Search Results

Search found 25669 results on 1027 pages for 'ill be back'.

Page 114/1027 | < Previous Page | 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121  | Next Page >

• WhatsApp &amp; Tasker for Android &ndash; Read &amp; Write messages

  - by Shaurya Anand

  So, I finally gave up on all my previous the Microsoft Mobile/Phone OS devices and made my switch to Android this year. I am using my Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 with CyanogenMod 9.1.0 (http://get.cm/get/jenkins/7086/cm-9.1.0-n7000.zip) and ClockworkMod 6.0.1.2 (http://download2.clockworkmod.com/recoveries/recovery-clockwork-6.0.1.2-n7000.zip) since August this year and I am so happy with the performance and the flexibility it offers me. As a software developer by profession, I would expect most of my gadget to be highly customizable and programmable (one time or at intervals) to suit my needs as close as it can. I was introduced to Automation for Android – Tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en) via reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/tasker) and the word ‘automation’ was enough for me to dive right into this app. Only automation that I did earlier was switching profiles depending on location on there phones. And now, just imagine a complete set of possibilities that can be automate on the phone or via the phone. I did my research and found a couple of other tools that do the same/as close as what Tasker can do and few of them are even free. There’s one even by Microsoft called on{X} (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.onx.app&hl=en). Microsoft’s on{X} really caught my eye. You can write code for your phone on the web application by them, deploy it on your phone and even trace the flow all using your PC. Really brilliant, I love the fact that it’s all JavaScript. Here comes the but, it is still very very young and it’s policy of accessing my News Feed on Facebook is not something that I can not digest. On{X} is good, but as I said earlier, the API is not very mature and hence, I gave up on it. I bought Tasker, the best 5,00 € I spent in ages and I want to talk about it in this post. I am still a “noob” while operating this tool, but I tried my shot at automating WhatsApp (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp&hl=en), a popular messenger for various platform. The requirement for the automation is that, if I send a WhatsApp ‘wru’ message to the phone, it should respond back giving the location and battery level of my phone. It could be useful, if you like to locate your misplaced phone or automatically reply to your partner/friend, honestly, I don’t know what you will use it - through this post, I am just introducing automating WhatsApp using Tasker. Before we begin, the following script only works when your phone is rooted as we will be accessing the WhatsApp database and type some special characters like ‘:’. Let’s follow the code line by line: Profile:         Location request from XYZ. (12) // Name of your profile. Event:         Notification [ Owner Application:WhatsApp Title:* ] // When a new notification comes from WhatsApp, this event is fired. Read the end note, if you face problems with Chrome app after enabling Tasker accessibility. Enter:         A1: Run Shell [ Command:sqlite3 // We will access the WhatsApp database and check if the message comes from designated phone number or not. We mustn’t reply to every message.                 /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db "SELECT _id, data FROM                  messages WHERE key_from_me='0' AND key_remote_jid LIKE '%XXXXXXXXXXX%' // Replace XXXXXXXXXXX with the phone number of your message sender.                 ORDER BY _id DESC LIMIT 1;" Timeout (Seconds):10 Use Root:On Store // I made a timeout for 10 seconds, if in case WhatsApp is busy accessing the database.                 Result In:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ] // Store the read Id and the last message on to the variable %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ         A2: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ~R .*[wW][rR][uU].* ] // Check if the pattern of the message is correct and we are all set to send the location.                 A3: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ !~ %WHATSAPP_LASTREQ ] // Verify that the message is different from the last request. Remember every message has a unique Id.                         A4: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request... Text:Sending location // Just a notification that the location message is being prepared.                                 to Krati Gupta... Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:On Priority:3 ] // Make a note it is a permanent notification, we will clear it later.                         A5: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Disabled // I am disabling the pattern lock, that I use using the plugin Secure Settings.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure // You can download the plugin from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin&hl=en                                 Settings ]                         A6: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Disabled // Disable the keygaurd, it is useful, when your phone is on lock and you want to automate everything, even the typing.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A7: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Enabled // Pretty clear, turn on the GPS and get location at A8                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A8: AutoShortcut [ Configuration:WhatsApp: Some One // I am using AutoShortcut plugin (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut) to start WhatsApp with the indented recipient.                                 Package:com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut Name:AutoShortcut ] // Replace Some One, actually choose it from the plugin, the right recipient.                         A9: Get Location [ Source:Any Timeout (Seconds):30 Continue Task // I am getting the location, timeout is 30 seconds, adjust it accordingly.                                 Immediately:Off Keep Tracking:Off ]                         A10: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Screen Dim // Now, this extension of the plugin Secure Settings, wakes your device so that you can type out the string on the WhatsApp app.                                 5 Seconds Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin                                 Name:Secure Settings ]                         A11: Run Shell [ Command:input text // Now, I am using the shell script to type the text to the window, because the ‘:’ while not be typed from the Type task in Tasker.                                 LOCATION:maps.google.com/maps?q=%LOC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On // And also, this is way faster, but remember you need root for this, not for the other way of typing.                                 Store Result In: ]                         A12: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] // Focus the Send button                         A13: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] // And press it.                         A14: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] // Get back to the typing box.                         A15: Run Shell [ Command:input text LOCATION_ACCURACY:%LOCACC Timeout                                 (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ]                         A16: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ]                         A17: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ]                         A18: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ]                         A19: Run Shell [ Command:input text BATTERY_LEVEL:%BATT% Timeout // I am adding Battery level in my case as well.                                 (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ]                         A20: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ]                         A21: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ]                         A22: Variable Set [ Name:%WHATSAPP_LASTREQ To:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ Do // And now, we say, request is done.                                 Maths:Off Append:Off ]                         A23: Button [ Button:Back ] // I am exiting the WhatsApp nicely and not killing it. If you are the murderer kind, kill it, just know, you don’t have any place in the heaven.                         A24: Button [ Button:Back ]                         A25: Notify Cancel [ Title: Warn Not Exist:Off ] // Remove the permanent notification.                         A26: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request Text:Location sent // Make a temporary notification, and say, location is sent.                                 successfully. Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:Off Priority:3 ]                                                         A27: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Disabled // Disable all the horrible things we turned on earlier.                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A28: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Enabled                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                         A29: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Enabled                                 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure                                 Settings ]                 A30: End If         A31: End If Download this Task from here: http://db.tt/9vRmbhyb That’s it in the above small example – you can read/write messages from/to WhatsApp app. I am using n7000-cm9.1-cwr6. Oh yea, and if you are having the Talkback auto enabled for Chrome browser, you need to turn Off the Web scripts to run. Tasker is amazing, I have automated a lot of tasks using this tool. I will share a few none generic ones with you in my coming post here.

  Read the article

• Pet Peeves with the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

  - by Bil Simser

  Have you ever noticed how something things just gnaw at your very being. This is the case with the WP7 marketplace, the Zune software, and the things that drive me batshit crazy with a side of fries. To go. I wanted to share. XBox Live is Not the Centre of the Universe Okay, it’s fine that the Zune software has an XBox live tag for games so can see them clearly but do we really need to have it shoved down our throats. On every click? Click on Games in the marketplace: The first thing that it defaults to on the filters on the right is XBox Live: Okay. Fine. However if you change it (say to Paid) then click onto a title when you come back from that title is the filter still set to Paid? No. It’s back to XBox Live again. Really? Give us a break. If you change to any filter on any other genre then click on the selected title, it doesn’t revert back to anything. It stays on the selection you picked. Let’s be fair here. The Games genre should behave just like every other one. If I pick Paid then when I come back to the list please remember that. Double Dipping On the subject of XBox Live titles, Microsoft (and developers who have an agreement with Microsoft to produce Live titles, which generally rules out indie game developers) is double dipping with regards to exposure of their titles. Here’s the Puzzle and Trivia Game section on the Marketplace for XBox Live titles: And here’s the same category filtered on Paid titles: See the problem? Two indie titles while the rest are XBox Live ones. So while XBL has it’s filter, they also get to showcase their wares in the Paid and Free filters as well. If you’re going to have an XBox Live filter then use it and stop pushing down indie titles until they’re off the screen (on some genres this is already the case). Free and Paid titles should be just that and not include XBox Live ones. If you’re really stoked that people can’t find the Free XBox Live titles vs. the paid ones, then create a Free XBox Live filter and a Paid XBox Live filter. I don’t think we would mind much. Whose Trial is it Anyways? You might notice apps in the marketplace with titles like “My Fart App Professional Lite” or “Silicon Lamb Spleen Builder Free”. When you submit and app to the marketplace it can either be free or paid. If it’s a paid app you also have the option to submit it with Trial capabilities. It’s up to you to decide what you offer in the trial version but trial versions can be purchased from within the app so after someone trys out your app (for free) and wants to unlock the Super Secret Obama Spy Ring Level, they can just go to the marketplace from your app (if you built that functionality in) and upgrade to the paid version. However it creates a rift of sorts when it comes to visibility. Some developers go the route of the paid app with a trial version, others decide to submit *two* apps instead of one. One app is the “Free” or “Lite” verions and the other is the paid version. Why go to the hassle of submitting two apps when you can just create a trial version in the same app? Again, visibility. There’s no way to tell Paid apps with Trial versions and ones without (it’s an option, you don’t have to provide trial versions, although I think it’s a good idea). However there is a way to see the Free apps from the Paid ones so some submit the two apps and have the Free version have links to buy the paid one (again through the Marketplace tasks in the API). What we as developers need for visibility is a new filter. Trial. That’s it. It would simply filter on Paid apps that have trial capabilities and surface up those apps just like the free ones. If Microsoft added this filter to the marketplace, it would eliminate the need for people to submit their “Free” and “Lite” versions and make it easier for the developer not to have to maintain two systems. I mean, is it really that hard? Can’t be any more difficult than the XBox Live Filter that’s already there. Location is Everything The last thing on my bucket list is about location. When I launch Zune I’m running in my native location setting, Canada. What’s great is that I navigate to the Travel Tools section where I have one of my apps and behold the splendour that I see: There are my apps in the number 1 and number 4 slot for top selling in that category. I show it to my wife to make up for the sleepless nights writing this stuff and we dance around and celebrate. Then I change my location on my operation system to United States and re-launch Zune. WTF? My flight app has slipped to the 10th spot (I’m only showing 4 across here out of the 7 in Zune) and my border check app that was #1 is now in the 32nd spot! End of celebration. Not only is relevance being looked at here, I value the comments people make on may apps as do most developers. I want to respond to them and show them that I’m listening. The next version of my border app will provide multiple camera angles. However when I’m running in my native Canada location, I only see two reviews. Changing over to United States I see fourteen! While there are tools out there to provide with you a unified view, I shouldn’t have to rely on them. My own Zune desktop software should allow me to see everything. I realize that some developers will submit an app and only target it for some locations and that’s their choice. However I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see what apps are ahead of mine, or see people comments and ratings. Another proposal. Either unify the marketplace (i.e. when I’m looking at it show me everything combined) or let me choose a filter. I think the first option might be difficult as you’re trying to average out top selling apps across all markets and have to deal with some apps that have been omitted from some markets. Although I think you could come up with a set of use cases that would handle that, maybe that’s too much work. At the very least, let us developers view the markets in a drop down or something from within the Zune desktop. Having to shut down Zune, change our location, and re-launch Zune to see other perspectives is just too onerous. A Call to Action These are just one mans opinion. Do you agree? Disagree? Feel hungry for a bacon sandwich? Let everyone know via the comments below. Perhaps someone from Microsoft will be reading and take some of these ideas under advisement. Maybe not, but at least let’s get the word out that we really want to see some change. Egypt can do it, why not WP7 developers!

  Read the article

• ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0

  - by James Michael Hare

  I had always been a fan of ANTS products (Reflector is absolutely invaluable, and their performance profiler is great as well – very easy to use!), so I was curious to see what the ANTS Memory Profiler could show me. Background While a performance profiler will track how much time is typically spent in each unit of code, a memory profiler gives you much more detail on how and where your memory is being consumed and released in a program. As an example, I’d been working on a data access layer at work to call a market data web service.  This web service would take a list of symbols to quote and would return back the quote data.  To help consolidate the thousands of web requests per second we get and reduce load on the web services, we implemented a 5-second cache of quote data.  Not quite long enough to where customers will typically notice a quote go “stale”, but just long enough to be able to collapse multiple quote requests for the same symbol in a short period of time. A 5-second cache may not sound like much, but it actually pays off by saving us roughly 42% of our web service calls, while still providing relatively up-to-date information.  The question is whether or not the extra memory involved in maintaining the cache was worth it, so I decided to fire up the ANTS Memory Profiler and take a look at memory usage. First Impressions The main thing I’ve always loved about the ANTS tools is their ease of use.  Pretty much everything is right there in front of you in a way that makes it easy for you to find what you need with little digging required.  I’ve worked with other, older profilers before (that shall remain nameless other than to hint it was created by a very large chip maker) where it was a mind boggling experience to figure out how to do simple tasks. Not so with AMP.  The opening dialog is very straightforward.  You can choose from here whether to debug an executable, a web application (either in IIS or from VS’s web development server), windows services, etc. So I chose a .NET Executable and navigated to the build location of my test harness.  Then began profiling. At this point while the application is running, you can see a chart of the memory as it ebbs and wanes with allocations and collections.  At any given point in time, you can take snapshots (to compare states) zoom in, or choose to stop at any time.  Snapshots Taking a snapshot also gives you a breakdown of the managed memory heaps for each generation so you get an idea how many objects are staying around for extended periods of time (as an object lives and survives collections, it gets promoted into higher generations where collection becomes less frequent). Generating a snapshot brings up an analysis view with very handy graphs that show your generation sizes.  Almost all my memory is in Generation 1 in the managed memory component of the first graph, which is good news to me, because Gen 2 collections are much rarer.  I once3 made the mistake once of caching data for 30 minutes and found it didn’t get collected very quick after I released my reference because it had been promoted to Gen 2 – doh! Analysis It looks like (from the second pie chart) that the majority of the allocations were in the string class.  This also is expected for me because the majority of the memory allocated is in the web service responses, so it doesn’t seem the entities I’m adapting to (to prevent being too tightly coupled to the web service proxy classes, which can change easily out from under me) aren’t taking a significant portion of memory. I also appreciate that they have clear summary text in key places such as “No issues with large object heap fragmentation were detected”.  For novice users, this type of summary information can be critical to getting them to use a tool and develop a good working knowledge of it. There is also a handy link at the bottom for “What to look for on the summary” which loads a web page of help on key points to look for. Clicking over to the session overview, it’s easy to compare the samples at each snapshot to see how your memory is growing, shrinking, or staying relatively the same.  Looking at my snapshots, I’m pretty happy with the fact that memory allocation and heap size seems to be fairly stable and in control: Once again, you can check on the large object heap, generation one heap, and generation two heap across each snapshot to spot trends. Back on the analysis tab, we can go to the [Class List] button to get an idea what classes are making up the majority of our memory usage.  As was little surprise to me, System.String was the clear majority of my allocations, though I found it surprising that the System.Reflection.RuntimeMehtodInfo came in second.  I was curious about this, so I selected it and went into the [Instance Categorizer].  This view let me see where these instances to RuntimeMehtodInfo were coming from. So I scrolled back through the graph, and discovered that these were being held by the System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactoryRefCache and I was satisfied this was just an artifact of my WCF proxy. I also like that down at the bottom of the Instance Categorizer it gives you a series of filters and offers to guide you on which filter to use based on the problem you are trying to find.  For example, if I suspected a memory leak, I might try to filter for survivors in growing classes.  This means that for instances of a class that are growing in memory (more are being created than cleaned up), which ones are survivors (not collected) from garbage collection.  This might allow me to drill down and find places where I’m holding onto references by mistake and not freeing them! Finally, if you want to really see all your instances and who is holding onto them (preventing collection), you can go to the “Instance Retention Graph” which creates a graph showing what references are being held in memory and who is holding onto them. Visual Studio Integration Of course, VS has its own profiler built in – and for a free bundled profiler it is quite capable – but AMP gives a much cleaner and easier-to-use experience, and when you install it you also get the option of letting it integrate directly into VS. So once you go back into VS after installation, you’ll notice an ANTS menu which lets you launch the ANTS profiler directly from Visual Studio.   Clicking on one of these options fires up the project in the profiler immediately, allowing you to get right in.  It doesn’t integrate with the Visual Studio windows themselves (like the VS profiler does), but still the plethora of information it provides and the clear and concise manner in which it presents it makes it well worth it. Summary If you like the ANTS series of tools, you shouldn’t be disappointed with the ANTS Memory Profiler.  It was so easy to use that I was able to jump in with very little product knowledge and get the information I was looking it for. I’ve used other profilers before that came with 3-inch thick tomes that you had to read in order to get anywhere with the tool, and this one is not like that at all.  It’s built for your everyday developer to get in and find their problems quickly, and I like that! Tweet Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Memory,Profiler

  Read the article

• How to Tell a Hardware Problem From a Software Problem

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Your computer seems to be malfunctioning — it’s slow, programs are crashing or Windows may be blue-screening. Is your computer’s hardware failing, or does it have a software problem that you can fix on your own? This can actually be a bit tricky to figure out. Hardware problems and software problems can lead to the same symptoms — for example, frequent blue screens of death may be caused by either software or hardware problems. Computer is Slow We’ve all heard the stories — someone’s computer slows down over time because they install too much software that runs at startup or it becomes infected with malware. The person concludes that their computer is slowing down because it’s old, so they replace it. But they’re wrong. If a computer is slowing down, it has a software problem that can be fixed. Hardware problems shouldn’t cause your computer to slow down. There are some rare exceptions to this — perhaps your CPU is overheating and it’s downclocking itself, running slower to stay cooler — but most slowness is caused by software issues. Blue Screens Modern versions of Windows are much more stable than older versions of Windows. When used with reliable hardware with well-programmed drivers, a typical Windows computer shouldn’t blue-screen at all. If you are encountering frequent blue screens of death, there’s a good chance your computer’s hardware is failing. Blue screens could also be caused by badly programmed hardware drivers, however. If you just installed or upgraded hardware drivers and blue screens start, try uninstalling the drivers or using system restore — there may be something wrong with the drivers. If you haven’t done anything with your drivers recently and blue screens start, there’s a very good chance you have a hardware problem. Computer Won’t Boot If your computer won’t boot, you could have either a software problem or a hardware problem. Is Windows attempting to boot and failing part-way through the boot process, or does the computer no longer recognize its hard drive or not power on at all? Consult our guide to troubleshooting boot problems for more information. When Hardware Starts to Fail… Here are some common components that can fail and the problems their failures may cause: Hard Drive: If your hard drive starts failing, files on your hard drive may become corrupted. You may see long delays when you attempt to access files or save to the hard drive. Windows may stop booting entirely. CPU: A failing CPU may result in your computer not booting at all. If the CPU is overheating, your computer may blue-screen when it’s under load — for example, when you’re playing a demanding game or encoding video. RAM: Applications write data to your RAM and use it for short-term storage. If your RAM starts failing, an application may write data to part of the RAM, then later read it back and get an incorrect value. This can result in application crashes, blue screens, and file corruption. Graphics Card: Graphics card problems may result in graphical errors while rendering 3D content or even just while displaying your desktop. If the graphics card is overheating, it may crash your graphics driver or cause your computer to freeze while under load — for example, when playing demanding 3D games. Fans: If any of the fans fail in your computer, components may overheat and you may see the above CPU or graphics card problems. Your computer may also shut itself down abruptly so it doesn’t overheat any further and damage itself. Motherboard: Motherboard problems can be extremely tough to diagnose. You may see occasional blue screens or similar problems. Power Supply: A malfunctioning power supply is also tough to diagnose — it may deliver too much power to a component, damaging it and causing it to malfunction. If the power supply dies completely, your computer won’t power on and nothing will happen when you press the power button. Other common problems — for example, a computer slowing down — are likely to be software problems. It’s also possible that software problems can cause many of the above symptoms — malware that hooks deep into the Windows kernel can cause your computer to blue-screen, for example. The Only Way to Know For Sure We’ve tried to give you some idea of the difference between common software problems and hardware problems with the above examples. But it’s often tough to know for sure, and troubleshooting is usually a trial-and-error process. This is especially true if you have an intermittent problem, such as your computer blue-screening a few times a week. You can try scanning your computer for malware and running System Restore to restore your computer’s system software back to its previous working state, but these aren’t  guaranteed ways to fix software problems. The best way to determine whether the problem you have is a software or hardware one is to bite the bullet and restore your computer’s software back to its default state. That means reinstalling Windows or using the Refresh or reset feature on Windows 8. See whether the problem still persists after you restore its operating system to its default state. If you still see the same problem – for example, if your computer is blue-screening and continues to blue-screen after reinstalling Windows — you know you have a hardware problem and need to have your computer fixed or replaced. If the computer crashes or freezes while reinstalling Windows, you definitely have a hardware problem. Even this isn’t a completely perfect method — for example, you may reinstall Windows and install the same hardware drivers afterwards. If the hardware drivers are badly programmed, the blue-screens may continue. Blue screens of death aren’t as common on Windows these days — if you’re encountering them frequently, you likely have a hardware problem. Most blue screens you encounter will likely be caused by hardware issues. On the other hand, other common complaints like “my computer has slowed down” are easily fixable software problems. When in doubt, back up your files and reinstall Windows. Image Credit: Anders Sandberg on Flickr, comedy_nose on Flickr     

  Read the article

• Invoice from Godaddy with intent to defraud?

  - by Berliner

  Hi Webmasters I have received several email asking me to renew a domain name: REMINDER: Renew early for multiple years and lock in your savings! For your review, listed below are domain names and their expiration dates. F.....COM - Mar. 09, 2011 Since I lost the domain name long time ago and couldn't get it back I asked if it was available again. Goddady replyed: According to WHOIS the domain name is registered to a Japanese company with the expiry date: 2011-12-02. I wrote to Godaddy: According to your information the domain holder is a Japanese company as described below. Can you give me an explanation why you send me an email asking me to pay for a domain name which I do not own? (Expiration Date: 2011-12-02) I am just curious, I am sure there is no ill will on your part. Godaddy answered: Dear Sir or Madam, Thank you for contacting online support. This was just to let you know the domain is registered to someone else and who. Then today I got yet another invoice asking me to renew the same domain name once again: **REMINDER: Renew early for multiple years and lock in your savings! The product(s) listed below have expired or are at risk of expiring: Product NameNext Attempt Date.COM Domain Name Renewal - 1 Year (recurring)03/14/2011 F........COM You are at risk of losing the service(s) or product(s) listed above. Your products are currently set to renew manually – they will NOT be renewed automatically on the next attempt date.** The expiry date has now been changed from the 9 of March to the 14 March. Another party owns the domain name and further the domain name was never registered with Godaddy. This appears like a way to make a few buck on a unsuspecting customer, it might even be illegal. Any comment how to take this futher would be most welcome.

  Read the article

• winusb formatting and installation error, lost data storage on 32gb flash drive

  - by Cary Felton

  i recently purchased a pny brand 32gb usb drive to use for configuring a dual boot on my computer, and for hdd files backup. i also recently installed zorin os 6.1 as my main os, and then downloaded winusb for linux, and set it to install the iso for windows 8 release preview as the activation code is still good untill jan.2013, and there was an error on the installation. i rebooted the computer, plugged in the usb drive, and i went from 32gb usable space to somehow having a partitioned drive (mounted as two separate drives) one being 3.7gb, and the other being i believe 25gb or so... i then formatted the drive with gparted back to fat32, and it still read as a windows usb with the installation files on it still? so then i took my usb drive to my library which runs windows 8, i installed bootice, and completely reformatted my usb drive, and somehow it is usable, but still not perfect. it reads i only have 29.9gb usable space... i have already thought of the non usable area, and that doesnt account for this error as when i first bought the drive and plugged it in on linux, it read total drive space was 32.2 and exactly 32 was usable. somehow i am short by 2gb of space which is very critical for what i am doing. i love linux, i only needed windows for bluray playback with daplayer as it wont work well in wine, but if i keep losing space on my usb drives im afraid ill have to switch back. any help would be appreciated as i already visited pny's site, and they have no support for this issue, and im not that fond of partitions, file systems, or formatting.

  Read the article

• Why does my browser take me to Scour.com? (redirect virus)

  - by Paula DiTallo

  The "scour" or Rootkit.Win32.TDSS virus has a long history which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scour Here is the primary symptom: after searching for something in your web browser using google, one of the results that you click on redirects you to scour.com. If you've executed ClamWin, Malwarebytes, McAfee, Norton, etc. to find and isolate the virus without any luck--this isn't really a surprise, since this virus attaches to existing system drivers. I only know of one reliable package that will remove this without ill effects--like adding new spyware. This package is called TDSSKiller. I have seen multiple websites that claim to have this software available, but the one that I know is reliable is located here: http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/solutions?qid=208280684 Once you go to Kaspersky's tech support site, the TDSSKiller zip file is available for downloading. When you execute this software, you will be able to "cure" or repair the infected driver. Remember to jot down the name of the driver for future reference--should you need to reinstall the driver from a "same-as" working computer, or your install disk if the repair is ineffective. The driver that happened to get infected on my computer was the tcpip.sys driver. This caused my win sockets to loose their ip addresses. In most other instances, less critical drivers such as HDAudBus.sys are infected. In my case, I was not through correcting my computer problems until I corrected the broken WinSock issue and loaded an earlier version of the tcpip.sys driver from: C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 which I placed in: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers Don't forget to reboot your computer after your repair! Once you download TDSSKiller and cure/repair your infected driver(s), the redirect on google searches should disappear .

  Read the article

• mac, netbeans 6.8, c++, sdl, opengl: compilation problems

  - by ufk

  Hiya. I'm trying to properly compile a c++ opengl+sdl application using netbeans 6.8 under Snow Leopard 64-bit. I have libSDL 1.2.14 installed using macports. The script that I try to compile is the following: #ifdef WIN32 #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN #include <windows.h> #endif #if defined(__APPLE__) && defined(__MACH__) #include <OpenGL/gl.h> // Header File For The OpenGL32 Library #include <OpenGL/glu.h> // Header File For The GLu32 Library #else #include <GL/gl.h> // Header File For The OpenGL32 Library #include <GL/glu.h> // Header File For The GLu32 Library #endif #include "sdl/SDL.h" #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include "SDL/SDL_main.h" SDL_Surface *screen=NULL; GLfloat rtri; // Angle For The Triangle ( NEW ) GLfloat rquad; // Angle For The Quad ( NEW ) void InitGL(int Width, int Height) // We call this right after our OpenGL window is created. { glViewport(0, 0, Width, Height); glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // This Will Clear The Background Color To Black glClearDepth(1.0); // Enables Clearing Of The Depth Buffer glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); // The Type Of Depth Test To Do glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enables Depth Testing glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); // Enables Smooth Color Shading glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The Projection Matrix gluPerspective(45.0f,(GLfloat)Width/(GLfloat)Height,0.1f,100.0f); // Calculate The Aspect Ratio Of The Window glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); } /* The main drawing function. */ int DrawGLScene() { glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // Clear The Screen And The Depth Buffer glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The View glTranslatef(-1.5f,0.0f,-6.0f); // Move Left 1.5 Units And Into The Screen 6.0 glRotatef(rtri,0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Rotate The Triangle On The Y axis ( NEW ) // draw a triangle glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); // Begin Drawing Triangles glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Front) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Front) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Front) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Right) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Right) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Right) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Back) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Back) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Back) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Left) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Left) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Left) glEnd(); glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The Current Modelview Matrix glTranslatef(1.5f,0.0f,-7.0f); // Move Right 1.5 Units And Into The Screen 6.0 glRotatef(rquad,1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Rotate The Quad On The X axis ( NEW ) glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Start Drawing Quads glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Green glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Top) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Top) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Top) glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Top) glColor3f(1.0f,0.5f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Orange glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Bottom) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Bottom) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Bottom) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Bottom) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Red glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Front) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Front) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Front) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Front) glColor3f(1.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Yellow glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Back) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Back) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Back) glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Back) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Set The Color To Blue glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Left) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Left) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Left) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Left) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Set The Color To Violet glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Right) glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Right) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Right) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Right) glEnd(); // Done Drawing A Quad rtri+=0.02f; // Increase The Rotation Variable For The Triangle ( NEW ) rquad-=0.015f; // Decrease The Rotation Variable For The Quad ( NEW ) // swap buffers to display, since we're double buffered. SDL_GL_SwapBuffers(); return true; } int main(int argc,char* argv[]) { int done; /*variable to hold the file name of the image to be loaded *In real world error handling code would precede this */ /* Initialize SDL for video output */ if ( SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO) < 0 ) { fprintf(stderr, "Unable to initialize SDL: %s\n", SDL_GetError()); exit(1); } atexit(SDL_Quit); /* Create a 640x480 OpenGL screen */ if ( SDL_SetVideoMode(640, 480, 0, SDL_OPENGL) == NULL ) { fprintf(stderr, "Unable to create OpenGL screen: %s\n", SDL_GetError()); SDL_Quit(); exit(2); } SDL_WM_SetCaption("another example",NULL); InitGL(640,480); done=0; while (! done) { DrawGLScene(); SDL_Event event; while ( SDL_PollEvent(&event) ) { if ( event.type == SDL_QUIT ) { done = 1; } if ( event.type == SDL_KEYDOWN ) { if ( event.key.keysym.sym == SDLK_ESCAPE ) { done = 1; } } } } } Under netbeans project properties I configured the following: C++ Compiler: added /usr/X11/include and /opt/local/include to the include directories. Linker: I added the following libraries: /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libGLU.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDL.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDLmain.a Now... before I included SDL_main.h and libSDLMain.a to the project I got an error unknown reference to _main then I read here: http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentries&category=7#55 that I need to include SDL_Main.h and to link libSDLMain.so to my project. after doing so, the project still won't compile. this is the Netbeans output: /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-Debug.mk SUBPROJECTS= .clean-conf rm -f -r build/Debug rm -f dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2 CLEAN SUCCESSFUL (total time: 79ms) /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-Debug.mk SUBPROJECTS= .build-conf /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-Debug.mk dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2 mkdir -p build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX rm -f build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o.d g++ -c -g -I/usr/X11/include -I/opt/local/include -MMD -MP -MF build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o.d -o build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o main.cpp mkdir -p dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX g++ -o dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2 build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o /opt/local/lib/libIL.dylib /opt/local/lib/libILU.dylib /opt/local/lib/libILUT.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libGLU.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDL.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDLmain.a Undefined symbols: "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSMenu", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "__objc_empty_cache", referenced from: _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _OBJC_CLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFBundleGetMainBundle", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFURLGetFileSystemRepresentation", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_NSApp", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSProcessInfo", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFURLCreateCopyDeletingLastPathComponent", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_NSAllocateMemoryPages", referenced from: -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "___CFConstantStringClassReference", referenced from: cfstring=CFBundleName in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring= in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=About in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Hide in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=h in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Hide Others in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Show All in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Quit in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=q in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Window in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=m in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Minimize in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSAutoreleasePool", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CPSEnableForegroundOperation", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CPSGetCurrentProcess", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFBundleCopyBundleURL", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_NSDeallocateMemoryPages", referenced from: -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSApplication", referenced from: l_OBJC_$_CATEGORY_NSApplication_$_SDLApplication in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CPSSetFrontProcess", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSString", referenced from: l_OBJC_$_CATEGORY_NSString_$_ReplaceSubString in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSObject", referenced from: _OBJC_CLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFBundleGetInfoDictionary", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFRelease", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "__objc_empty_vtable", referenced from: _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _OBJC_CLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSMenuItem", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_objc_msgSend", referenced from: -[SDLMain application:openFile:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[SDLMain applicationDidFinishLaunching:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_METACLASS_$_NSObject", referenced from: _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_objc_msgSend_fixup", referenced from: l_objc_msgSend_fixup_objectForKey_ in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) l_objc_msgSend_fixup_length in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) l_objc_msgSend_fixup_alloc in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) l_objc_msgSend_fixup_release in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) ld: symbol(s) not found collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2] Error 1 make[1]: *** [.build-conf] Error 2 make: *** [.build-impl] Error 2 BUILD FAILED (exit value 2, total time: 263ms) any ideas? thanks a lot!

  Read the article

• How Can I Know Whether I Am a Good Programmer?

  - by Kristopher Johnson

  Like most people, I think of myself as being a bit above average in my field. I get paid well, I've gotten promotions, and I've never had a real problem getting good references or getting a job. But I've been around enough to notice that many of the worst programmers I've worked with thought they were some of the best. Bad programmers who are surrounded by other bad programmers seem to be the most self-deluded. I'm certainly not perfect. I do make mistakes. I do miss deadlines. But I think I make about the same number of bonehead moves that "other good programmers" do. The problem is that I define "other good programmers" to mean "people who are like me." So, I wonder, is there any way a programmer can make some sort of reasonable self-evaluation? How do we know whether we are good or bad at our jobs? Or, if terms like good and bad are too ill-defined, how can programmers honestly identify their own strengths and weaknesses, so that they can take advantage of the former and work to improve the latter?

  Read the article

• Constructs for wrapping a hardware state machine

  - by Henry Gomersall

  I am using a piece of hardware with a well defined C API. The hardware is stateful, with the relevant API calls needing to be in the correct order for the hardware to work properly. The API calls themselves will always return, passing back a flag that advises whether the call was successful, or if not, why not. The hardware will not be left in some ill defined state. In effect, the API calls advise indirectly of the current state of the hardware if the state is not correct to perform a given operation. It seems to be a pretty common hardware API style. My question is this: Is there a well established design pattern for wrapping such a hardware state machine in a high level language, such that consistency is maintained? My development is in Python. I ideally wish the hardware state machine to be abstracted to a much simpler state machine and wrapped in an object that represents the hardware. I'm not sure what should happen if an attempt is made to create multiple objects representing the same piece of hardware. I apologies for the slight vagueness, I'm not very knowledgeable in this area and so am fishing for assistance of the description as well!

  Read the article

• Tegnap délutáni Guru Partin a Proaktív Támogatásról beszéltünk

  - by user552636

  Gyorsan közeleg a karácsony, hagyományosan ilyenkor tartja Oracle Guru partiját az Oracle University. Idén elso ízben az Oracle Support is tartott eloadást, melynek témája a Proaktív Támogatás volt. Az eloadás elején rövid kis felmérést végeztünk arról, hogy az Oracle által kínált proaktív támogató eszközöket mennyire ismeri, illetve mennyire használja a hallgatóság.  A felmérésbol kiderült, hogy a támogatást igénybe vevok több proaktív eszközt is ismernek, egy részüket használják is. Azonban az is látható a válaszokból, hogy vannak olyan területei a támogatásnak, melyeket nem ismernek az Ügyfelek, vagy ismerik, de nem használják ki Support nyújtotta összes lehetoséget. Az eloadás három fo témakört ölelt át:      PREVENT / MEGELOZ RESOLVE / MEGOLD UPGRADE / FRISSÍT A PREVENT / MEGELOZ témakörben áttekintettük milyen eszközök támogatják Ügyfeleinket a szoftverek, rendszerek egészségének megorzésében, a hibák/betegségek elkerülésében, a problémák megelozésében A RESOLVE / MEGOLD részben azokat a rendelkezére álló eszközöket, lehetoségeket ismertettük, melyek a  problémák gyors megoldását, a felmerült kérdések gyors megválaszolását segítik  Az UPGRADE / FRISSÍT témában a folyamatos megújulásban, a szoftverek és rendszerek életciklusának megtervezését, ill. naprakészen tartását támogató szolgáltatásokat tekintettük át.          Mindezek az eszközök, lehetoségek termékenként strukturált formában Oracle Premier Support: Get Proactive! [ID 432.1]  My Oracle support cikken belül hozzáférhetoek.  Következo szemináriumunkat már az új esztendoben, 2013. január 9-én, 9:00 órától tartjuk az Oracle Hungary irodában.  A szeminárium témája: Hogyan használjuk az Oracle Supportot? - Gyakorlati tanácsok egy támogató mérnök szemszögébol  Eloadó: Fekete Krisztián - támogató mérnök Minden érdeklodot szeretettel látunk a januári szemináriumon!  Minden kedves Ügyfelünknek meghitt, szeretetteljes karácsonyi ünnepeket és sikerekben, örömökben gazdag boldog új esztendot kívánok!  

  Read the article

• Exception Handling And Other Contentious Political Topics

  - by Justin Jones

  So about three years ago, around the time of my last blog post, I promised a friend I would write this post. Keeping promises is a good thing, and this is my first step towards easing back into regular blogging. I fully expect him to return from Pennsylvania to buy me a beer over this. However, it’s been an… ahem… eventful three years or so, and blogging, unfortunately, got pushed to the back burner on my priority list, along with a few other career minded activities. Now that the personal drama of the past three years is more or less resolved, it’s time to put a few things back on the front burner. What I consider to be proper exception handling practices is relatively well known these days. There are plenty of blog posts out there already on this topic which more or less echo my opinions on this topic. I’ll try to include a few links at the bottom of the post. Several years ago I had an argument with a co-worker who posited that exceptions should be caught at every level and logged. This might seem like sanity on the surface, but the resulting error log looked something like this: Error: System.SomeException Followed by small stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace. Error: System.SomeException Followed by slightly bigger stack trace.   These were all the same exception. The problem with this approach is that the error log, if you run any kind of analytics on in, becomes skewed depending on how far up the stack trace your exception was thrown. To mitigate this problem, we came up with the concept of the “PreLoggedException”. Basically, we would log the exception at the very top level and subsequently throw the exception back up the stack encapsulated in this pre-logged type, which our logging system knew to ignore. Now the error log looked like this: Error: System.SomeException Followed by small stack trace. Much cleaner, right? Well, there’s still a problem. When your exception happens in production and you go about trying to figure out what happened, you’ve lost more or less all context for where and how this exception was thrown, because all you really know is what method it was thrown in, but really nothing about who was calling the method or why. What gives you this clue is the entire stack trace, which we’re losing here. I believe that was further mitigated by having the logging system pull a system stack trace and add it to the log entry, but what you’re actually getting is the stack for how you got to the logging code. You’re still losing context about the actual error. Not to mention you’re executing a whole slew of catch blocks which are sloooooooowwwww……… In other words, we started with a bad idea and kept band-aiding it until it didn’t suck quite so bad. When I argued for not catching exceptions at every level but rather catching them following a certain set of rules, my co-worker warned me “do yourself a favor, never express that view in any future interviews.” I suppose this is my ultimate dismissal of that advice, but I’m not too worried. My approach for exception handling follows three basic rules: Only catch an exception if 1. You can do something about it. 2. You can add useful information to it. 3. You’re at an application boundary. Here’s what that means: 1. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. We’ll start with a trivial example of a login system that uses a file. Please, never actually do this in production code, it’s just concocted example. So if our code goes to open a file and the file isn’t there, we get a FileNotFound exception. If the calling code doesn’t know what to do with this, it should bubble up. However, if we know how to create the file from scratch we can create the file and continue on our merry way. When you run into situations like this though, What should really run through your head is “How can I avoid handling an exception at all?” In this case, it’s a trivial matter to simply check for the existence of the file before trying to open it. If we detect that the file isn’t there, we can accomplish the same thing without having to handle in in a catch block. 2. Only catch an exception if you can do something about it. Continuing with the poorly thought out file based login system we contrived in part 1, if the code calls a Login(…) method and the FileNotFound exception is thrown higher up the stack, the code that calls Login must account for a FileNotFound exception. This is kind of counterintuitive because the calling code should not need to know the internals of the Login method, and the data file is an implementation detail. What makes more sense, assuming that we didn’t implement any of the good advice from step 1, is for Login to catch the FileNotFound exception and wrap it in a new exception. For argument’s sake we’ll say LoginSystemFailureException. (Sorry, couldn’t think of anything better at the moment.) This gives us two stack traces, preserving the original stack trace in the inner exception, and also is much more informative to the calling code. 3. Only catch an exception if you’re at an application boundary. At some point we have to catch all the exceptions, even the ones we don’t know what to do with. WinForms, ASP.Net, and most other UI technologies have some kind of built in mechanism for catching unhandled exceptions without fatally terminating the application. It’s still a good idea to somehow gracefully exit the application in this case if possible though, because you can no longer be sure what state your application is in, but nothing annoys a user more than an application just exploding. These unhandled exceptions need to be logged, and this is a good place to catch them. Ideally you never want this option to be exercised, but code as though it will be. When you log these exceptions, give them a “Fatal” status (e.g. Log4Net) and make sure these bugs get handled in your next release. That’s it in a nutshell. If you do it right each exception will only get logged once and with the largest stack trace possible which will make those 2am emergency severity 1 debugging sessions much shorter and less frustrating. Here’s a few people who also have interesting things to say on this topic:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/9538/Exception-Handling-Best-Practices-in-NET I know there’s more but I can’t find them at the moment.

  Read the article

• "Bootmgr is missing...." Upon reboot [closed]

  - by Gabe

  Possible Duplicate: Install/running ubuntu on extarnal HDD with a windows laptop? Ill take you through the steps I did. Sorry if this question has already been resolved, I'm new to Ubuntu and forums in general. I have 2 internal HDDs in my computer, both with Win7. One HDD is my mothers, the other is mine. I did this because she didn't want my games on her computer, and my PCs motherboard took a crap on me, so I set up a dual boot. I also have an external HDD. This is what I am trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 on. I formatted the drive by right clicking it, then selecting "Format". It is now in NTSF format. I downloaded the Windows installer, ran it, and selected "I:/" (my externl hdd) as the install location. The download and installation ran smoothly, and it gave me the reboot prompt. I selected "Reboot now" and my PC rebooted. I was then interrupted by the "Bootmgr is missing. Press CTRL + ALT + DEL TO REBOOT" message. NOTE: I would like to use my HDD for a FULL Ubuntu installation, not the Live (i think thats what its called). I want all my files and settings from Ubuntu saved to the External drive as if it was my only drive. If you need more information just ask. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Animation API vs frame animation

  - by Max

  I'm pretty far down the road in my game right now, closing in on the end. And I'm adding little tweaks here and there. I used custom frame animation of a single image with many versions of my sprite on it, and controlled which part of the image to show using rectangles. But I'm starting to think that maybe I should've used the Animation API that comes with android instead. Will this effect my performance in a negative way? Can I still use rectangles to draw my bitmap? Could I add effects from the Animation API to my current frame-controlled animation? like the fadeout-effect etc? this would mean I wont have to change my current code. I want some of my animations to fade out, and just noticed that using the Animation API makes things alot easier. But needless to say, I would prefer not having to change all my animation-code. I'm bad at explaining, so Ill show a bit of how I do my animation: private static final int BMP_ROWS = 1; //I use top-view so only need my sprite to have 1 direction private static final int BMP_COLUMNS = 3; public void update(GameControls controls) { if (sprite.isMoving) { currentFrame = ++currentFrame % BMP_COLUMNS; } else { this.setFrame(1); } } public void draw(Canvas canvas, int x, int y, float angle) { this.x=x; this.y=y; canvas.save(); canvas.rotate(angle , x + width / 2, y + height / 2); int srcX = currentFrame * width; int srcY = 0 * height; Rect src = new Rect(srcX, srcY, srcX + width, srcY + height); Rect dst = new Rect(x, y, x + width, y + height); canvas.drawBitmap(bitmap, src, dst, null); canvas.restore(); }

  Read the article

• Error while installation of CHMSee

  - by Anshuman Chakraborty

  I have recently migrated from Windows to Ubuntu. My current locale shows below output :- cha@COMPUTER:~$ locale LANG=en_IN LANGUAGE=en_IN:en LC_CTYPE="en_IN" LC_NUMERIC="en_IN" LC_TIME="en_IN" LC_COLLATE="en_IN" LC_MONETARY="en_IN" LC_MESSAGES="en_IN" LC_PAPER="en_IN" LC_NAME="en_IN" LC_ADDRESS="en_IN" LC_TELEPHONE="en_IN" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_IN" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_IN" LC_ALL= When I am trying to install CHMSee (or any other Application) using UBUNTU Software Center. I am getting below error. installArchives() failed: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory Selecting previously unselected package libchm1. (Reading database ... (Reading database ... 5% (Reading database ... 10% (Reading database ... 15% (Reading database ... 20% (Reading database ... 25% (Reading database ... 30% (Reading database ... 35% (Reading database ... 40% (Reading database ... 45% (Reading database ... 50% (Reading database ... 55% (Reading database ... 60% (Reading database ... 65% (Reading database ... 70% (Reading database ... 75% (Reading database ... 80% (Reading database ... 85% (Reading database ... 90% (Reading database ... 95% (Reading database ... 100% (Reading database ... 207053 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libchm1 (from .../libchm1_2%3a0.40a-1_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0-0. Unpacking libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0-0 (from .../libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0-0_1.8.0-0ubuntu2_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package libwebkitgtk-1.0-common. Unpacking libwebkitgtk-1.0-common (from .../libwebkitgtk-1.0-common_1.8.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package libwebkitgtk-1.0-0. Unpacking libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 (from .../libwebkitgtk-1.0-0_1.8.0-0ubuntu2_i386.deb) ... Selecting previously unselected package chmsee. Unpacking chmsee (from .../chmsee_1.3.0-2ubuntu2_i386.deb) ... Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ... Processing triggers for gnome-menus ... Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme ... Processing triggers for man-db ... locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory Setting up qmail (1.06-4) ... The hostname -f command returned: $1 Your system needs to have a fully qualified domain name (fqdn) in order to install the var-qmail packages. Installation aborted. dpkg: error processing qmail (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of qmail-run: qmail-run depends on qmail (>= 1.06-2.1); however: Package qmail is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing qmail-run (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Setting up libchm1 (2:0.40a-1) ... No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure. Setting up libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0-0 (1.8.0-0ubuntu2) ... Setting up libwebkitgtk-1.0-common (1.8.0-0ubuntu2) ... Setting up libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 (1.8.0-0ubuntu2) ... Setting up chmsee (1.3.0-2ubuntu2) ... Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Errors were encountered while processing: qmail qmail-run Error in function: SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Setting up qmail (1.06-4) ... The hostname -f command returned: $1 Your system needs to have a fully qualified domain name (fqdn) in order to install the var-qmail packages. Installation aborted. dpkg: error processing qmail (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of qmail-run: qmail-run depends on qmail (>= 1.06-2.1); however: Package qmail is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing qmail-run (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Can someone please help me in resolving this issue. The elaboration would be most appreciated since I am very new to this. Thanks, Anshuman Chakraborty

  Read the article

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked Read() and Exchange()

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Last time we discussed the Interlocked class and its Add(), Increment(), and Decrement() methods which are all useful for updating a value atomically by adding (or subtracting).  However, this begs the question of how do we set and read those values atomically as well? Read() – Read a value atomically Let’s begin by examining the following code: 1: public class Incrementor 2: { 3: private long _value = 0; 4:  5: public long Value { get { return _value; } } 6:  7: public void Increment() 8: { 9: Interlocked.Increment(ref _value); 10: } 11: } 12:  It uses an interlocked increment, as we discuss in my previous post (here), so we know that the increment will be thread-safe.  But, to realize what’s potentially wrong we have to know a bit about how atomic reads are in 32 bit and 64 bit .NET environments. When you are dealing with an item smaller or equal to the system word size (such as an int on a 32 bit system or a long on a 64 bit system) then the read is generally atomic, because it can grab all of the bits needed at once.  However, when dealing with something larger than the system word size (reading a long on a 32 bit system for example), it cannot grab the whole value at once, which can lead to some problems since this read isn’t atomic. For example, this means that on a 32 bit system we may read one half of the long before another thread increments the value, and the other half of it after the increment.  To protect us from reading an invalid value in this manner, we can do an Interlocked.Read() to force the read to be atomic (of course, you’d want to make sure any writes or increments are atomic also): 1: public class Incrementor 2: { 3: private long _value = 0; 4:  5: public long Value 6: { 7: get { return Interlocked.Read(ref _value); } 8: } 9:  10: public void Increment() 11: { 12: Interlocked.Increment(ref _value); 13: } 14: } Now we are guaranteed that we will read the 64 bit value atomically on a 32 bit system, thus ensuring our thread safety (assuming all other reads, writes, increments, etc. are likewise protected).  Note that as stated before, and according to the MSDN (here), it isn’t strictly necessary to use Interlocked.Read() for reading 64 bit values on 64 bit systems, but for those still working in 32 bit environments, it comes in handy when dealing with long atomically. Exchange() – Exchanges two values atomically Exchange() lets us store a new value in the given location (the ref parameter) and return the old value as a result. So just as Read() allows us to read atomically, one use of Exchange() is to write values atomically.  For example, if we wanted to add a Reset() method to our Incrementor, we could do something like this: 1: public void Reset() 2: { 3: _value = 0; 4: } But the assignment wouldn’t be atomic on 32 bit systems, since the word size is 32 bits and the variable is a long (64 bits).  Thus our assignment could have only set half the value when a threaded read or increment happens, which would put us in a bad state. So instead, we could write Reset() like this: 1: public void Reset() 2: { 3: Interlocked.Exchange(ref _value, 0); 4: } And we’d be safe again on a 32 bit system. But this isn’t the only reason Exchange() is valuable.  The key comes in realizing that Exchange() doesn’t just set a new value, it returns the old as well in an atomic step.  Hence the name “exchange”: you are swapping the value to set with the stored value. So why would we want to do this?  Well, anytime you want to set a value and take action based on the previous value.  An example of this might be a scheme where you have several tasks, and during every so often, each of the tasks may nominate themselves to do some administrative chore.  Perhaps you don’t want to make this thread dedicated for whatever reason, but want to be robust enough to let any of the threads that isn’t currently occupied nominate itself for the job.  An easy and lightweight way to do this would be to have a long representing whether someone has acquired the “election” or not.  So a 0 would indicate no one has been elected and 1 would indicate someone has been elected. We could then base our nomination strategy as follows: every so often, a thread will attempt an Interlocked.Exchange() on the long and with a value of 1.  The first thread to do so will set it to a 1 and return back the old value of 0.  We can use this to show that they were the first to nominate and be chosen are thus “in charge”.  Anyone who nominates after that will attempt the same Exchange() but will get back a value of 1, which indicates that someone already had set it to a 1 before them, thus they are not elected. Then, the only other step we need take is to remember to release the election flag once the elected thread accomplishes its task, which we’d do by setting the value back to 0.  In this way, the next thread to nominate with Exchange() will get back the 0 letting them know they are the new elected nominee. Such code might look like this: 1: public class Nominator 2: { 3: private long _nomination = 0; 4: public bool Elect() 5: { 6: return Interlocked.Exchange(ref _nomination, 1) == 0; 7: } 8: public bool Release() 9: { 10: return Interlocked.Exchange(ref _nomination, 0) == 1; 11: } 12: } There’s many ways to do this, of course, but you get the idea.  Running 5 threads doing some “sleep” work might look like this: 1: var nominator = new Nominator(); 2: var random = new Random(); 3: Parallel.For(0, 5, i => 4: { 5:  6: for (int j = 0; j < _iterations; ++j) 7: { 8: if (nominator.Elect()) 9: { 10: // elected 11: Console.WriteLine("Elected nominee " + i); 12: Thread.Sleep(random.Next(100, 5000)); 13: nominator.Release(); 14: } 15: else 16: { 17: // not elected 18: Console.WriteLine("Did not elect nominee " + i); 19: } 20: // sleep before check again 21: Thread.Sleep(1000); 22: } 23: }); And would spit out results like: 1: Elected nominee 0 2: Did not elect nominee 2 3: Did not elect nominee 1 4: Did not elect nominee 4 5: Did not elect nominee 3 6: Did not elect nominee 3 7: Did not elect nominee 1 8: Did not elect nominee 2 9: Did not elect nominee 4 10: Elected nominee 3 11: Did not elect nominee 2 12: Did not elect nominee 1 13: Did not elect nominee 4 14: Elected nominee 0 15: Did not elect nominee 2 16: Did not elect nominee 4 17: ... Another nice thing about the Interlocked.Exchange() is it can be used to thread-safely set pretty much anything 64 bits or less in size including references, pointers (in unsafe mode), floats, doubles, etc.  Summary So, now we’ve seen two more things we can do with Interlocked: reading and exchanging a value atomically.  Read() and Exchange() are especially valuable for reading/writing 64 bit values atomically in a 32 bit system.  Exchange() has value even beyond simply atomic writes by using the Exchange() to your advantage, since it reads and set the value atomically, which allows you to do lightweight nomination systems. There’s still a few more goodies in the Interlocked class which we’ll explore next time! Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Interlocked

  Read the article

• How can I discourage the use of Access?

  - by Greg Buehler

  Lets pretend that a very large company (revenue numbers with more than 8 figures) is looking to do a refresh on a software system, particularly the dashboard used by employees. This system was originally put together in the early 1990's to handle inventory tracking and storage across a variety of facilities (10+). Since this large company is now in the process of implementing some of these inventory processes with SAP they are in need of a major refresh. The existing system: Microsoft Access project performs dashboard duties Unique shipping/receiving configurations at different facilities require unique forms and queries within the Access project Uses 3rd party libraries referenced by Access to directly interface with at control system (read: motors, conveyors, and counters) Individual SQL Server 2000 instances (some traces of pre-update SQL Server 6.0 documents) at each facility The Issue: This system started as a home brewed inventory tracking scheme with a single internal sponsor who is still in charge of the technical direction. The original sponsor prescribing the desired deliverables that are being called for in the current RFP. The RFP describes a system based around a single Access project. Any suggestion that Access is ill suited for a project of this scope are shot down under the reasoning that "it works for the scope now". Are there any case studies, notices, or statements that can be used to disuade this potential customer from repeating their mistake? Does Microsoft make any statements directly about when it is highly recommended to ditch Access?

  Read the article

• "sha256sum mismatch jdk-7u3-linux-x64.tar.gz " error when trying to install Oracle Java

  - by Fawkes5

  i recently tried installed java 7 on ubuntu 12.04 and i think i screwed something up I followed the instructions given here. First you need to remove openjdk for this run the following command from your terminal sudo apt-get purge openjdk* Now you can install Java7 by adding the following repository: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eugenesan/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer Now everytime i install a new program i get the following error: Download done. sha256sum mismatch jdk-7u3-linux-x64.tar.gz Oracle JDK 7 is NOT installed. dpkg: error processing oracle-java7-installer (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Setting up python-central (0.6.17ubuntu1) ... Setting up python-eggtrayicon (2.25.3-11) ... Setting up gmail-notify (1.6.1.1-1ubuntu1) ... Processing triggers for python-central ... Errors were encountered while processing: oracle-java7-installer Error in function: However.The program seems to install and work just fine so it doesn't seem to be a problem preventing me from doing anything So then i reinstalled openjdk by going: sudo apt-get install openjdk* But i still get the same error. going: sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer gives me the same error. What is going on? Please let me know if this is clear or not and ill try to explain my issue better

  Read the article

• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

  Read the article

• A Quarter Century of SPARC

  - by kemer

  You might have missed an interesting milestone: the 25th anniversary of SPARC. Twenty-five years! Almost 40% of my life: humbling, maybe a little scary. When I joined Sun Microsystems in 1988, SPARC was just starting to shake things up. The next year we introduced the SPARCstation 1, which had basically triple the performance of our Motrolla-based Sun–3 systems. Not too long after that, our competition began a campaign of “SPARC is dead.” We really distressed them with our success, in spite of our small size. “It won’t last.” “It can’t last!” So they told themselves. For a stroll down memory lane take a look at this page. I remember the sales meeting we had in Atlanta to internally announce the SPARCstation 1. Sun hadn’t really hit the big times, yet. Our much bigger competitors viewed us as an ill-mannered pest, certain of our demise. And, why wouldn’t they be certain: other startups more our size, such as Apollo (remember them?), Silicon Graphics (they fought the good fight!), and the incredibly cool Symbolics are memories. Wait! There was also a BIG company, DEC, who scoffed at us: they are history, too. In fact, we really upset them with what was supposed to be an internal-only video production that was a take-off on Bruce Lee movies, in which we battled the evil Doctor DEC – complete with computer mice (or is that “mouses”?) wielded like nun chucks with the new SPARCstation 1 somehow in the middle of everything. The memory is vivid, but the details hazy. After all, that was almost a quarter century ago. So, here’s to Oracle’s SPARC: still going strong after all these years. – Kemer

  Read the article

• Which Language Next? Python? Ruby? [closed]

  - by Ryan Craig

  I am a beginning Webmaster (relatively), with 2+ years of php experience. I also have some java training and a bit of .net. My company is now close to redeveloping the website that I work on, which is coded primarily in php, but has some poorly-written .net in part as well (it's confusing and ill-planned, but I didn't make any of those decisions. Can anyone say action-oriented .net and JScript?). So, I'm trying to decide which language I should learn next to quickly develop a new site. I will probably just redevelop it at first in php because I'm very comfortable with it. However, I'd like to migrate in the next year to something newer and more forward-thinking. This being said, .net is out of the question a little bit. We need cheap developers who are fast and can get pages up quickly. In this part of the country, part-time .net developers are hard to find. So, we need something that will be pretty standard in the next few years, but we have some .net SOAP 1.1 APIs that we use on our actual service (separate from the corporate website), that we will need to integrate part of the site with. Developing with php and SOAP is much more difficult than doing the same thing. So, I may have to develop the API collaborative part in .net just to be easy, and then I'd like to use something else that is fast, flexible, forward thinking, and will be relatively standard and easy to find developers for. So, any ideas? Python and Django? Ruby on Rails? Another framework? Thanks for your thoughts. Sorry, I know this was long, but it's all very convoluted and confusing so I needed to be slightly long-winded.

  Read the article

• More Denali Execution Plan Warning Goodies

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  In my last blog, I showed how the execution plan in denali has been enhanced by 2 new warnings ,conversion affecting cardinality and conversion affecting seek, which are shown when a data type conversion has happened either implicitly or explicitly. That is not all though, there is more .  Also added are two warnings when performance has been affected due to memory issues. Memory spills to tempdb are a costly operation and happen when SqlServer is under memory pressure and needs to free some up. For a long time you have been able to see these as warnings in a profiler trace as a sort or hash warning event,  but now they are included right in the execution plan.  Not only that but also you can see which operator caused the spill , not just which statement.  Pretty damn handy. Another cause of performance problems relating to memory are memory grant waits.  Here is an informative write up on them,  but simply speaking , SQLServer has to allocate a certain amount of memory for each statement. If it is unable to you get a “memory grant wait”.  Once again there are other methods of analyzing these,  but the plan now shows these too. Don't worry that’s not real production code There is one other new warning that is of interest to me, “Unmatched Indexes”.  Once I find out the conditions under which that fires ill blog about it.

  Read the article

• how to solve ArrayList outOfBoundsExeption?

  - by iQue

  Im getting: 09-02 17:15:39.140: E/AndroidRuntime(533): java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Invalid index 1, size is 1 09-02 17:15:39.140: E/AndroidRuntime(533): at java.util.ArrayList.throwIndexOutOfBoundsException(ArrayList.java:251) when Im killing enemies using this method: private void checkCollision() { Rect h1 = happy.getBounds(); for (int i = 0; i < enemies.size(); i++) { for (int j = 0; j < bullets.size(); j++) { Rect b1 = bullets.get(j).getBounds(); Rect e1 = enemies.get(i).getBounds(); if (b1.intersect(e1)) { enemies.get(i).damageHP(5); bullets.remove(j); Log.d("TAG", "HERE: LOLTHEYTOUCHED"); } if (h1.intersect(e1)){ happy.damageHP(5); } if(enemies.get(i).getHP() <= 0){ enemies.remove(i); } if(happy.getHP() <= 0){ //end-screen !!!!!!! } } } } using this ArrayList: private ArrayList<Enemy> enemies = new ArrayList<Enemy>(); and adding to array like this: public void createEnemies() { Bitmap bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.female); if (enemyCounter < 24) { enemies.add(new Enemy(bmp, this, controls)); } enemyCounter++; } I dont really understand what the problem is, Ive been looking around for a while but cant really find anything that helps me. If you know or if you can link me someplace where they have a solution for a similar problem Ill be a very happy camper! Thanks for ur time.

  Read the article

• Game Asset Management

  - by user964123

  I am making my first small mobile game in C# XNA. Lets say I have 3 screens, the main menu, options and game screen. A single game session usually lasts for 1 min, so the user will alternate frequently between the main menu and game screen. Therefore, once I load the textures for either screen, I want to keep them in memory to avoid frequent reloading. Both screens share some assets like their background textures, but differ in others. The first solution I came up with is making 2 texture factory classes, MainScreenAssetFactory and GameScreenAssetFactory, each with their own content manager, and ill store them in a globally accessible point so that they persist after either screen is destroyed. There is also a OptionsScreenAssetFactory, but that I dont want to cache it since the options screen is rarely visited. A typical Factory would look something like this public class MainScreenAssetFactory { private readonly ContentManager contentManager; public MainScreenAssetFactory(IServiceProvider serviceProvider, string rootDirectory) { contentManager = new ContentManager(serviceProvider) { RootDirectory = rootDirectory }; } public Texture2D ListElementBackground { get { return return contentManager.Load<Texture2D>("UserTab"); } } public Texture2D ListElementBulletPoint { get { return return contentManager.Load<Texture2D>("TabIcon"); } } public Texture2D LoggedOutUser { get { return return contentManager.Load<Texture2D>("LoggedOutUser"); } } } Since both Main, Options and Game Screen share some common resources, instead of loading them more than once, I created another class CommonAssetTexFactory which holds the common stuff and stays in-memory during the app lifetime. For example, this class gets passed to the options screen when it is created. However, given my small game with its few assets, I am already finding this solution cumbersome and inflexible. Changing anything would require looking to see if its already in the common factory, and if not, modifying existing factories and so on. And this is just considering textures currently, i didnt add sound files yet. I cant imagine bigger games with thousands of resources using this approach. A better idea must exist. Would someone please enlighten me?

  Read the article

• How to mount a network drive?

  - by Relik

  Ok so I'm trying to set-up a home file server. I'm thinking about just setting it up as an FTP server, no particular reason other than I'm familiar with FTP and samba tends to be very frustrating. Basically the set-up I'm going for, is to be-able to create multiple user accounts for the server and restrict or allow access to specific folders on each user. FTP is the only way (that I know of) to accomplish a set-up like that. My question is how can I mount an FTP server as a drive in Ubuntu so that all my applications can access it just like any other driver or folder. An example would be downloading 12.10 via torrent when it comes out, I would like to be able to tell transmission to just download the file straight to my ftp server. I know how to do this in Windows, its actually very easy. But I cant figure it out in Ubuntu. I have tried using the "connect to server" option in nautilus, and it works, but it doesn’t give me the result I want, most applications don’t see the folder, while others can. Also I am open to options other than FTP if anyone has any suggestions. I've looked into FreeNAS but that doesn’t seem to allow me to control the user accounts the way I want to. Then after all is said and done I would still need a way to mount the shares as a drive in Ubuntu. The ability to mount network drives in windows is one of my favourite features, but seeing how Ubuntu is now my daily OS and has been for about 4 years, I really need a way to accomplish the same thing in Ubuntu. Also a GUI would be preferable, seeing as there will be multiple people using this server, I would like it to be as easy as possible. EDIT: this link here seems to be almost exactly what I'm wanting to do, if I could find a GUI that can do this ill be almost set. then I would just need to find a way to hide specific folders from certain users.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121  | Next Page >