = rand_string( 256 ); //generate my extra salty pw $password = crypt('password'); $hash = $password . $salty; $newpass = $hash; //insert the data in the database include ('../../scripts/dbconnect.php'); //Update db record with my salty pw ;) // TESTED WITH AND WITHOUT SALTY //HENCE $password and $newpass mysql_query("UPDATE `Register` SET `Password` = '$password' WHERE `emailinput` = '$email'"); mysql_close($connect); However my LOGIN script is failing. I have it setup to TEST and echo if its login or not. It always returns FAILED. I entered the DB and changed the crypted salty pw to "TEST" and I got a SUCCESS. So my problem is somewhere in this LOGIN script I assume. Now I am not sure how to implement my $Salty in this. But also be advised that even without SALTY (just using crypt to store my pass) - I was still unable to perform a login successfully. And if you're gonna suggest i use blowfish - note that my webhost doesn't have it supported and i don't know how to install it. here's my login script: if (isset($_POST['formsubmitted'])) { include ('../../scripts/dbconnect.php'); $username = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['username']); $password = crypt(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['password'])); $qry = "SELECT ID FROM Register WHERE emailinput='$username' AND Password='$password'"; $result = mysql_query($qry); if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) { echo 'SUCCESS'; //START SESSION } else { echo 'FAILED'; //YOU ARE NOT LOGGED IN } } So what's wrong with this login? Why isn't it working just using the crypt/storing only crypt? How can i make it work storing both the crypt and randomly generated SALTY :) ? Ty advance

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• How should I ethically approach user password storage for later plaintext retrieval?

  - by Shane

  As I continue to build more and more websites and web applications I am often asked to store user's passwords in a way that they can be retrieved if/when the user has an issue (either to email a forgotten password link, walk them through over the phone, etc.) When I can I fight bitterly against this practice and I do a lot of ‘extra’ programming to make password resets and administrative assistance possible without storing their actual password. When I can’t fight it (or can’t win) then I always encode the password in some way so that it at least isn’t stored as plaintext in the database—though I am aware that if my DB gets hacked that it won’t take much for the culprit to crack the passwords as well—so that makes me uncomfortable. In a perfect world folks would update passwords frequently and not duplicate them across many different sites—unfortunately I know MANY people that have the same work/home/email/bank password, and have even freely given it to me when they need assistance. I don’t want to be the one responsible for their financial demise if my DB security procedures fail for some reason. Morally and ethically I feel responsible for protecting what can be, for some users, their livelihood even if they are treating it with much less respect. I am certain that there are many avenues to approach and arguments to be made for salting hashes and different encoding options, but is there a single ‘best practice’ when you have to store them? In almost all cases I am using PHP and MySQL if that makes any difference in the way I should handle the specifics. Additional Information for Bounty I want to clarify that I know this is not something you want to have to do and that in most cases refusal to do so is best. I am, however, not looking for a lecture on the merits of taking this approach I am looking for the best steps to take if you do take this approach. In a note below I made the point that websites geared largely toward the elderly, mentally challenged, or very young can become confusing for people when they are asked to perform a secure password recovery routine. Though we may find it simple and mundane in those cases some users need the extra assistance of either having a service tech help them into the system or having it emailed/displayed directly to them. In such systems the attrition rate from these demographics could hobble the application if users were not given this level of access assistance, so please answer with such a setup in mind. Thanks to Everyone This has been a fun questions with lots of debate and I have enjoyed it. In the end I selected an answer that both retains password security (I will not have to keep plain text or recoverable passwords), but also makes it possible for the user base I specified to log into a system without the major drawbacks I have found from normal password recovery. As always there were about 5 answers that I would like to have marked correct for different reasons, but I had to choose the best one--all the rest got a +1. Thanks everyone!

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• c++ multithread array

  - by user1731972

  i'm doing something for fun, trying to learn multithreading Problems passing array by reference to threads but Arno pointed out that my threading via process.h wasn't going to be multi-threaded. What I'm hoping to do is something where I have an array of 100 (or 10,000, doesn't really matter I don't think), and split up the assignment of values to each thread. Example, 4 threads = 250 values per thread to be assigned. Then I can use this filled array for further calculations. Here's some code I was working on (which doesn't work) #include <process.h> #include <windows.h> #include <iostream> #include <fstream> #include <time.h> //#include <thread> using namespace std; void myThread (void *dummy ); CRITICAL_SECTION cs1,cs2; // global int main() { ofstream myfile; myfile.open ("coinToss.csv"); int rNum; long numRuns; long count = 0; int divisor = 1; float holder = 0; int counter = 0; float percent = 0.0; HANDLE hThread[1000]; int array[10000]; srand ( time(NULL) ); printf ("Runs (use multiple of 10)? "); cin >> numRuns; for (int i = 0; i < numRuns; i++) { //_beginthread( myThread, 0, (void *) (array1) ); //??? //hThread[i * 2] = _beginthread( myThread, 0, (void *) (array1) ); hThread[i*2] = _beginthread( myThread, 0, (void *) (array) ); } //WaitForMultipleObjects(numRuns * 2, hThread, TRUE, INFINITE); WaitForMultipleObjects(numRuns, hThread, TRUE, INFINITE); } void myThread (void *param ) { //thanks goes to stockoverflow //http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12801862/problems-passing-array-by-reference-to-threads int *i = (int *)param; for (int x = 0; x < 1000000; x++) { //param[x] = rand() % 2 + 1; i[x] = rand() % 2 + 1; } } Can anyone explain why it isn't working?

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• How to capture child links clicked using jquery?

  - by user244394

  I am trying to capture the event when a child element link is clicked and add class called "highlightchild" to it. Also I want to check if there are any child element link exist or not, if no child element exits ie "third level" highlight with "highlightparent" the parent. How can I do that using jquery? $(document).ready(function() { $('.menu ul').hide(); $('.menu .arrowUp').click(function() { $('.menu ul').hide(); $(this).find(".third-level").toggle(); }); }); html <ul class="menu"> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="#">link1</a> <ul class="third-level" > <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="/somelink/">Some Link</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="#">link2</a> <ul class="third-level" > <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="/links2/">some Links 2</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="#">link3</a> <ul class="third-level" > <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="/Agri/">Agricultural</a></li> <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="/sugar/">Sugar</a></li> <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="/bbc/">Coffee</a></li> <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="/cnn/">Energy</a></li> <!-- third level non-active --> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="funstuff">Fun stuff</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="#">link4</a></li> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="#">link5</a></li> <li class="arrowUp"><a href="#">link6</a></li> </ul>

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• How can I represent a line of music notes in a way that allows fast insertion at any index?

  - by chairbender

  For "fun", and to learn functional programming, I'm developing a program in Clojure that does algorithmic composition using ideas from this theory of music called "Westergaardian Theory". It generates lines of music (where a line is just a single staff consisting of a sequence of notes, each with pitches and durations). It basically works like this: Start with a line consisting of three notes (the specifics of how these are chosen are not important). Randomly perform one of several "operations" on this line. The operation picks randomly from all pairs of adjacent notes that meet a certain criteria (for each pair, the criteria only depends on the pair and is independent of the other notes in the line). It inserts 1 or several notes (depending on the operation) between the chosen pair. Each operation has its own unique criteria. Continue randomly performing these operations on the line until the line is the desired length. The issue I've run into is that my implementation of this is quite slow, and I suspect it could be made faster. I'm new to Clojure and functional programming in general (though I'm experienced with OO), so I'm hoping someone with more experience can point out if I'm not thinking in a functional paradigm or missing out on some FP technique. My current implementation is that each line is a vector containing maps. Each map has a :note and a :dur. :note's value is a keyword representing a musical note like :A4 or :C#3. :dur's value is a fraction, representing the duration of the note (1 is a whole note, 1/4 is a quarter note, etc...). So, for example, a line representing the C major scale starting on C3 would look like this: [ {:note :C3 :dur 1} {:note :D3 :dur 1} {:note :E3 :dur 1} {:note :F3 :dur 1} {:note :G3 :dur 1} {:note :A4 :dur 1} {:note :B4 :dur 1} ] This is a problematic representation because there's not really a quick way to insert into an arbitrary index of a vector. But insertion is the most frequently performed operation on these lines. My current terrible function for inserting notes into a line basically splits the vector using subvec at the point of insertion, uses conj to join the first part + notes + last part, then uses flatten and vec to make them all be in a one-dimensional vector. For example if I want to insert C3 and D3 into the the C major scale at index 3 (where the F3 is), it would do this (I'll use the note name in place of the :note and :dur maps): (conj [C3 D3 E3] [C3 D3] [F3 G3 A4 B4]), which creates [C3 D3 E3 [C3 D3] [F3 G3 A4 B4]] (vec (flatten previous-vector)) which gives [C3 D3 E3 C3 D3 F3 G3 A4 B4] The run time of that is O(n), AFAIK. I'm looking for a way to make this insertion faster. I've searched for information on Clojure data structures that have fast insertion but haven't found anything that would work. I found "finger trees" but they only allow fast insertion at the start or end of the list. Edit: I split this into two questions. The other part is here.

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• Ubuntu 10.10 Ad-Hoc Setup (from Wireless Router, to Ubuntu Server/Desktop to Wireless Router)

  - by user60375

  Okay, so I know there are different approaches for this, but I will explain my story briefly before getting to the technical stuff. My fiancée and I are going through some financial issues (as I assume a lot of us are). We ended up having to move from our house and stay with some friends/family for 6 months, just to get ourselves caught up. (Medical bills, among other issues,etc). So this is where it gets fun. At our friends house, we are staying in the loft setup which is not near the cable modem and wireless router. I have a "hand-crafted" media center running XBMC, an Ubuntu 10.10 Server/Desktop (multi-purpose, very powerful and tons drive space), two working laptops, a between the two of us we have multiple wireless devices/phones. Now our friends Wireless router doesn't have any options for assigning IP addresses, but my router does. My current setup is: Friends Cable Modem -- Friend's Wireless Router -- Ubuntu 10.10 Server -- My Wireless Router (local-link from Friend's wireless (incoming) to sharing connection on ETH0 (outgoing)) -- to all devices. (Wireless Modem, Ubuntu Server that share's it's wireless incoming connection to the ethernet port my Wireless router share's with the rest of the devices). I setup my router to use default settings from my friend's router, using Google's DNS on my router (disabled DNS setup on Ubuntu Server), everything is assigned nicely and runs smooth. My Ubuntu server was given the address 10.42.43.1 (assuming standard from Network-Manager). (On the Ubuntu machine that shares to my wireless router; I have some server apps installed, but mainly just use Samba/NFS/Tangerine action. My problem/goal is that every device has no problem of accessing the internet from my router, the media-center has an assigned ip address, all services from all devices (ZeroConf, Avanhi, Bonjour, GIT, SSH, FTP, Apache2, etc) all work correctly except from my Ubuntu Server (which serves the wireless connection to ETH0 to another Wireless Router). The Ubuntu 10.10 Server/Desktop is not broadcasting anything (the Zeroconf Service Discovery 0.4 Gnome Applet shows the services from the Ubuntu server but no other computers can see them). I can access it from my Media-Center (Running Xbuntu 10.04) if I direct it to 10.42.43.1, no problem. But I cannot access Tangerine (Daapd) and the Samba shares do not show up on any computers for 10.42.43.1 (not in the WORKGROUP which Samba is setup simple and default but I can direct computers to that address and the shares will add except on a damn Windows 7 parition). Is this an issue with how I have my router setup and possible the gateway? An issue with Network-Manager? And issue with my Ubuntu Server/Desktop? I know there is a lot to that, but it's simpler than I probably have explained? Any help would be appreciated. If you need more details, I can provide them. If there is a better way of my attempting this home-network, please let me know. Thanks in advance for the help.

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• creating a heirarchy of terminals or workspaces

  - by intuited

  <rant This question occurred to me ('occurred' meaning 'whispered seductively in my ear for the 100th time') while using GNU-screen, so I'll make that my example. However this is a much more general question about user interfaces and what I perceive as a flawmissing feature in every implementation I've yet seen. I'm wondering if there is some way to create a heirarchy/tree of terminals in a screen session. EG I'd like to have something like 1 bash 1.1 bash 1.2 bash 2 bash 3 bash 3.1 bash 3.1.1 bash 3.1.2 bash It would be good if the terminals could be labelled instead of having to be navigated to via some arrangement that I suspect doesn't exist. So then you could jump to one using eg ^A:goto happydays or ^A:goto dykstra.angry. So to generalize that: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, gnome-terminal, roxterm, konsole, yakuake, OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Mr. Snuffaluppagus's Funtime Carousel™, and Your Mom's Jam Browser™ all offer the ability to create a flat set of tabs containing documents of an identical nature: web pages, terminals, documents, fun rideable animals, and jams. GNU-screen implements the same functionality without using tabs. Linux and OS/X window managers provide the ability to organize windows into an array of workspaces, which amounts to again, the same deal. Over the past few years, this has become a more or less ubiquitous concept which has been righteously welcomed into the far reaches of the computer interface funfest. Heavy users of these systems quickly encounter a problem with it: the set of entities is flat. In the case of workspaces, an option may be available to create a 2d array. However none of these applications furnish their users with the ability to create heirarchies, similar to filesystem directory structures, containing instances of their particular contained type. I for one am consistently bothered by this, and am wondering if the community can offer some wisdom as to why this has not happened in any of the foremost collections of computational functionality our culture has yet produced. Or if perhaps it has and I'm just an ignorant savage. I'd like to be able to not only group things into a tree structure, but also to create references (aka symbolic links, aka pointers) from one part of the structure to another, as well as apply properties (eg default directory, colorscheme, ...) recursively downward from a given node. I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to save these structures as known sessions, and apply tags to particular instances. So then you can sort through them by tag, find them by name, or just use the arrow keys (with an appropriate modifier) to move left or right and in or out of a given level. Another key combo would serve to create a branch in the place of the current terminal/webpage/lifelike statue/spreadsheet/spreadsheet sheet/presentation/jam and move that entity into the new branch, then create a fresh one as a sibling to it: a second leaf node within the same branch node. They would get along well. I find it a bit astonishing that this hasn't happened yet, and the only reason I can venture as a guess is that the creators of these fine systems do not consider such functionality to be useful to a significant portion of their userbase. I posit that the probability that that such an assumption would be correct is pretty low. On the other hand, given the relative ease with which such structures can be implemented using modern libraries/languages, it doesn't seem likely that difficulty of implementation would be a major roadblock. If it could be done in 1972 or whenever within the constraints of a filesystem driver, it should be relatively painless to implement in 2010 in a fullblown application. Given that all of these systems are capable of maintaining a set of equivalent entities, it seems unlikely that a major infrastructure overhaul would be necessary in order to enable a navigable heirarchy of them. </rant Mostly I'm just looking to start up a discussion and/or brainstorming on this topic. Any ideas, examples, criticism, or analysis are quite welcome. * Mr. Snuffaluppagus's Funtime Carousel is a registered trademark of Children's Television Workshop Inc. * Your Mom's Jam Browser is a registered trademark of Your Mom Inc.

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• simple and reliable centralized logging inside Amazon VPC

  - by Nakedible

  I need to set up centralized logging for a set of servers (10-20) in an Amazon VPC. The logging should be as to not lose any log messages in case any single server goes offline - or in the case that an entire availability zone goes offline. It should also tolerate packet loss and other normal network conditions without losing or duplicating messages. It should store the messages durably, at the minimum on two different EBS volumes in two availability zones, but S3 is a good place as well. It should also be realtime so that the messages arrive within seconds of their generation to two different availability zones. I also need to sync logfiles not generated via syslog, so a syslog-only centralized logging solution would not fulfill all the needs, although I guess that limitation could be worked around. I have already reviewed a few solutions, and I will list them here: Flume to Flume to S3: I could set up two logservers as Flume hosts which would store log messages either locally or in S3, and configure all the servers with Flume to send all messages to both servers, using the end-to-end reliability options. That way the loss of a single server shouldn't cause lost messages and all messages would arrive in two availability zones in realtime. However, there would need to be some way to join the logs of the two servers, deduplicating all the messages delivered to both. This could be done by adding a unique id on the sending side to each message and then write some manual deduplication runs on the logfiles. I haven't found an easy solution to the duplication problem. Logstash to Logstash to ElasticSearch: I could install Logstash on the servers and have them deliver to a central server via AMQP, with the durability options turned on. However, for this to work I would need to use some of the clustering capable AMQP implementations, or fan out the deliver just as in the Flume case. AMQP seems to be a yet another moving part with several implementations and no real guidance on what works best this sort of setup. And I'm not entirely convinced that I could get actual end-to-end durability from logstash to elasticsearch, assuming crashing servers in between. The fan-out solutions run in to the deduplication problem again. The best solution that would seem to handle all the cases, would be Beetle, which seems to provide high availability and deduplication via a redis store. However, I haven't seen any guidance on how to set this up with Logstash and Redis is one more moving part again for something that shouldn't be terribly difficult. Logstash to ElasticSearch: I could run Logstash on all the servers, have all the filtering and processing rules in the servers themselves and just have them log directly to a removet ElasticSearch server. I think this should bring me reliable logging and I can use the ElasticSearch clustering features to share the database transparently. However, I am not sure if the setup actually survives Logstash restarts and intermittent network problems without duplicating messages in a failover case or similar. But this approach sounds pretty promising. rsync: I could just rsync all the relevant log files to two different servers. The reliability aspect should be perfect here, as the files should be identical to the source files after a sync is done. However, doing an rsync several times per second doesn't sound fun. Also, I need the logs to be untamperable after they have been sent, so the rsyncs would need to be in append-only mode. And log rotations mess things up unless I'm careful. rsyslog with RELP: I could set up rsyslog to send messages to two remote hosts via RELP and have a local queue to store the messages. There is the deduplication problem again, and RELP itself might also duplicate some messages. However, this would only handle the things that log via syslog. None of these solutions seem terribly good, and they have many unknowns still, so I am asking for more information here from people who have set up centralized reliable logging as to what are the best tools to achieve that goal.

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• synchronization of file locations between two machines

  - by intuited

  Although similar threads have been asked on this site and its siblings before, I've not managed to glean the answer to this persistent question. Any help is much appreciated. The situation: I've got two laptops; both contain a ton of music. Sometimes I move these music files to different locations, or change the metadata in them, or convert them to a different format. I might do any of these things on either machine. I rarely do all of them at once — ie it's unlikely that I'll convert a file's format and move it to a different location all in one go. I'd like to be able to synchronize these changes without having to sift through everything that was renamed or moved. I'm familiar with rsync but I find it inadequate, because although it can compute checksums, it doesn't have any way to store them. So if a file differs, it can't figure out which side it changed on. This also means that it can't attempt to match a missing file to a new one with the same checksum (ie a move) if the filesize and date are the same, it , so it takes an epoch to do a sync on a large repository. I would like to only check the checksum if the files even if you turn on checksumming, it still doesn't use it intelligently: ie it checksums files even if the sizes differ. IIRC. it's not able to use file metadata as a means of file comparison. this is sort of a wishlist item but it seems doable. I've also looked into rsnapshot, but its requirement to create a full backup is impractical in this situation. I don't need a backup, I just need a record of what file with each hash was where when. Unison seems like it might be able to do something vaguely along these lines, but I'm loathe to spend hours wading through its details only to discover that it's sadly lacking. Plus, it's fun asking questions on here. What I'd like is a tool that does something along these lines: keeps track of file checksums or of actual renames, possibly using inotify to greatly reduce resource consumption/latency stores a database containing this info, along with other pertinencies like the file format and metadata, the actual inode, the filename history, etc. uses this info to provide more-intelligent synchronization with a counterpart on the other side. So for example: if a file has been converted from flac to ogg, but kept the same base filename, or the same metadata, it should be able to send the new version over, and the other side should delete the original. Probably it should actually sequester it somewhere in case they or you screwed up, but that's a detail. And then when the transaction is done, the state is logged so that the next time the two interact they can work out their differences. Maybe all this metadata stuff is a fancy pipe dream. I would actually be pretty happy if there was something out there that could just use checksums in an intelligent way. This would be sort of like having the intelligence of something like git, minus the need to duplicate data in an index/backup/etc (and branching, and checkouts, and all the other great stuff that RCSs do. basically just fast forward commit pushes are all I want, with maybe the option to roll back.) So is there something out there that can do this? If not, can someone suggest a good way to start making it?

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• What NAS setup for two-way syncing over the internet?

  - by Jamse

  I have family living a few hours away and have a lot of files that I would like to share - especially lots of folders of digital photos, but also documents etc. - partially so they can see them, partially so I can have access when I visit them and partially for backup / redundancy purposes. My current hard drives on my main machine are getting pretty full anyway, and I have a MythTV box where my music is currently stored, so I was thinking of getting a NAS anyway. And at the other end my family have a few computers, so they would probably benefit from a NAS too. My general idea (though I'm willing to shift on this if there are any bright ideas about other ways of achieving my objectives) is to get a matching pair of NASs and have them sync over the internet. (To cut down on bandwidth use I would get them in sync locally to start with.) Having read around as best I can it seems that syncing over the internet is generally only a feature on quite high end units. However, I have seen that QNAP seem to feature this on their TS-110 and TS-210 units, which might work (they call it "remote replication"). They seem pretty reasonably priced for what they are, but of course with buying 2 of them and then adding the drives (say 1TB or 2TB each) I'd be looking at about £400 total. So, I'm looking for recommendations really. I don't want to spend more than the QNAPs would cost me, but any other ideas would be most appreciated. I am comfortable with technology and tinkering around, but I don't have as much time for that as I would like, so I guess I would favour solutions that require less tinkering rather than more (even though that's less fun!). Any thoughts would be welcome, as would any comments from people who have used the QNAP boxes for this. Thanks in advance. Some specifications: Two-way syncing. Changes made at either end should be synced to the other. There shouldn't be one unit that is effectively a read-only mirror of the other. Not real time. The syncing doesn't need to be real time - if it updated, say, daily overnight that would be fine. Set and forget. I would prefer minimal user interaction once set up - it would be great if syncs were scheduled and automatic. OS independence. I am running Windows XP plus an Ubuntu-based MythTV box. At the other end there are Windows 7 and Windows XP machines, plus a networked TV set top box which I think can play files off the network. Machine independence. I would favour a system that is self-contained, i.e. not reliant on any particular PC being switched on. If the system had enough else going for it I could perhaps work around it at this end, where I only have one PC that's used as such, but it would be harder at the other where there are at least two PCs that might be accessing the files. Notifications. I guess things like getting an email notification if the syncing fell over for any reason would be useful, though it's not a deal breaker. Update I've been digging some more and it looks like QNAP's Remote Replication function is actually just Rsync, so only really suitable for one-way syncing. I've posted on their forum to double check, but I think that's the case. In which case, I think the focus of my question is now either: do any reasonably-priced NASs support bidirectional syncing over the internet?, or has anyone had any luck installing onto NASs for this purpose? (Also, updated question to clarify that I'm after two-way syncing.)

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• What NAS setup for syncing over the internet?

  - by Jamse

  I have family living a few hours away and have a lot of files that I would like to share - especially lots of folders of digital photos, but also documents etc. - partially so they can see them, partially so I can have access when I visit them and partially for backup / redundancy purposes. My current hard drives on my main machine are getting pretty full anyway, and I have a MythTV box where my music is currently stored, so I was thinking of getting a NAS anyway. And at the other end my family have a few computers, so they would probably benefit from a NAS too. My general idea (though I'm willing to shift on this if there are any bright ideas about other ways of achieving my objectives) is to get a matching pair of NASs and have them sync over the internet. (To cut down on bandwidth use I would get them in sync locally to start with.) Having read around as best I can it seems that syncing over the internet is generally only a feature on quite high end units. However, I have seen that QNAP seem to feature this on their TS-110 and TS-210 units, which might work (they call it "remote replication"). They seem pretty reasonably priced for what they are, but of course with buying 2 of them and then adding the drives (say 1TB or 2TB each) I'd be looking at about £400 total. So, I'm looking for recommendations really. I don't want to spend more than the QNAPs would cost me, but any other ideas would be most appreciated. I am comfortable with technology and tinkering around, but I don't have as much time for that as I would like, so I guess I would favour solutions that require less tinkering rather than more (even though that's less fun!). Any thoughts would be welcome, as would any comments from people who have used the QNAP boxes for this. Thanks in advance. Some specifications: Two-way syncing. Changes made at either end should be synced to the other. There shouldn't be one unit that is effectively a read-only mirror of the other. Not real time. The syncing doesn't need to be real time - if it updated, say, daily overnight that would be fine. Set and forget. I would prefer minimal user interaction once set up - it would be great if syncs were scheduled and automatic. OS independence. I am running Windows XP plus an Ubuntu-based MythTV box. At the other end there are Windows 7 and Windows XP machines, plus a networked TV set top box which I think can play files off the network. Machine independence. I would favour a system that is self-contained, i.e. not reliant on any particular PC being switched on. If the system had enough else going for it I could perhaps work around it at this end, where I only have one PC that's used as such, but it would be harder at the other where there are at least two PCs that might be accessing the files. Notifications. I guess things like getting an email notification if the syncing fell over for any reason would be useful, though it's not a deal breaker.

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• Conversation as User Assistance

  - by ultan o'broin

  Applications User Experience members (Erika Web, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Anne Gentle (left) with Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help The Microsoft Development Network Community Center ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes reach out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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• Displaying an image on a LED matrix with a Netduino

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  In the previous post, we’ve been flipping bits manually on three ports of the Netduino to simulate the data, clock and latch pins that a shift register expected. We did all that in order to control one line of a LED matrix and create a simple Knight Rider effect. It was rightly pointed out in the comments that the Netduino has built-in knowledge of the sort of serial protocol that this shift register understands through a feature called SPI. That will of course make our code a whole lot simpler, but it will also make it a whole lot faster: writing to the Netduino ports is actually not that fast, whereas SPI is very, very fast. Unfortunately, the Netduino documentation for SPI is severely lacking. Instead, we’ve been reliably using the documentation for the Fez, another .NET microcontroller. To send data through SPI, we’ll just need  to move a few wires around and update the code. SPI uses pin D11 for writing, pin D12 for reading (which we won’t do) and pin D13 for the clock. The latch pin is a parameter that can be set by the user. This is very close to the wiring we had before (data on D11, clock on D12 and latch on D13). We just have to move the latch from D13 to D10, and the clock from D12 to D13. The code that controls the shift register has slimmed down considerably with that change. Here is the new version, which I invite you to compare with what we had before: public class ShiftRegister74HC595 { protected SPI Spi; public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin) : this(latchPin, SPI.SPI_module.SPI1) { } public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin, SPI.SPI_module spiModule) { var spiConfig = new SPI.Configuration( SPI_mod: spiModule, ChipSelect_Port: latchPin, ChipSelect_ActiveState: false, ChipSelect_SetupTime: 0, ChipSelect_HoldTime: 0, Clock_IdleState: false, Clock_Edge: true, Clock_RateKHz: 1000 ); Spi = new SPI(spiConfig); } public void Write(byte buffer) { Spi.Write(new[] {buffer}); } } All we have to do here is configure SPI. The write method couldn’t be any simpler. Everything is now handled in hardware by the Netduino. We set the frequency to 1MHz, which is largely sufficient for what we’ll be doing, but it could potentially go much higher. The shift register addresses the columns of the matrix. The rows are directly wired to ports D0 to D7 of the Netduino. The code writes to only one of those eight lines at a time, which will make it fast enough. The way an image is displayed is that we light the lines one after the other so fast that persistence of vision will give the illusion of a stable image: foreach (var bitmap in matrix.MatrixBitmap) { matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, true); matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, false); row++; } Now there is a twist here: we need to run this code as fast as possible in order to display the image with as little flicker as possible, but we’ll eventually have other things to do. In other words, we need the code driving the display to run in the background, except when we want to change what’s being displayed. Fortunately, the .NET Micro Framework supports multithreading. In our implementation, we’ve added an Initialize method that spins a new thread that is tied to the specific instance of the matrix it’s being called on. public LedMatrix Initialize() { DisplayThread = new Thread(() => DoDisplay(this)); DisplayThread.Start(); return this; } I quite like this way to spin a thread. As you may know, there is another, built-in way to contextualize a thread by passing an object into the Start method. For the method to work, the thread must have been constructed with a ParameterizedThreadStart delegate, which takes one parameter of type object. I like to use object as little as possible, so instead I’m constructing a closure with a Lambda, currying it with the current instance. This way, everything remains strongly-typed and there’s no casting to do. Note that this method would extend perfectly to several parameters. Of note as well is the return value of Initialize, a common technique to add some fluency to the API and enabling the matrix to be instantiated and initialized in a single line: using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) The “using” in the previous line is because we have implemented IDisposable so that the matrix kills the thread and clears the display when the user code is done with it: public void Dispose() { Clear(); DisplayThread.Abort(); } Thanks to the multi-threaded version of the matrix driver class, we can treat the display as a simple bitmap with a very synchronous programming model: matrix.Set(someimage); while (button.Read()) { Thread.Sleep(10); } Here, the call into Set returns immediately and from the moment the bitmap is set, the background display thread will constantly continue refreshing no matter what happens in the main thread. That enables us to wait or read a button’s port on the main thread knowing that the current image will continue displaying unperturbed and without requiring manual refreshing. We’ve effectively hidden the implementation of the display behind a convenient, synchronous-looking API. Pretty neat, eh? Before I wrap up this post, I want to talk about one small caveat of using SPI rather than driving the shift register directly: when we got to the point where we could actually display images, we noticed that they were a mirror image of what we were sending in. Oh noes! Well, the reason for it is that SPI is sending the bits in a big-endian fashion, in other words backwards. Now sure you could fix that in software by writing some bit-level code to reverse the bits we’re sending in, but there is a far more efficient solution than that. We are doing hardware here, so we can simply reverse the order in which the outputs of the shift register are connected to the columns of the matrix. That’s switching 8 wires around once, as compared to doing bit operations every time we send a line to display. All right, so bringing it all together, here is the code we need to write to display two images in succession, separated by a press on the board’s button: var button = new InputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_SW1, false, Port.ResistorMode.Disabled); using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) { // Oh, prototype is so sad! var sad = new byte[] { 0x66, 0x24, 0x00, 0x18, 0x00, 0x3C, 0x42, 0x81 }; DisplayAndWait(sad, matrix, button); // Let's make it smile! var smile = new byte[] { 0x42, 0x18, 0x18, 0x81, 0x7E, 0x3C, 0x18, 0x00 }; DisplayAndWait(smile, matrix, button); } And here is a video of the prototype running: The prototype in action I’ve added an artificial delay between the display of each row of the matrix to clearly show what’s otherwise happening very fast. This way, you can clearly see each of the two images being displayed line by line. Next time, we’ll do no hardware changes, focusing instead on building a nice programming model for the matrix, with sprites, text and hardware scrolling. Fun stuff. By the way, can any of my reader guess where we’re going with all that? The code for this prototype can be downloaded here: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/NetduinoLedMatrixDriver.zip

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• Test All Features of Windows Phone 7 On Your PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you developer or just excited about the upcoming Windows Phone 7, and want to try it out now?  Thanks to free developer tools from Microsoft and a new unlocked emulator rom, you can try out most of the exciting features today from your PC. Last week we showed you how to try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC and get started developing for the upcoming new devices.  We noticed, however, that the emulator only contains Internet Explorer Mobile and some settings.  This is still interesting to play around with, but it wasn’t the full Windows Phone 7 experience. Some enterprising tweakers discovered that more applications were actually included in the emulator, but were simply hidden from users.  Developer Dan Ardelean then figured out how to re-enable these features, and released a tweaked emulator rom so everyone can try out all of the Windows Phone 7 features for themselves.  Here we’ll look at how you can run this new emulator image on your PC, and then look at some interesting features in Windows Phone 7. Editor Note: This modified emulator image is not official, and isn’t sanctioned by Microsoft. Use your own judgment when choosing to download and use the emulator. Setting Up Emulator Rom To test-drive Windows Phone 7 on your PC, you must first download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (link below).  Follow the steps we showed you last week at: Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC today.  Once it’s installed, go ahead and run the default emulator as we showed to make sure everything works ok. Once the Windows Phone Developer Tools are installed and running, download the new emulator rom from XDA Forums (link below).  This will be a zip file, so extract it first. Note where you save the file, as you will need the address in the next step. Now, to run our new emulator image, we need to open the emulator in command line and point to the new rom image.  To do this, browse to the correct directory, depending on whether you’re running the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows: 32 bit: C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\ 64 bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0\ Hold your Shift key down and right-click in the folder.  Choose Open Command Window here. At the command prompt, enter XDE.exe followed by the location of your new rom image.  Here, we downloaded the rom to our download folder, so at the command prompt we entered: XDE.exe C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\WM70Full\WM70Full.bin The emulator loads … with the full Windows Phone 7 experience! To make it easier, let’s make a shortcut on our desktop to load the emulator with the new rom directly.  Right-click on your desktop (or any folder you want to create the shortcut in), select New, and then Shortcut. Now, in the box, we need to enter the path for the emulator followed by the location of our rom.  Both items must be in quotes.  So, in our test, we entered the following: 32 bit: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0\” “C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\WM70Full\WM70Full.bin” 64 bit: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0\” “C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\WM70Full\WM70Full.bin” Make sure to enter the correct location of the new emulator rom for your computer, and keep both items in separate quotes.  Click next when you’ve entered the location. Name the shortcut; we named it Windows Phone 7, but simply enter whatever you’d like.  Click Finish when you’re done. You should now have a nice Windows Phone icon and your fully functional shortcut!  Double-click it to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator as above. Features in the Unlocked Windows Phone 7 Emulator So let’s look at what you can do with this new emulator.  Almost everything you’ve seen in demos from the Mobile World Conference and Mix’10 are right here for you to play with.  Here’s the application menu, which you can access by clicking on the arrow on the top of the home screen, which shows how much stuff they’ve got in this!   And, of course, even the home screen itself shows much more activity than it did in the original emulator. Let’s check out some of these sections.  Here’s Zune running on Windows Phone 7, and the Zune Marketplace.  The animations are beautiful, so be sure to check this out yourself. The new picture hub is much nicer than any picture viewer included with Windows Mobile in the past…   Stay productive, and on schedule with the new Calendar. The XBOX hub gives us only a hint of things to come, and the links to games now are simply placeholders. Here’s a look at the Office hub.  This doesn’t show up on the homescreen right now, but you can access it in the applications menu.  Office obviously still has a lot of work left on it, but even at a glance here it looks like it includes a lot more functionality than Office Mobile in Windows Mobile 6. Here’s a look at each of the three apps: Word, Excel, and OneNote, and the formatting pallet in Office apps.   This emulator also includes a lot more settings than the default one, including settings for individual applications. You can even activate the screen lock, and try out the lift-to-peek-or-unlock feature… Finally, this version of Windows Phone 7 includes a very nice SystemInfo app with an advanced task manager.  We hope this is still available when the actual phones are released. Conclusion If you’re excited about the upcoming Windows Phone 7 series, or simply want to learn more about what’s coming, this is a great way to test it out.  With these exciting new hubs and applications, there’s something here for everyone.  Let us know what you like most about Windows Phone 7 and what your favorite app or hub is. Links Please note: These roms are not officially supported by Microsoft, and could be taken down. Download the unlocked Windows Phone 7 emulator from XDA Forums – click the link in this post to download How the unlocked emulator image was created Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC todayGet stats on your Ruby on Rails codeDisable Windows Vista’s Built-in CD/DVD Burning FeaturesWeek in Geek – The Slick Windows 7 File Copy Animation EditionGeek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Get Better Windows Search With UltraSearch Scan News With NY Times Article Skimmer SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss how Razor enables you to both implicitly and explicitly define code nuggets within your view templates, and walkthrough some code examples of each of them.  Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post. Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a collection of products and output a <ul> list of product names that link to their corresponding product pages: When run, the above code generates output like below: Notice above how we were able to embed two code nuggets within the content of the foreach loop.  One of them outputs the name of the Product, and the other embeds the ProductID within a hyperlink.  Notice that we didn’t have to explicitly wrap these code-nuggets - Razor was instead smart enough to implicitly identify where the code began and ended in both of these situations.  How Razor Enables Implicit Code Nuggets Razor does not define its own language.  Instead, the code you write within Razor code nuggets is standard C# or VB.  This allows you to re-use your existing language skills, and avoid having to learn a customized language grammar. The Razor parser has smarts built into it so that whenever possible you do not need to explicitly mark the end of C#/VB code nuggets you write.  This makes coding more fluid and productive, and enables a nice, clean, concise template syntax.  Below are a few scenarios that Razor supports where you can avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/end of a code nugget, and instead have Razor implicitly identify the code nugget scope for you: Property Access Razor allows you to output a variable value, or a sub-property on a variable that is referenced via “dot” notation: You can also use “dot” notation to access sub-properties multiple levels deep: Array/Collection Indexing: Razor allows you to index into collections or arrays: Calling Methods: Razor also allows you to invoke methods: Notice how for all of the scenarios above how we did not have to explicitly end the code nugget.  Razor was able to implicitly identify the end of the code block for us. Razor’s Parsing Algorithm for Code Nuggets The below algorithm captures the core parsing logic we use to support “@” expressions within Razor, and to enable the implicit code nugget scenarios above: Parse an identifier - As soon as we see a character that isn't valid in a C# or VB identifier, we stop and move to step 2 Check for brackets - If we see "(" or "[", go to step 2.1., otherwise, go to step 3  Parse until the matching ")" or "]" (we track nested "()" and "[]" pairs and ignore "()[]" we see in strings or comments) Go back to step 2 Check for a "." - If we see one, go to step 3.1, otherwise, DO NOT ACCEPT THE "." as code, and go to step 4 If the character AFTER the "." is a valid identifier, accept the "." and go back to step 1, otherwise, go to step 4 Done! Differentiating between code and content Step 3.1 is a particularly interesting part of the above algorithm, and enables Razor to differentiate between scenarios where an identifier is being used as part of the code statement, and when it should instead be treated as static content: Notice how in the snippet above we have ? and ! characters at the end of our code nuggets.  These are both legal C# identifiers – but Razor is able to implicitly identify that they should be treated as static string content as opposed to being part of the code expression because there is whitespace after them.  This is pretty cool and saves us keystrokes. Explicit Code Nuggets in Razor Razor is smart enough to implicitly identify a lot of code nugget scenarios.  But there are still times when you want/need to be more explicit in how you scope the code nugget expression.  The @(expression) syntax allows you to do this: You can write any C#/VB code statement you want within the @() syntax.  Razor will treat the wrapping () characters as the explicit scope of the code nugget statement.  Below are a few scenarios where we could use the explicit code nugget feature: Perform Arithmetic Calculation/Modification: You can perform arithmetic calculations within an explicit code nugget: Appending Text to a Code Expression Result: You can use the explicit expression syntax to append static text at the end of a code nugget without having to worry about it being incorrectly parsed as code: Above we have embedded a code nugget within an <img> element’s src attribute.  It allows us to link to images with URLs like “/Images/Beverages.jpg”.  Without the explicit parenthesis, Razor would have looked for a “.jpg” property on the CategoryName (and raised an error).  By being explicit we can clearly denote where the code ends and the text begins. Using Generics and Lambdas Explicit expressions also allow us to use generic types and generic methods within code expressions – and enable us to avoid the <> characters in generics from being ambiguous with tag elements. One More Thing….Intellisense within Attributes We have used code nuggets within HTML attributes in several of the examples above.  One nice feature supported by the Razor code editor within Visual Studio is the ability to still get VB/C# intellisense when doing this. Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an implicit code nugget within an <a> href=”” attribute: Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an explicit code nugget embedded in the middle of a <img> src=”” attribute: Notice how we are getting full code intellisense for both scenarios – despite the fact that the code expression is embedded within an HTML attribute (something the existing .aspx code editor doesn’t support).  This makes writing code even easier, and ensures that you can take advantage of intellisense everywhere. Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s ability to implicitly scope code nuggets reduces the amount of typing you need to perform, and leaves you with really clean code. When necessary, you can also explicitly scope code expressions using a @(expression) syntax to provide greater clarity around your intent, as well as to disambiguate code statements from static markup. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning to use a relational database? Yes, you’ve played with Access a bit, but now your employer or college instructor has charged you with becoming proficient with Oracle database. Here’s 10 reasons why I think Oracle SQL Developer is the perfect vehicle to help get you started. 1. It’s free No need to break into one of these… No start-up costs, no need to wrangle budget dollars from your company. Students don’t have any money after books and lab fees anyway. And most employees don’t like having to ask for ‘special’ software anyway. So avoid all of that and make sure the free stuff doesn’t suit your needs first. Upgrades are available on a regular base, also at no cost, and support is freely available via our public forums. 2. It will run pretty much anywhere Windows – check. OSX (Apple) – check. Unix – check. Linux – check. No need to start up a windows VM to run your Windows-only software in your lab machine. 3. Anyone can install it There’s no installer, no registry to be updated, no admin privs to be obtained. If you can download and extract files to your machine or USB storage device, you can run it. You can be up and running with SQL Developer in under 5 minutes. Here’s a video tutorial to see how to get started. 4. It’s ubiquitous I admit it, I learned a new word yesterday and I wanted an excuse to use it. SQL Developer’s everywhere. It’s had over 2,500,000 downloads in the past year, and is the one of the most downloaded items from OTN. This means if you need help, there’s someone sitting nearby you that can assist, and since they’re in the same tool as you, they’ll be speaking the same language. 5. Simple User Interface Up-up-down-down-Left-right-left-right-A-B-A-B-START will get you 30 lives, but you already knew that, right? You connect, you see your objects, you click on your objects. Or, you can use the worksheet to write your queries and programs in. There’s only one toolbar, and just a few buttons. If you’re like me, video games became less fun when each button had 6 action items mapped to it. I just want the good ole ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘SELECT’, and ‘START’ controls. If you’re new to Oracle, you shouldn’t have the double-workload of learning a new complicated tool as well. 6. It’s not a ‘black box’ Click through your objects, but also get the SQL that drives the GUI As you use the wizards to accomplish tasks for you, you can view the SQL statement being generated on your behalf. Just because you have a GUI, doesn’t mean you’re ceding your responsibility to learn the underlying code that makes the database work. 7. It’s four tools in one It’s not just a query tool. Maybe you need to design a data model first? Or maybe you need to migrate your Sybase ASE database to Oracle for a new project? Or maybe you need to create some reports? SQL Developer does all of that. So once you get comfortable with one part of the tool, the others will be much easier to pick up as your needs change. 8. Great learning resources available Videos, blogs, hands-on learning labs – you name it, we got it. Why wait for someone to train you, when you can train yourself at your own pace? 9. You can use it to teach yourself SQL Instead of being faced with the white-screen-of-panic, you can visually build your queries by dragging and dropping tables and views into the Query Builder. Yes, ‘just like Access’ – only better. And as you build your query, toggle to the Worksheet panel and see the SQL statement. Again, SQL Developer is not a black box. If you prefer to learn by trial and error, the worksheet will attempt to suggest the next bit of your SQL statement with it’s completion insight feature. And if you have syntax errors, those will be highlighted – just like your misspelled words in your favorite word processor. 10. It scales to match your experience level You won’t be a n00b forever. In 6-8 months, when you’re ready to tackle something a bit more complicated, like XML DB or Oracle Spatial, the tool is already there waiting on you. No need to go out and find the ‘advanced’ tool. 11. Wait, you said this was a ‘Top 10′ list? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m using this ‘trick’ to get you to continue reading because I’m going to say something you might not want to hear. Are you ready? Tools won’t replace experience, failure, hard work, and training. Just because you have the keys to the car, doesn’t mean you’re ready to head out on the race track. While SQL Developer reduces the barriers to entry, it does not completely remove them. Many experienced folks simply do not like tools. Rather, they don’t like the people that pick up tools without the know-how to properly use them. If you don’t understand what ‘TRUNCATE’ means, don’t try it out. Try picking up a book first. Of course, it’s very nice to have your own sandbox to play in, so you don’t upset the other children. That’s why I really like our Dev Days Database Virtual Box image. It’s your own database to learn and experiment with.

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• Tools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress Blog

  - by Matthew Guay

  Now that you’ve got a nice blog, you want to do more with it and start posting content.  Here we look at some tools that will allow you to post directly to your WordPress blog. Writing a new blog post is easy with WordPress as we saw in our previous post about Starting your own WordPress blog.  The web editor gives you a lot of features and even lets you edit your post’s source code if you enjoy hacking HTML.  There are other tools that will allow you to post content, here we look at how you can post with dedicated apps, browser plugins, and even by email. Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer (part of the Windows Live Essentials Suite) is a great app for posting content to your blog.  This free program for Microsoft lets you post content to a variety of blogging services, including Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, and of course WordPress.  You can write blog posts directly from its Word-like editor, complete with pictures and advanced formatting.  Even if you’re offline, you can still write posts and save them for when you’re online again. For more information about installing Live writer, check out our article on how to Install Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7. Once Live Writer is installed, open it to add your blog.  If you already had Live Writer installed and configured for a blog, you can add your new blog, too.  Just click your blog’s name in the top right corner, and select “Add blog account”. Select “Other blog service” to add your WordPress blog to Writer, and click Next.   Enter your blog’s web address, and your username and password.  Check Remember my password so you don’t have to enter it every time you write something. Writer will analyze your blog and setup your account. During the setup process it may ask to post a temporary post.  This will let you preview blog posts using your blog’s real theme, which is helpful, so click Yes. Finally, add your Blog’s name, and click Finish. You can now use the rich editor to write and add content to a new blog post.   Select the Preview tab to see how your post will look on your blog… Or, if you’re a HTML geek, select the Source tab to edit the code of your blog post. From the bottom of the window, you can choose categories, insert tags, and even schedule the post to publish on a different day.  Live Writer is fully integrated with WordPress; you’re not missing anything by using the desktop editor. If you want to edit a post you’ve already published, click the Open button and select the post.  You can chose and edit any post, including ones you published via the web interface or other editors. Add Multimedia Content to your Posts with Live Writer Back in the Edit tab, you can add pictures, videos and more from the sidebar.  Select what you want to insert. Pictures If you insert a picture, you can add many nice borders and designs to it. Or, you can even add artistic effects from the Effects tab in the sidebar. Photo Gallery If you want to post several pictures, say some of your vacation shots, then inserting a picture gallery may be the best option.  Select Insert Photo Gallery in the sidebar, and then choose the pictures you want in the gallery. Once the gallery is inserted, you can choose from several styles to showcase your pictures. When you post the blog, you will be asked to sign in with your Windows Live ID as the gallery pictures will be stored in the free Skydrive storage service. Your blog readers can see the preview of your pictures directly on your blog, and then can view each individual picture, download them, or see a slideshow online via the link. Video If you want to add a video to your blog post, select Video from the sidebar as above.  You can select a video that’s already online, or you can choose a new video from file and upload it via YouTube directly from Windows Live Writer.   Note that you will have to sign in with your YouTube account to upload videos to YouTube, so if you’re not logged in you’ll be prompted to do so when you click Insert. Geek Tip:  If you ever want to copy your Live Writer settings to another computer, check out our article on how to Backup Your Windows Live Writer Settings. Microsoft Office Word Word 2007 and 2010 also let you post content directly to your blog.  This is especially nice if you’ve already typed up a document and think it would be good on your Blog as well.  Check out our in-depth tutorial on posting blog posts via Word 2007 using Word 2007 as a blogging tool. This works in Word 2010 too, except the Office Orb has been replaced by the new Backstage view.  So, in Word 2010, to start a new blog post, click File \ New then select Blog post.  Proceed as you would in Word 2007 to add your blog settings and post the content you want. Or, if you’ve already written a document and want to post it, select File \ Share (or Save and Send in the final version of Word 2010), and then click Publish as Blog Post.  If you haven’t setup your blog account yet, set it up as shown in the Word 2007 article. Post Via Email Most of us use email daily, and already have our favorite email app or service.  Whether on your desktop or mobile phone, it’s easy to create rich emails and add content.  WordPress lets you generate a unique email address that you can use to easily post content and email to your blog.  Just compose your email with the subject as the title of your post, and send it to this unique address.  Your new post will be up in minutes. To active this feature, click the My Account button in the top menu bar in your WordPress.com account, and select My Blogs. Click the Enable button under Post by Email beside your blog’s name.   Now you’ll have a private email you can use to post to your blog.  Anything you send to this email will be posted as a new post.  If you think your email may be compromised, click Regenerate to get a new publishing email address. Any email program or webapp now is a blog post editor.  Feel free to use rich formatting or insert pictures; it all comes through great.  This is also a great way to post to your blog from your mobile device.  Whether you’re using webmail or a dedicated email client on your phone, you can now blog from anywhere.   Mobile Applications WordPress also offer dedicated applications for blogging directly from your mobile device.  You can write new posts, edit existing ones, and manage comments all from your Smartphone.  Currently they offer apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.  Check them out at the link below. Conclusion Whether you want to write from your browser or email a post to your blog, WordPress is flexible enough to work right along with your preferences.  However you post, you can be sure that it will look professional and be easily accessible with your WordPress blog. Download Windows Live Writer Download WordPress apps for your mobile device Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Set a Future Date for a Post in WordPressAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogFuture Date a Post in Windows Live WriterHow To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPressUsing Word 2007 as a Blogging Tool TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• Solaris 10 branded zone VM Templates for Solaris 11 on OTN

  - by jsavit

  Early this year I wrote the article Ours Goes To 11 which describes the ability to import Solaris 10 systems into a "Solaris 10 branded zone" under Oracle Solaris 11. I did this using Solaris 11 Express, and the capability remains in Solaris 11 with only slight changes. This important tool lets you painlessly inhaling a Solaris Container from Solaris 10 or entire Solaris 10 systems ("the global zone") into virtualized environments on a Solaris 11 OS. Just recently, Oracle provided Oracle VM Templates for Oracle Solaris 10 Zones to let you create Solaris 10 branded zones for Solaris 11 even if you don't currently have access to install media or a running Solaris 10 system. To use this, just download the Oracle VM Template for Oracle Solaris Zone 10 from OTN at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/virtual-machines-1355605.html. This page contains images of Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 (the recent update to Solaris 10) in SPARC and x86 formats suitable for creating branded zones. The same page also has a VirtualBox image you can download for a complete Solaris 10 install in a guest virtual machine you can run on any host OS that supports VirtualBox. Both sets of downloads provide a quick - and extremely easy - way to set up a virtual Solaris 10 environment. In the case of the Oracle VM Templates, they illustrate several advanced features of Solaris 11. To start, just go to the above link, download the template for the hardware platform (SPARC or x86) you want, and download the README file also linked from that page. Install prerequisites The README file tells you to install the prerequisite Solaris 11 package that implements the Solaris 10 brand. Then you can install instances of zones with that brand. # pkg install pkg:/system/zones/brand/brand-solaris10 Packages to install: 1 Create boot environment: No Create backup boot environment: Yes DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 1/1 44/44 0.4/0.4 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 74/74 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 That took only a few minutes, and didn't require a reboot. Install the Solaris 10 zone Now it's time to run the downloaded template file. First make it executable via the chmod command, of course. I found that (unlike stated in the README) there was no need to rename the downloaded file to remove the .bin. When you run it you provide several parameters to describe the zone configuration: -a IP address - the IP address and optional netmask for the zone. This is the only mandatory parameter. -z zonename - the name of the zone you would like to create. -i interface - the package will create an exclusive-IP zone using a virtual NIC (vnic) based on this physical interface. In my case, I have a NIC called rge0. -p PATH - specifies the path in which you want the zoneroot to be placed. In my case, I have a ZFS dataset mounted at /zones, and this will create a zoneroot at /zones/s10u10. Kicking it off, you will see a copyright message, and then messages showing progress building the zone, which only takes a few minutes. # ./solaris-10u10-x86.bin -p /zones -a 192.168.1.100 -i rge0 -z s10u10 ... ... Checking disk-space for extraction Ok Extracting in /export/home/CDimages/s10zone/bootimage.ihaqvh ... 100% [===============================] Checking data integrity Ok Checking platform compatibility The host and the image do not have the same Solaris release: host Solaris release: 5.11 image Solaris release: 5.10 Will create a Solaris 10 branded zone. Warning: could not find a defaultrouter Zone won't have any defaultrouter configured IMAGE: ./solaris-10u10-x86.bin ZONE: s10u10 ZONEPATH: /zones/s10u10 INTERFACE: rge0 VNIC: vnicZBI13379 MAC ADDR: 2:8:20:5c:1a:cc IP ADDR: 192.168.1.100 NETMASK: 255.255.255.0 DEFROUTER: NONE TIMEZONE: US/Arizona Checking disk-space for installation Ok Installing in /zones/s10u10 ... 100% [===============================] Using a static exclusive-IP Attaching s10u10 Booting s10u10 Waiting for boot to complete booting... booting... booting... Zone s10u10 booted The zone's root password has been set using the root password of the local host. You can change the zone's root password to further harden the security of the zone: being root, log into the zone from the local host with the command 'zlogin s10u10'. Once logged in, change the root password with the command 'passwd'. The nifty part in my opinion (besides being so easy), is that the zone was created as an exclusive-IP zone on a virtual NIC. This network configuration lets you enforce traffic isolation from other zones, enforce network Quality of Service, and even let the zone set its own characteristics like IP address and packet size. Independence of the zone's network characteristics from the global zone is one of the enhancements in Solaris 10 that make it easier to consolidate zones while preserving their autonomy, yet provide control in a consolidated environment. Let's see what the virtual network environment looks like by issuing commands from the Solaris 11 global zone. First I'll use Old School ifconfig, and then I'll use the new ipadm and dladm commands. # ifconfig -a4 lo0: flags=2001000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,VIRTUAL> mtu 8232 index 1 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 rge0: flags=1004943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,MULTICAST,DHCP,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2 inet 192.168.1.3 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 ether 0:14:d1:18:ac:bc vboxnet0: flags=201000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,CoS> mtu 1500 index 3 inet 192.168.56.1 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.56.255 ether 8:0:27:f8:62:1c # dladm show-phys LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE yge0 Ethernet unknown 0 unknown yge0 yge1 Ethernet unknown 0 unknown yge1 rge0 Ethernet up 1000 full rge0 vboxnet0 Ethernet up 1000 full vboxnet0 # dladm show-link LINK CLASS MTU STATE OVER yge0 phys 1500 unknown -- yge1 phys 1500 unknown -- rge0 phys 1500 up -- vboxnet0 phys 1500 up -- vnicZBI13379 vnic 1500 up rge0 s10u10/vnicZBI13379 vnic 1500 up rge0 s10u10/net0 vnic 1500 up rge0 # dladm show-vnic LINK OVER SPEED MACADDRESS MACADDRTYPE VID vnicZBI13379 rge0 1000 2:8:20:5c:1a:cc random 0 s10u10/vnicZBI13379 rge0 1000 2:8:20:5c:1a:cc random 0 s10u10/net0 rge0 1000 2:8:20:9d:d0:79 random 0 # ipadm show-addr ADDROBJ TYPE STATE ADDR lo0/v4 static ok 127.0.0.1/8 rge0/_a dhcp ok 192.168.1.3/24 vboxnet0/_a static ok 192.168.56.1/24 lo0/v6 static ok ::1/128 Log into the zone The install step already booted the zone, so lets log into it. Notice how you have to be appropriately privileged to log into a zone. This is my home system so I'm being a bit cavalier, but in a production environment you can give granular control of who can login to which zones. Voila! a Solaris 10 environment under a Solaris 11 kernel. Notice the output from the uname -a and ifconfig commands, and output from a ping to a nearby host. $ zlogin s10u10 zlogin: You lack sufficient privilege to run this command (all privs required) savit@home:~$ sudo zlogin s10u10 Password: [Connected to zone 's10u10' pts/5] Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.10 Generic Patch January 2005 # uname -a SunOS s10u10 5.10 Generic_Virtual i86pc i386 i86pc # ifconfig -a4 lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 vnicZBI13379: flags=1000843 mtu 1500 index 2 inet 192.168.1.100 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 ether 2:8:20:5c:1a:cc # bash bash-3.2# ifconfig -a lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 vnicZBI13379: flags=1000843 mtu 1500 index 2 inet 192.168.1.100 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 ether 2:8:20:5c:1a:cc bash-3.2# ping 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.2 is alive For fun, I configured Apache (setting its configuration file in /etc/apache2) and brought it up. Easy - took just a few minutes. bash-3.2# svcs apache2 STATE STIME FMRI disabled 12:38:46 svc:/network/http:apache2 bash-3.2# svcadm enable apache2 Summary In just a few minutes, I built a functioning virtual Solaris 10 environment under by Solaris 11 system. It was... easy! While I can still do it the manual way (creating and using a system archive), this is a low-effort way to create a Solaris 10 zone on Solaris 11.

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