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• Ok it has been pointed out to me

  - by Ratman21

  That it seems my blog is more of poor me or pity me or I deserve a job blog.   Hmmm I wont say, I have not wined here as I have used this blog to vent my frustration on the whole out of work thing (lack of money, self worth, family issues and the never end bills coming my way) but, it was also me trying to reach to others in the same boat as well as advertising, hay I am out here, employers.   It was also said, that I don’t have any thing listed here on me, like a cover letter or resume. Well there is but, it was so many months and post ago. Also what I had posted is not current. So here is my most current cover and resume.   Scott L Newman 45219 Dutton Way Callahan, Fl. 32011 To Whom It May Concern: I am really interested in the IT vacancie that you have listed for your company. Maybe I don’t have all the qualifications you want (hold on don’t hit delete yet) yet! But maybe I do, as I have over 20 + years experience in "IT” RIGHT NOW.   Read the rest of my cover and my resume. You will see what my “IT” skills are and it will Show that I can to this work! I can bring to your company along with my, can do attitude, a broad range of skills, including: Certified CompTIA A+, Security+  and Network+ Technician §         2.5 years (NOC) Network experience on large Cisco based Wan – UK to Austria §         20 years experience MIS/DP – Yes I can do IBM mainframes and Tandem  non-stops too §         18 years experience as technical Help Desk support – panicking users, no problem §         18 years experience with PC/Server based system, intranet and internet systems §         10+ years experienced on: Microsoft Office, Windows XP and Data Network Fundamentals (YES I do windows) §         Strong trouble shooting skills for software, hard ware and circuit issues (and I can tell you what kind of horrors I had to face on all of them). §         Very experienced on working with customers on problems – again panicking users, no problem §         Working experience with Remote Access (VPN/SecurID) – I didn’t just study them I worked on/with them §         Skilled in getting info for and creating documentation for Operation procedures (I don’t just wait for them to give it to me I go out and get it. Waiting for info on working applications is, well dumb) Multiple software languages (Hey I have done some programming) And much more experiences in “IT” (Mortgage, stocks and financial information systems experience and have worked “IT” in a hospital) Can multitask, also have ability to adapt to change and learn quickly. (once was put in charge of a system that I had not worked with for over two years. Talk about having to relearn and adapt to changes but, I did it.) I would welcome the opportunity to further discuss this position with you. If you have questions or would like to schedule an interview, please contact me by phone at 904-879-4880 or on my cell 352-356-0945 or by e-mail at [email protected] or leave a message on my web site (http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/). I have enclosed/attached my resume for your review and I look forward to hearing from you.   Thank you for taking a moment to consider my cover letter and resume. I appreciate how busy you are. Sincerely, Scott L. Newman    Scott L. Newman 45219 Dutton Way, Callahan, FL 32011? H (904)879-4880 C (352)356-0945 ? [email protected] Web - http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/                                                       ______                                                                                       OBJECTIVE To obtain a Network Operation or Helpdesk position.     PROFILE Information Technology Professional with 20+ years of experience. Volunteer website creator and back-up sound technician at True Faith Christian Fellowship. CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ Certified.   TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS   §         Technical Support §         Frame Relay §         Microsoft Office Suite §         Inventory Management §         ISDN §         Windows NT/98/XP §         Client/Vendor Relations §         CICS §         Cisco Routers/Switches §         Networking/Administration §         RPG §         Helpdesk §         Website Design/Dev./Management §         Assembler §         Visio §         Programming §         COBOL IV §               EDUCATION ? New HorizonsComputerLearningCenter, Jacksonville, Florida – CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+ Certified.             Currently working on CCNA Certification ?MottCommunity College, Flint, Michigan – Associates Degree - Data Processing and General Education ? Currently studying Japanese     PROFESSIONAL             TrueFaithChristianFellowshipChurch – Callahan, FL, October 2009 – Present Web site Tech ·        Web site Creator/tech, back up song leader and back up sound technician. Note church web site is (http://ambassadorsforjesuschrist.webs.com/) U.S. Census (temp employee) Feb. 23 to March 8, 2010 ·        Enumerator for NassauCounty   ThomasCreekBaptistChurch – Callahan, FL,     June 2008 – September 2009 Churchsound and video technician      ·        sound and video technician           Fidelity National Information Services ? Jacksonville, FL ? February 01, 2005 to October 28, 2008 Client Server Dev/Analyst I ·        Monitored Multiple Debit Card sites, Check Authorization customers and the Card Auth system (AuthNet) for problems with the sites, connections, servers (on our LAN) and/or applications ·        Night (NOC) Network operator for a large Wide Area Network (WAN) ·        Monitored Multiple Check Authorization customers for problems with circuits, routers and applications ·        Resolved circuit and/or router issues or assist circuit carrier in resolving issue ·        Resolved application problems or assist application support in resolution ·        Liaison between customer and application support ·        Maintained and updated the NetOps Operation procedures Guide ·        Kept the listing of equipment on the raised floor updated ·        Involved in the training of all Night Check and Card server operation operators ·        FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005. Was one of 3 kept on.   Certegy ? St.Pete, FL ? August 31, 2003 to February 1, 2005 Senior NetOps Operator(FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005 all of above jobs/skills were same as listed in FNIS) ·        Converting Documentation to Adobe format ·        Sole trainer of day/night shift System Management Center operators (SMC) ·        Equifax spun off Card/Check Dept. as Certegy. Certegy terminated contract with EDS. One of six in the whole IT dept that was kept on.   EDS  (Certegy Account) ? St.Pete, FL ? July 1, 1999 to August 31, 2003 Senior NetOps Operator ·        Equifax outsourced the NetOps dept. to EDS in 1999. ·        Same job skills as listed above for FNIS.   Equifax ? St.Pete&Tampa, FL ? January 1, 1991 to July 1, 1999 NetOps/Tandem Operator ·        All of the above for FNIS, except for circuit and router issues ·        Operated, monitored and trouble shot Tandem mainframe and servers on LAN ·        Supported in the operation of the Print, Tape and Microfiche rooms ·        Equifax acquired TelaCredit in 1991.   TelaCredit ? Tampa, FL ? June 28, 1989 to January 1, 1991 Tandem Operator ·        Operated and monitored Tandem Non-stop systems for Card and Check Auths ·        Operated multiple high-speed Laser printers and Microfiche printers ·        Mounted, filed and maintained 18 reel-to-reel mainframe tape drives, cartridges tape drives and tape library.

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• Drawing on a webpage – HTML5 - IE9

  - by nmarun

  So I upgraded to IE9 and continued exploring HTML5. Now there’s this ‘thing’ called Canvas in HTML5 with which you can do some cool stuff. Alright what IS this Canvas thing anyways? The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group says this: “The canvas element provides scripts with a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly.” The Canvas element has two only attributes – width and height and when not specified they take up the default values of 300 and 150 respectively. Below is what my HTML file looks like: 1: <!DOCTYPE html> 2: <html lang="en-US"> 3: <head> 4: <script type="text/javascript" src="CustomScript.js"></script> 5: <script src="jquery-1.4.4.js" type="text/javascript"></script 6:  7: <title>Draw on a webpage</title> 8: </head> 9: <body> 10: <canvas id="canvas" width="500" height="500"></canvas> 11: <br /> 12: <input type="submit" id="submit" value="Clear" /> 13: <h4 id="currentPosition"> 14: 0, 0 15: </h4> 16: <div id="mousedownCoords"></div> 17: </body> 18: </html> In case you’re wondering, this is not a MVC or any kind of web application. This is plain ol’ HTML even though I’m writing all this in VS 2010. You see this is a very simple, ‘gimmicks-free’ html page. I have declared a Canvas element on line 10 and a button on line 11 to clear the drawing board. I’m using jQuery / JavaScript show the current position of the mouse on the screen. This will get updated in the ‘currentPosition’ <h4> tag and I’m using the ‘mousedownCoords’ to write all the places where the mouse was clicked. This is what my page renders as: The rectangle with a background is our canvas. The coloring is due to some javascript (which we’ll see in a moment). Now let’s get to our CustomScript.js file. 1: jQuery(document).ready(function () { 2: var isFirstClick = true; 3: var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas"); 4: // getContext: Returns an object that exposes an API for drawing on the canvas 5: var canvasContext = canvas.getContext("2d"); 6: fillBackground(); 7:  8: $("#submit").click(function () { 9: clearCanvas(); 10: fillBackground(); 11: }); 12:  13: $(document).mousemove(function (e) { 14: $('#currentPosition').html(e.pageX + ', ' + e.pageY); 15: }); 16: $(document).mouseup(function (e) { 17: // on the first click 18: // set the moveTo 19: if (isFirstClick == true) { 20: canvasContext.beginPath(); 21: canvasContext.moveTo(e.pageX - 7, e.pageY - 7); 22: isFirstClick = false; 23: } 24: else { 25: // on subsequent clicks, draw a line 26: canvasContext.lineTo(e.pageX - 7, e.pageY - 7); 27: canvasContext.stroke(); 28: } 29:  30: $('#mousedownCoords').text($('#mousedownCoords').text() + '(' + e.pageX + ',' + e.pageY + ')'); 31: }); 32:  33: function fillBackground() { 34: canvasContext.fillStyle = '#a1b1c3'; 35: canvasContext.fillRect(0, 0, 500, 500); 36: canvasContext.fill(); 37: } 38:  39: function clearCanvas() { 40: // wipe-out the canvas 41: canvas.width = canvas.width; 42: // set the isFirstClick to true 43: // so the next shape can begin 44: isFirstClick = true; 45: // clear the text 46: $('#mousedownCoords').text(''); 47: } 48: })   The script only looks long and complicated, but is not. I’ll go over the main steps. Get a ‘hold’ of your canvas object and retrieve the ‘2d’ context out of it. On mousemove event, write the current x and y coordinates to the ‘currentPosition’ element. On mouseup event, check if this is the first time the user has clicked on the canvas. The coloring of the canvas is done in the fillBackground() function. We first need to start a new path. This is done by calling the beginPath() function on our context. The moveTo() function sets the starting point of our path. The lineTo() function sets the end point of the line to be drawn. The stroke() function is the one that actually draws the line on our canvas. So if you want to play with the demo, here’s how you do it. First click on the canvas (nothing visible happens on the canvas). The second click draws a line from the first click to the current coordinates and so on and so forth. Click on the ‘Clear’ button, to reset the canvas and to give your creativity a clean slate. Here’s a sample output: Happy drawing! Verdict: HTML5 and IE9 – I think we’re on to something big and great here!

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• Caveat utilitor - Can I run two versions of Microsoft Project side-by-side?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  A number of out customers have asked if there are any problems in installing and running multiple versions of Microsoft Project on a single client. Although this is a case of Caveat utilitor (Let the user beware), as long as the user understands and accepts the issues that can occur then they can do this. Although Microsoft provide the ability to leave old versions of Office products (except Outlook) on your client when you are installing a new version of the product they certainly do not endorse doing so. Figure: For Project you can choose to keep the old stuff   That being the case I would have preferred that they put a “(NOT RECOMMENDED)” after the options to impart that knowledge to the rest of us, but they did not. The default and recommended behaviour is for the newer version installer to remove the older versions. Of course this does not apply in the revers. There are no forward compatibility packs for Office. There are a number of negative behaviours (or bugs) that can occur in this configuration: There is only one MS Project In Windows a file extension can only be associated with a single program.  In this case, MPP files can be associated with only one version of winproj.exe.  The executables are in different folders so if a user double-clicks a Project file on the desktop, file explorer, or Outlook email, Windows will launch the winproj.exe associated with MPP and then load the MPP file.  There are problems associated with this situation and in some cases workarounds. The user double-clicks on a Project 2010 file, Project 2007 launches but is unable to open the file because it is a newer version.  The workaround is for the user to launch Project 2010 from the Start menu then open the file.  If the file is attached to an email they will need to first drag the file to the desktop. All your linked MS Project files need to be of the same version There are a number of problems that occur when people use on Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology.  The three common uses of OLE are: for inserted projects where a Master project contains sub-projects and each sub-project resides in its own MPP file shared resource pools where multiple MPP files share a common resource pool kept in a single MPP file cross-project links where a task or milestone in one MPP file has a  predecessor/successor relationship with a task or milestone in a different MPP file What I’ve seen happen before is that if you are running in a version of Project that is not associated with the MPP extension and then try and activate an OLE link then Project tries to launch the other version of Project.  Things start getting very confused since different MPP files are being controlled by different versions of Project running at the same time.  I haven’t tried this in awhile so I can’t give you exact symptoms but I suspect that if Project 2010 is involved the symptoms will be different then in a Project 2003/2007 scenario.  I’ve noticed that Project 2010 gives different error messages for the exact same problem when it occurs in Project 2003 or 2007.  -Anonymous The recommendation would be either not to use this feature if you have to have multiple versions of Project installed or to use only a single version of Project. You may get unexpected negative behaviours if you are using shared resource pools or resource pools even when you are not running multiple versions as I have found that they can get broken very easily. If you need these thing then it is probably best to use Project Server as it was created to solve many of these specific issues. Note: I would not even allow multiple people to access a network copy of a Project file because of the way Windows locks files in write mode. This can cause write-locks that get so bad a server restart is required I’ve seen user’s files get write-locked to the point where the only resolution is to reboot the server. Changing the default version to run for an extension So what if you want to change the default association from Project 2007 to Project 2010?   Figure: “Control Panel | Folder Options | Change the file associated with a file extension” Windows normally only lists the last version installed for a particular extension. You can select a specific version by selecting the program you want to change and clicking “Change program… | Browse…” and then selecting the .exe you want to use on the file system. Figure: You will need to select the exact version of “winproj.exe” that you want to run Conclusion Although it is possible to run multiple versions of Project on one system in the main it does not really make sense.

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• Second Day of Data Integration Track at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Doug Reid

  0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Our second day at OpenWorld and the Data Integration Team was very active with customer meetings, product updates, product demonstrations, sessions, plus much more.  If the volume of traffic by our demo pods is any indicator, this is a record year for attendance at OpenWorld.  The DIS team have had tremendous number of people stop by our demo pods to learn about the latest product releases or to speak to one of our product managers.    For Oracle GoldenGate, there has been a great deal of interest in Integrated Capture and the  Oracle GoldenGate Monitor plug-in for Enterprise Manager.  Our customer panels this year have been very well attended and on Tuesday we held the “Real World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate Customer Panel”. On this panel this year we had Michael Wells from Raymond James, Joy Mathew and Venki Govindarajan from Comcast, and Serkan Karatas from Turk Telekom. Our panelists have a great mix of experiences and all are passionate about using Oracle Data Integration products to solve very complex use cases. Each panelist was given a ten minute to overview their use of our product, followed by a barrage of questions from the audience. Michael Wells spoke about using Oracle GoldenGate for heterogeneous real time replication from HP (Tandem) NonStop to SQL Server and emphasized the need for using standard naming conventions for when customers configure GoldenGate, as the practices is immensely helpful when debugging a problem. Joy Mathew and Venkat Govindarajan from Comcast described how they have used GoldenGate for over a decade and their experiences of using the product for replicating data from HP nonstop to Terdata. Serkan Karatas from Turk Telekom dove into using Oracle GoldenGate and the value of archiving data in extremely large databases, which in Turk Telekoms case resulted in a 1 month ROI for the entire project. Thanks again to our panelist and audience participants for making the session interactive and informative.  For Wednesday we have a number of sessions available to attendees plus two hands-on labs, which I have listed below.   If you are unable to attend our hands-on lab for Oracle GoldenGate Veridata, it is available online at youtube.com. Sessions  11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Best Practices for High Availability with Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Exadata -Moscone South - 102 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Customer Perspectives: Oracle Data Integrator -Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 Oracle GoldenGate Case Study: Real-Time Operational Reporting Deployment at Oracle -Moscone West - 2003 Data Preparation and Ongoing Governance with the Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Platform -Moscone West - 3000 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active -Moscone West - 3000 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database -Moscone South - 102 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Hands-on Labs 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Introduction to Oracle GoldenGate Veridata Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle SOA Suite: Hands-on Lab -Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 If you are at OpenWorld please join us in these sessions. For a full review of data integration track at OpenWorld please see our Focus-On Document.

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• .NET Security Part 4

  - by Simon Cooper

  Finally, in this series, I am going to cover some of the security issues that can trip you up when using sandboxed appdomains. DISCLAIMER: I am not a security expert, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you actually are writing security-critical code, then get a proper security audit of your code by a professional. The examples below are just illustrations of the sort of things that can go wrong. 1. AppDomainSetup.ApplicationBase The most obvious one is the issue covered in the MSDN documentation on creating a sandbox, in step 3 – the sandboxed appdomain has the same ApplicationBase as the controlling appdomain. So let’s explore what happens when they are the same, and an exception is thrown. In the sandboxed assembly, Sandboxed.dll (IPlugin is an interface in a partially-trusted assembly, with a single MethodToDoThings on it): public class UntrustedPlugin : MarshalByRefObject, IPlugin { // implements IPlugin.MethodToDoThings() public void MethodToDoThings() { throw new EvilException(); } } [Serializable] internal class EvilException : Exception { public override string ToString() { // show we have read access to C:\Windows // read the first 5 directories Console.WriteLine("Pwned! Mwuahahah!"); foreach (var d in Directory.EnumerateDirectories(@"C:\Windows").Take(5)) { Console.WriteLine(d.FullName); } return base.ToString(); } } And in the controlling assembly: // what can possibly go wrong? AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase } // only grant permissions to execute // and to read the application base, nothing else PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.pathDiscovery, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain("Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms); // execute UntrustedPlugin in the sandbox // don't crash the application if the sandbox throws an exception IPlugin o = (IPlugin)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap("Sandboxed.dll", "UntrustedPlugin"); try { o.MethodToDoThings() } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.ToString()); } And the result? Oops. We’ve allowed a class that should be sandboxed to execute code with fully-trusted permissions! How did this happen? Well, the key is the exact meaning of the ApplicationBase property: The application base directory is where the assembly manager begins probing for assemblies. When EvilException is thrown, it propagates from the sandboxed appdomain into the controlling assembly’s appdomain (as it’s marked as Serializable). When the exception is deserialized, the CLR finds and loads the sandboxed dll into the fully-trusted appdomain. Since the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory contains the sandboxed assembly, the CLR finds and loads the assembly into a full-trust appdomain, and the evil code is executed. So the problem isn’t exactly that the sandboxed appdomain’s ApplicationBase is the same as the controlling appdomain’s, it’s that the sandboxed dll was in such a place that the controlling appdomain could find it as part of the standard assembly resolution mechanism. The sandbox then forced the assembly to load in the controlling appdomain by throwing a serializable exception that propagated outside the sandbox. The easiest fix for this is to keep the sandbox ApplicationBase well away from the ApplicationBase of the controlling appdomain, and don’t allow the sandbox permissions to access the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory. If you do this, then the sandboxed assembly can’t be accidentally loaded into the fully-trusted appdomain, and the code can’t be executed. If the plugin does try to induce the controlling appdomain to load an assembly it shouldn’t, a SerializationException will be thrown when it tries to load the assembly to deserialize the exception, and no damage will be done. 2. Loading the sandboxed dll into the application appdomain As an extension of the previous point, you shouldn’t directly reference types or methods in the sandboxed dll from your application code. That loads the assembly into the fully-trusted appdomain, and from there code in the assembly could be executed. Instead, pull out methods you want the sandboxed dll to have into an interface or class in a partially-trusted assembly you control, and execute methods via that instead (similar to the example above with the IPlugin interface). If you need to have a look at the assembly before executing it in the sandbox, either examine the assembly using reflection from within the sandbox, or load the assembly into the Reflection-only context in the application’s appdomain. The code in assemblies in the reflection-only context can’t be executed, it can only be reflected upon, thus protecting your appdomain from malicious code. 3. Incorrectly asserting permissions You should only assert permissions when you are absolutely sure they’re safe. For example, this method allows a caller read-access to any file they call this method with, including your documents, any network shares, the C:\Windows directory, etc: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static string GetFileText(string filePath) { new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, filePath).Assert(); return File.ReadAllText(filePath); } Be careful when asserting permissions, and ensure you’re not providing a loophole sandboxed dlls can use to gain access to things they shouldn’t be able to. Conclusion Hopefully, that’s given you an idea of some of the ways it’s possible to get past the .NET security system. As I said before, this post is not exhaustive, and you certainly shouldn’t base any security-critical applications on the contents of this blog post. What this series should help with is understanding the possibilities of the security system, and what all the security attributes and classes mean and what they are used for, if you were to use the security system in the future.

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• .NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8

  - by Jeff

  I remember sitting in Building 5 at Microsoft with some of my coworkers, when one of them came in with a shiny new 11” MacBook Air. It was nearly two years ago, and we found it pretty odd that the OEM’s building Windows machines sucked at industrial design in a way that defied logic. While Dell and HP were in a race to the bottom building commodity crap, Apple was staying out of the low-end market completely, and focusing on better design. In the process, they managed to build machines people actually wanted, and maintain an insanely high margin in the process. I stopped buying the commodity crap and custom builds in 2006, when Apple went Intel. As a .NET guy, I was still in it for Microsoft’s stack of development tools, which I found awesome, but had back to back crappy laptops from HP and Dell. After that original 15” MacBook Pro, I also had a Mac Pro tower (that I sold after three years for $1,500!), a 27” iMac, and my favorite, a 17” MacBook Pro (the unibody style) with an SSD added from OWC. The 17” was a little much to carry around because it was heavy, but it sure was nice getting as much as eight hours of battery life, and the screen was amazing. When the rumors started about a 15” model with a “retina” screen inspired by the Air, I made up my mind I wanted one, and ordered it the day it came out. I sold my 17”, after three years, for $750 to a friend who is really enjoying it. I got the base model with the upgrade to 16 gigs of RAM. It feels solid for being so thin, and if you’ve used the third generation iPad or the newer iPhone, you’ll be just as thrilled with the screen resolution. I’m typically getting just over six hours of battery life while running a VM, but Parallels 8 allegedly makes some power improvements, so we’ll see what happens. (It was just released today.) The nice thing about VM’s are that you can run more than one at a time. Primarily I run the Windows 8 VM with four cores (the laptop is quad-core, but has 8 logical cores due to hyperthreading or whatever Intel calls it) and 8 gigs of RAM. I also have a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM I spin up when I need to test stuff in a “real” server environment, and I give it two cores and 4 gigs of RAM. The Windows 8 VM spins up in about 8 seconds. Visual Studio 2012 takes a few more seconds, but count part of that as the “ReSharper tax” as it does its startup magic. The real beauty, the thing I looked most forward to, is that beautifully crisp C# text. Consolas has never looked as good as it does at 10pt. as it does on this display. You know how it looks great at 80pt. when conference speakers demo stuff on a projector? Think that sharpness, only tiny. It’s just gorgeous. Beyond that, everything is just so responsive and fast. Builds of large projects happen in seconds, hundreds of unit tests run in seconds… you just don’t spend a lot of time waiting for stuff. It’s kind of painful to go back to my 27” iMac (which would be better if I put an SSD in it before its third birthday). Are there negatives? A few minor issues, yes. As is the case with OS X, not everything scales right. You’ll see some weirdness at times with splash screens and icons and such. Chrome’s text rendering (in Windows) is apparently not aware of how to deal with higher DPI’s, so text is fuzzy (the OS X version is super sharp, however). You’ll also have to do some fiddling with keyboard settings to use the Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts. Overall, it’s as close to a no-compromise development experience as I’ve ever had. I’m not even going to bother with Boot Camp because the VM route already exceeds my expectations. You definitely get what you pay for. If this one also lasts three years and I can turn around and sell it, it’s worth it for something I use every day.

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• How customers view and interact with a company

  The Harvard Business Review article written by Rayport and Jaworski is aptly titled “Best Face Forward” because it sheds light on how customers view and interact with a company. In the past most business interaction between customers was performed in a face to face meeting where one party would present an item for sale and then the other would decide whether to purchase the item. In addition, if there was a problem with a purchased item then they would bring the item back to the person who sold the item for resolution. One of my earliest examples of witnessing this was when I was around 6 or 7 years old and I was allowed to spend the summer in Tennessee with my Grandparents. My Grandfather had just written a book about the local history of his town and was selling them to his friends and local bookstores. I still remember he offered to pay me a small commission for every book I helped him sell because I was carrying the books around for him. Every sale he made was face to face with his customers which allowed him to share his excitement for the book with everyone. In today’s modern world there is less and less human interaction as the use of computers and other technologies allow us to communicate within seconds even though both parties may be across the globe or just next door. That being said, customers view a company through multiple access points called faces that represent the ability to interact without actually seeing a human face. As a software engineer this is a good and a bad thing because direct human interaction and technology based interaction have both good and bad attributes based on the customer. How organizations coordinate business and IT functions, to provide quality service varies based on each individual business and the goals and directives put in place by its management. According to Rayport and Jaworski, the type of interaction used through a particular access point may lend itself to be people-dominate, machine-dominate, or a combination of both. The method by which a company communicates information through an access point is a strategic choice that relates costs and customer outcomes. To simplify this, the choice is based on what can give the customer the best experience interacting with the company when the cost of the interaction is also a factor. I personally see examples of this every day at work. The company website is machine-dominate with people updating and maintaining information, our groups department is people dominate because most of the customer interaction is done at the customers location and is backed up by machine based data sources, and our sales/member service department is a hybrid because employees work in tandem with machines in order for them to assist customers with signing up or any other issue they may have. The positive and negative aspects of human and machine interfaces are a key aspect in deciding which interface to use when allowing customers to access a company or a combination of the two. Rayport and Jaworski also used MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson preliminary catalog of human and machine strengths. He stated that humans outperform machines in judgment, pattern recognition, exception processing, insight, and creativity. I have found this to be true based on the example of how sales and member service reps at my company handle a multitude of questions and various situations with a lot of unknown variables. A machine interface could never effectively be able to handle these scenarios because there are too many variables to consider and would not have the built-in logic to process each customer’s claims and needs. In addition, he also stated that machines outperform humans in collecting, storing, transmitting and routine processing. An example of this would be my employer’s website. Customers can simply go online and purchase a product without even talking to a sales or member services representative. The information is then stored in a database so that the customer can always go back and review there order, and access their selected services. A human, no matter how smart they are would never be able to keep track of hundreds of thousands of customers let alone know what they purchased or how much they paid. In today’s technology driven economy every company must offer their customers multiple methods of accessibly in order to survive. The more of an opportunity a company has to create a positive experience for their customers, in my opinion, they more likely the customer will return to that company again. I have noticed this with my personal shopping habits and experiences. References Rayport, J., & Jaworski, B. (2004). Best Face Forward. Harvard Business Review, 82(12), 47-58. Retrieved from Business Source Complete database.

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• Creating SparseImages for Pivot

  - by John Conwell

  Learning how to programmatically make collections for Microsoft Live Labs Pivot has been a pretty interesting ride. There are very few examples out there, and the folks at MS Live Labs are often slow on any feedback.  But that is what Reflector is for, right? Well, I was creating these InfoCard images (similar to the Car images in the "New Cars" sample collection that that MS created for Pivot), and wanted to put a Tag Cloud into the info card.  The problem was the size of the tag cloud might vary in order for all the tags to fit into the tag cloud (often times being bigger than the info card itself).  This was because the varying word lengths and calculated font sizes. So, to fix this, I made the tag cloud its own separate image from the info card.  Then, I would create a sparse image out of the two images, where the tag cloud fit into a small section of the info card.  This would allow the user to see the info card, but then zoom into the tag cloud and see all the tags at a normal resolution.  Kind'a cool. But...I couldn't find one code example (not one!) of how to create a sparse image.  There is one page on the SeaDragon site (http://www.seadragon.com/developer/creating-content/deep-zoom-tools/) that gives over the API for creating images and collections, and it sparsely goes over how to create a sparse image, but unless you are familiar with the API already, the documentation doesn't help very much. The key is the Image.ViewportWidth and Image.ViewportOrigin properties of the image that is getting super imposed on the main image.  I'll walk through the code below.  I've setup a couple Point structs to represent the parent and sub image sizes, as well as where on the parent I want to position the sub image.  Next, create the parent image.  This is pretty straight forward.  Then I create the sub image.  Then I calculate several ratios; the height to width ratio of the sub image, the width ratio of the sub image to the parent image, the height ratio of the sub image to the parent image, then the X and Y coordinates on the parent image where I want the sub image to be placed represented as a ratio of the position to the parent image size. After all these ratios have been calculated, I use them to calculate the Image.ViewportWidth and Image.ViewportOrigin values, then pass the image objects into the SparseImageCreator and call Create. The key thing that was really missing from the API documentation page is that when setting up your sub images, everything is expressed in a ratio in relation to the main parent image.  If I had known this, it would have saved me a lot of trial and error time.  And how did I figure this out?  Reflector of course!  There is a tool called Deep Zoom Composer that came from MS Live Labs which can create a sparse image.  I just dug around the tool's code until I found the method that create sparse images.  But seriously...look at the API documentation from the SeaDragon size and look at the code below and tell me if the documentation would have helped you at all.  I don't think so!   public static void WriteDeepZoomSparseImage(string mainImagePath, string subImagePath, string destination) {     Point parentImageSize = new Point(720, 420);     Point subImageSize = new Point(490, 310);     Point subImageLocation = new Point(196, 17);     List<Image> images = new List<Image>();     //create main image     Image mainImage = new Image(mainImagePath);     mainImage.Size = parentImageSize;     images.Add(mainImage);     //create sub image     Image subImage = new Image(subImagePath);     double hwRatio = subImageSize.X/subImageSize.Y;            // height width ratio of the tag cloud     double nodeWidth = subImageSize.X/parentImageSize.X;        // sub image width to parent image width ratio     double nodeHeight = subImageSize.Y / parentImageSize.Y;    // sub image height to parent image height ratio     double nodeX = subImageLocation.X/parentImageSize.X;       //x cordinate position on parent / width of parent     double nodeY = subImageLocation.Y / parentImageSize.Y;     //y cordinate position on parent / height of parent     subImage.ViewportWidth = (nodeWidth < double.Epsilon) ? 1.0 : (1.0 / nodeWidth);     subImage.ViewportOrigin = new Point(         (nodeWidth < double.Epsilon) ? -1.0 : (-nodeX / nodeWidth),         (nodeHeight < double.Epsilon) ? -1.0 : ((-nodeY / nodeHeight) / hwRatio));     images.Add(subImage);     //create sparse image     SparseImageCreator creator = new SparseImageCreator();     creator.Create(images, destination); }

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• Microsoft BUILD 2013 Day 1&ndash;Keynote

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013-day-1ndashkeynote.aspx This one is going to be a little long because the keynote was jam-packed so bare with me. The keynote for the first day of BUILD 2013 was kicked off by Steve Balmer.  He made it very clear that Microsoft’s focus is on accelerating its time to market with products and product updates.  His quote was that “Rapid release” is the new norm.  He continued by showing off several new Lumias that have been buzzing around the internet for a while and announce that Sprint will now be carrying the HTC 8XT and Samsung ATIV. Balmer is known for repeating words or phrase for affect.  This time it was “Rapid release, rapid release” and “Touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, …”.  This was fun, but even more fun was when he announce that all attendees would receive an Acer Iconia 8” tablet. SCORE! The next subject Balmer focused on is new apps.  The three new ones were Flipboard, Facebook and NFL Fantasy Football.  I liked the first two because these are ones that people coming from other platforms are missing.  The NFL app is great just because it targets a demographic that can be fanatical.  If these types of apps keep coming than the missing app argument goes away. While many Negative Nancy’s are describing Windows 8.1 as Windows 180 Steve Balmer chose to call it a “refined blend” as in a coffee that has been improved with a new mix.  This includes more multi-tasking options and leveraging Bing straight throughout the entire ecosystem. He ended this first section by explaining that this will also bring more Bing development opportunities to the community. Steve Balmer was followed by Julie Larson-Green who spent her time on stage selling us on Windows 8 all over again from my point of view.  Something that I would not have thought was needed until I had listened to some other attendees who had a number of concerns and complaints.  She showed a number of new gestures that will come with Windows 8.1, and while they were cool I was left wondering if they really improved the experience.  I guess only time will tell. I did like the fact that it the UI implementation to bring up “All Apps” now mirrors that of Windows Phone.  The consistency is a big step forward that I hope to see continue.  The cool factor went up from there as she swiped content from a desktop (mega-tablet) to the XBox One.  This seamless experience I believe is what is really needed for any future platform to be relevant. I was much more enthused by the presentation of Antoine Leblond who humbled us by letting us know that there are 5k new API.  How that can be or how anyone would ever use all of them is another question.  His announcement was that the Visual Studio 2013 preview would be available today along with the Windows 8.1 bits.  One of the features of VS2013 that he demonstrated is the power consumption profiler.  With battery life being a key factor with consumer consumption devices this is a welcome addition. He didn’t limit his presentation to VS2013 features though.  He showed how the Store has been redesigned to enable better search and discoverability of apps and how Win 8.1 can perform multiple screen scales depending on the resolution of the device automatically.  The last feature he demoed was the real time video streaming API which he made sure we understood by attaching a Surface to a little robot.  Oh, but there was one more thing.  Antoine and Julie announce that all attendees would also be getting Surface Pros.  BONUS! How much more could there be?  Gurdeep Singh Pall was about to pile on.  He introduced us to Bing as a platform (BaaP?).  He said if they (Microsoft) could do something with and API that is good 3rd party developers can do something that is dynamite and showed us some of the tools they had produced.  These included natural user interface improvements such as voice commands that looked to put Siri to shame.  Add to that 3D, OCR and translation capabilities and the future looks to be full of opportunities. Balmer then came out to show us one last thing.  Project Spark is a game design environment that will be available for Windows 8.1, XBox 360 and XBox One.  All I can say is that if my kids get their hands on this they are going to be able to learn some of what dad does in a much more enjoyable way. At the end of it all I was both exhausted and energized by what I saw.  What could they have possibly left for the day 2 keynote?  I hear it will feature Scott Hanselman.  If that is right we are in for a treat.  See you there. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote,Bing,Visual Studio 2013,Project Spark

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• SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remote Diag

  - by juanlarios

  I have had some time this week to try out some tools that I have been meaning to try out. This week I am trying out the SP 2010 Diagnostic Studio. I installed it successfully and tried it on my development evironment. I was able to build a report and a snapshot of the environment. I decided to turn my attention to my Employer's intranet environment. This would allow me to analyze it and measure it against benchmarks. I didn't want to install the Diagnostic studio on the Production Envorinment, lucky for me, the Diagnostic studio can be run remotely, well...kind of. Issue My development environment is a stand alone, full installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. It has Office 2010, SQL 2008 Enterprise, a DC...well you get the point, it's jammed packed! But more importantly it's a stand alone, self contained VM environment. Well Microsoft has instructions as to how to connect remotely with Diagnostic Studio here. The deciving part of this is that the SP2010DS prompts you for credentails. So I thought I was getting the right account to run the reports. I tried all the Power Shell commands in the link above but I still ended up getting the following errors: 06/28/2011 12:50:18    Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request...If the SPN exists, but CredSSP cannot use Kerberos to validate the identity of the target computer and you still want to allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer, use gpedit.msc and look at the following policy: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Delegation -> Allow Fresh Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication.  Verify that it is enabled and configured with an SPN appropriate for the target computer. For example, for a target computer name "myserver.domain.com", the SPN can be one of the following: WSMAN/myserver.domain.com or WSMAN/*.domain.com. Try the request again after these changes. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. 06/28/2011 12:54:47    Access to the path '\\<targetserver>\C$\Users\<account logging in>\AppData\Local\Temp' is denied. You might also get an error message like this: The WinRM client cannot process the request. A computer policy does not allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer. Explanation After looking at the event logs on the target environment, I noticed that there were a several Security Exceptions. After looking at the specifics around who was denied access, I was able to see the account that was being denied access, it was the client machine administrator account. Well of course that was never going to work!!! After some quick Googling, the last error message above will lead you to edit the Local Group Policy on the client server. And although there are instructions from microsoft around doing this, it really will not work in this scenario. Notice the Description and how it only applices to authentication mentioned? Resolution I can tell you what I did, but I wish there was a better way but I simply don't know if it's duable any other way. Because my development environment had it's own DC, I didn't really want to mess with Kerberos authentication. I would also not be smart to connect that server to the domain, considering it has it's own DC. I ended up installing SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio on another Windows 7 Dev environment I have, and connected the machien to the domain. I ran all the necesary remote credentials commands mentioned here. Those commands add the group policy for you! Once I did this I was able to authenticate properly and I was able to get the reports. Conclusion   You can run SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remotely but it will require some specific scenarions. A couple of things I should mention is that as far as I understand, SP2010 DS, will install agents on your target environment to run tests and retrieve the data. I was a Farm Administrator, and also a Server Admin on SharePoint Server. I am not 100% sure if you need all those permissions but I that's just what I have to my internal intranet.   I deally I would like to have a machine that I can have SharePoint 2010 DIagnostic Studio installed and I can run that against client environments. It appears that I will not be able to do that, unless I enable Kerberos on my Windows 7 Machine now. If you have it installed in the same way I would like to have it, please let me know, I'll keep trying to get what I'm after. Hope this helps someone out there doing the same.

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• My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

  - by Valter Minute

  Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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• My rhythm game runs choppy even with high frame rate

  - by felipedrl

  I'm coding a rhythm game and the game runs smoothly with uncapped fps. But when I try to cap it around 60 the game updates in little chunks, like hiccups, as if it was skipping frames or at a very low frame rate. The reason I need to cap frame rate is because in some computers I tested, the fps varies a lot (from ~80 - ~250 fps) and those drops are noticeable and degrade response time. Since this is a rhythm game this is very important. This issue is driving me crazy. I've spent a few weeks already on it and still can't figure out the problem. I hope someone more experienced than me could shed some light on it. I'll try to put here all the hints I've tried along with two pseudo codes for game loops I tried, so I apologize if this post gets too lengthy. 1st GameLoop: const uint UPDATE_SKIP = 1000 / 60; uint nextGameTick = SDL_GetTicks(); while(isNotDone) { // only false when a QUIT event is generated! if (processEvents()) { if (SDL_GetTicks() > nextGameTick) { update(UPDATE_SKIP); render(); nextGameTick += UPDATE_SKIP; } } } 2nd Game Loop: const uint UPDATE_SKIP = 1000 / 60; while (isNotDone) { LARGE_INTEGER startTime; QueryPerformanceCounter(&startTime); // process events will return false in case of a QUIT event processed if (processEvents()) { update(frameTime); render(); } LARGE_INTEGER endTime; do { QueryPerformanceCounter(&endTime); frameTime = static_cast<uint>((endTime.QuadPart - startTime.QuadPart) * 1000.0 / frequency.QuadPart); } while (frameTime < UPDATE_SKIP); } [1] At first I thought it was a timer resolution problem. I was using SDL_GetTicks, but even when I switched to QueryPerformanceCounter, supposedly less granular, I saw no difference. [2] Then I thought it could be due to a rounding error in my position computation and since game updates are smaller in high FPS that would be less noticeable. Indeed there is an small error, but from my tests I realized that it is not enough to produce the position jumps I'm getting. Also, another intriguing factor is that if I enable vsync I'll get smooth updates @60fps regardless frame cap code. So why not rely on vsync? Because some computers can force a disable on gfx card config. [3] I started printing the maximum and minimum frame time measured in 1sec span, in the hope that every a few frames one would take a long time but still not enough to drop my fps computation. It turns out that, with frame cap code I always get frame times in the range of [16, 18]ms, and still, the game "does not moves like jagger". [4] My process' priority is set to HIGH (Windows doesn't allow me to set REALTIME for some reason). As far as I know there is only one thread running along with the game (a sound callback, which I really don't have access to it). I'm using AudiereLib. I then disabled Audiere by removing it from the project and still got the issue. Maybe there are some others threads running and one of them is taking too long to come back right in between when I measured frame times, I don't know. Is there a way to know which threads are attached to my process? [5] There are some dynamic data being created during game run. But It is a little bit hard to remove it to test. Maybe I'll have to try harder this one. Well, as I told you I really don't know what to try next. Anything, I mean, anything would be of great help. What bugs me more is why at 60fps & vsync enabled I get an smooth update and at 60fps & no vsync I don't. Is there a way to implement software vsync? I mean, query display sync info? Thanks in advance. I appreciate the ones that got this far and yet again I apologize for the long post. Best Regards from a fellow coder.

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• Windows Phone 8 Announcement

  - by Tim Murphy

  As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall.  That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions.  Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered.  A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8.  It will also run natively on multiple cores.  They mentioned that they have run it on up to 64 cores to this point.  The phones as you might expect will at least start as dual core.  If you remember there were metrics saying that Windows Phone 7 performed operations faster on a single core than other platforms did with dual cores.  The metrics they showed here indicate that Windows Phone 8 runs faster on comparable dual core hardware than other platforms. New Screen Resolutions Screen resolution has never been an issue for me, but it has been a criticism of Windows Phone 7 in the media.  Windows Phone 8 will supports three screen resolutions: WVGA 800 x 480, WXGA 1280 x 768, and 720 1280x720.  Hopefully this makes pixel counters a little happier. MicroSD Support This was one of my pet peeves when I got my Samsung Focus. With Windows Phone 8 the operating system will support adding MicroSD cards after initial setup.  Of course this is dependent on the hardware company on implementing it, but I think we have seen that even feature phone manufacturers have not had a problem supporting this in the past. NFC NFC has been an anticipated feature for some time.  What Microsoft showed today included the fact that they didn’t just want it to be for the phone.  There is cross platform NFC functionality between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.  The demos , while possibly a bit fanciful, showed would could be achieved even in a retail environment.  We are getting closer and closer to a Minority Report world with these technologies. Wallet Windows Phone 8 isn’t the first platform to have a wallet concept.  What they have done to differentiate themselves is to make it sot that it is not dependent on a SIM type chip like other platforms.  They have also expanded the concept beyond just banks to other types of credits such as airline miles. Nokia Mapping People have been envious of the Lumia phones having the Nokia mapping software.  Now all Windows Phone 8 devices will use NavTeq data and will have the capability to run in an offline fashion.  This is a major step forward from the Bing “touch for the next turn” maps. IT Administration The lack of features for enterprise administration and deployment was a complaint even before the Windows Phone 7 was released.  With the Windows Phone 8 release such features as Bitlocker and Secure boot will be baked into the OS. We will also have the ability to privately sign and distribute applications. Changing Start Screen Joe Belfiore made a big deal about this aspect of the new release.  Users will have more color themes available to them and the live tiles will be highly customizable. You will have the ability to resize and organize the tiles in a more dynamic way.  This allows for less important tiles or ones with less information to be made smaller.  And There Is More So what other tidbits came out of the presentation?  Later this summer the API for WP8 will be available.  There will be developer events coming to a city near you.  Another announcement of interest to developers is the ability to write applications at a native code level.  This is a boon for game developers and those who need highly efficient applications. As a topper on the cake there was mention of in app payment. On the consumer side we also found out that all updates will be available over the air.  Along with this came the fact that Microsoft will support all devices with updates for at least 18 month and you will be able to subscribe for early updates.  Update coming for Windows Phone 7.5 customers to WP7.8.  The main enhancement will be the new live tile features.  The big bonus is that the update will bypass the carriers.  I would assume though that you will be brought up to date with all previous patches that your carrier may not have released. There is so much more, but that is enough for one post.  Needless to say, EXCITING! del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 8,WP8,Windows Phone 7,WP7,Announcements,Microsoft

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• JQuery dialog momentairly displayed on page load

  - by Kevin Won

  I created a page that has a JQuery based dialog using the standard JQuery UI function. I do this with out of the box functionality of JQuery... nothing special at all. Here is my HTML for the dialog: <div id = "myDialog"> <!-- ... more html in here for the dialog --> </div> Then the JQuery called in javascript that transforms the <div> to a dialog: // pruned .js as an example of kicking up a JQuery dialog $('#myDialog').dialog({ autoOpen: false, title: 'Title here', modal: true } }); Again, plain-vanilla JQuery. So you start this wizard by clicking on a link on the parent page, and it then spawns a JQuery dialog which has a significant chunk of HTML that includes images, etc. As I continued developing this page, I started to notice that when I loaded the page in the browser that the <div> tags I was putting in that JQuery transforms into dialogs would very briefly be displayed. Then the page would act as expected. In other words, the dialog would not be hidden, it would be displayed briefly in-line in the page. Quite ugly and unprofessional looking! But after a split second, the page would render correctly and look just as I expected/wanted. Over time, as the page size grew, the time the page would remain incorrectly rendered grew. My guess is that the rendering engine of the browser is rendering the page as it is loading, then at the end it is kicking off the JQuery that will transform the <div> into a dialog. This JQuery function will then transform the simple <div> to a JQuery dialog and hide it (since I have the autoOpen property set to false). Some browsers <cough>IE</cough> display it longer than others. My large-ish dialog now causes the page to incorrectly render for about 1 second... YUCK! I came up with a resolution to this problem which works OK, but I'm wondering if someone knows of a better way.

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• Android: manifest targetSdkVersion change resulted in: icon not visible, widget no longer works, and

  - by Casey

  I recently upgraded my Android app to support multiple resolutions. Previously, my Android.manifest file had a line: To support multiple density and resolution devices, I changed this to: <supports-screens android:smallScreens="false" android:normalScreens="true" android:largeScreens="true" android:anyDensity="true" /> <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="3" android:targetSdkVersion="4" /> I then added a couple of new directories, like drawable-hdpi-v4 and drawable-long-hdpi-v4 that includes the high-res versions of the graphics. That's about it. Ever since releasing this update, there have been a decent number of users complaining about various problems: - the app icon doesn't appear (I did not create a high res version of the icon) - the home screen widget no longer works, even if they delete and re-add it (this code did not change with the update). I've had a user send me their error log, which shows: 03-19 20:59:41.617 W/ActivityManager( 1854): Unable to launch app com.alt12.babybump/10078 for broadcast Intent { action=android.appwidget.action.APPWIDGET_UPDATE flags=0x4 comp={com.alt12.babybump/com.alt12.babybump.WidgetGirl} (has extras) }: process is bad There is one questionable section in my existing widget code that may be relevant: @Override public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) { // v1.5 fix that doesn't call onDelete Action final String action = intent.getAction(); if (AppWidgetManager.ACTION_APPWIDGET_DELETED.equals(action)) { final int appWidgetId = intent.getExtras().getInt( AppWidgetManager.EXTRA_APPWIDGET_ID, AppWidgetManager.INVALID_APPWIDGET_ID); if (appWidgetId != AppWidgetManager.INVALID_APPWIDGET_ID) { this.onDeleted(context, new int[] { appWidgetId }); } } else { super.onReceive(context, intent); } } And perhaps most troublesome: the sqlite database is no longer accessible/writeable for some users so their data is no longer available. I did add the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission to the manifest. This is only happening to certain users and it tends to be HTC Eris users. In that error log I see things such as: 03-19 16:00:56.173 E/FlurryAgent( 4791): java.io.FileNotFoundException: /data/data/com.alt12.babybump/files/.flurryagent.-2333f5cb 03-19 16:00:56.173 E/FlurryAgent( 4791): at org.apache.harmony.luni.platform.OSFileSystem.open(OSFileSystem.java:231) 03-19 16:01:09.393 E/Database( 4791): sqlite3_open_v2("/data/data/com.alt12.babybump/databases/uitematmamad.db", &handle, 6, NULL) failed 03-19 16:01:09.393 W/System.err( 4791): android.database.sqlite.SQLiteException: unable to open database file It's as if the update has caused a new process and it can't access the old process's data, or something. Any help appreciated!

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• DynamicMethod for ConstructorInfo.Invoke, what do I need to consider?

  - by Lasse V. Karlsen

  My question is this: If I'm going to build a DynamicMethod object, corresponding to a ConstructorInfo.Invoke call, what types of IL do I need to implement in order to cope with all (or most) types of arguments, when I can guarantee that the right type and number of arguments is going to be passed in before I make the call? Background I am on my 3rd iteration of my IoC container, and currently doing some profiling to figure out if there are any areas where I can easily shave off large amounts of time being used. One thing I noticed is that when resolving to a concrete type, ultimately I end up with a constructor being called, using ConstructorInfo.Invoke, passing in an array of arguments that I've worked out. What I noticed is that the invoke method has quite a bit of overhead, and I'm wondering if most of this is just different implementations of the same checks I do. For instance, due to the constructor matching code I have, to find a matching constructor for the predefined parameter names, types, and values that I have passed in, there's no way this particular invoke call will not end up with something it should be able to cope with, like the correct number of arguments, in the right order, of the right type, and with appropriate values. When doing a profiling session containing a million calls to my resolve method, and then replacing it with a DynamicMethod implementation that mimics the Invoke call, the profiling timings was like this: ConstructorInfo.Invoke: 1973ms DynamicMethod: 93ms This accounts for around 20% of the total runtime of this profiling application. In other words, by replacing the ConstructorInfo.Invoke call with a DynamicMethod that does the same, I am able to shave off 20% runtime when dealing with basic factory-scoped services (ie. all resolution calls end up with a constructor call). I think this is fairly substantial, and warrants a closer look at how much work it would be to build a stable DynamicMethod generator for constructors in this context. So, the dynamic method would take in an object array, and return the constructed object, and I already know the ConstructorInfo object in question. Therefore, it looks like the dynamic method would be made up of the following IL: l001: ldarg.0 ; the object array containing the arguments l002: ldc.i4.0 ; the index of the first argument l003: ldelem.ref ; get the value of the first argument l004: castclass T ; cast to the right type of argument (only if not "Object") (repeat l001-l004 for all parameters, l004 only for non-Object types, varying l002 constant from 0 and up for each index) l005: newobj ci ; call the constructor l006: ret Is there anything else I need to consider? Note that I'm aware that creating dynamic methods will probably not be available when running the application in "reduced access mode" (sometimes the brain just won't give up those terms), but in that case I can easily detect that and just calling the original constructor as before, with the overhead and all.

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• Animating custom-drawn UITableViewCell when entering edit mode

  - by Adam Alexander

  Background First of all, much gratitude to atebits for their very informative blog post Fast Scrolling in Tweetie with UITableView. The post explains in detail how the developers were able to squeeze as much scrolling performance as possible out of the UITableViews in Tweetie. Goals Beginning with the source code linked from the blog post (original) (my github repo): Allow a UITableView using these custom cells to switch to edit mode, exposing the UI for deleting an item from the table. (github commit) Move the cell's text aside as the deletion control slides in from the left. This is complete, although the text jumps back and forth without animation. (github commit) Apply animation to the text movement in goal 2 above for a smooth user experience. This is the step where I became stuck. The Question What is the best way to introduce this animation to complete goal 3? It would be nice if this could be done in a manner that keeps the logic from my last commit because I would love the option to move the conflicting part of the view only, while any non-conflicting portions (such as right-justified text) stay in the same place or move a different number of pixels. If the above is not possible then undoing my last commit and replacing it with an option that slides the entire view to the right would be a workable solution also. I appreciate any help anyone can provide, from quick pointers and ideas all the way to code snippets or github commits. Of course you are welcome to fork my repo if you would like. I will be staying involved with this question to make sure any successful resolution is committed to github and fully documented here. Thanks very much for your time! Updated thoughts I have been thinking about this a lot since my first post and realized that moving some text items relative to others in the view could undo some of the original performance goals solved in the original blog post. So at this point I am thinking a solution where the entire single subview is animated to its new postion may be the best one. Second, if it is done in this way there may be an instance where the subview has a custom color or gradient background. Hopefully this can be done in a way that in its normal position the background extends unseen off to the left enough so that when the view is slid to the right the custom background is still visible across the entire cell.

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• JNDI / Classpath problem in glassfish

  - by Michael Borgwardt

  I am in the process of converting a large J2EE app from EJB 2 to EJB 3 (all stateless session beans, using glassfish 2.1.1), and running out of ideas. The first EJB I converted (let's call it Foo) ran without major problems (it was the only one in its ejb-module and I could completely replace the deployment descriptor with annotations) and the app ran fine. But after converting the second one (let's call it Bar, one of several in a different ejb-module) there is a weird combination of problems: The app deploys without errors (nothing in the logs either) There is an error when looking up Bar via JNDI When looking at the JNDI tree in the glassfish admin console, Bar is not present at all. Then when I look at the logs, I see this (Foo is the correct name of the EJB's remote interface of the first converted, previously working EJB): Caused by: javax.naming.NamingException: ejb ref resolution error for remote business interface Foo [Root exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: Foo] at com.sun.ejb.EJBUtils.lookupRemote30BusinessObject(EJBUtils.java:425) at com.sun.ejb.containers.RemoteBusinessObjectFactory.getObjectInstance(RemoteBusinessObjectFactory.java:74) at javax.naming.spi.NamingManager.getObjectInstance(NamingManager.java:304) at com.sun.enterprise.naming.SerialContext.lookup(SerialContext.java:414) at com.sun.enterprise.naming.SerialContext.list(SerialContext.java:603) at javax.naming.InitialContext.list(InitialContext.java:395) at com.sun.enterprise.admin.monitor.jndi.JndiMBeanHelper.getJndiEntriesByContextPath(JndiMBeanHelper.java:106) at com.sun.enterprise.admin.monitor.jndi.JndiMBeanImpl.getNames(JndiMBeanImpl.java:231) ... 68 more Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: XXX at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1578) at com.sun.ejb.EJBUtils.getBusinessIntfClassLoader(EJBUtils.java:679) at com.sun.ejb.EJBUtils.lookupRemote30BusinessObject(EJBUtils.java:348) ... 75 more This is followed by more exceptions for all the entries that (like Foo) do appear in the JNDI tree. These look like this: Caused by: javax.naming.NotContextException: BarHome cannot be listed at com.sun.enterprise.naming.SerialContext.list(SerialContext.java:607) at javax.naming.InitialContext.list(InitialContext.java:395) at com.sun.enterprise.admin.monitor.jndi.JndiMBeanHelper.getJndiEntriesByContextPath(JndiMBeanHelper.java:106) at com.sun.enterprise.admin.monitor.jndi.JndiMBeanImpl.getNames(JndiMBeanImpl.java:231) ... 68 more However, no exception for Bar, it does not appear in the log at all except one entry during deployment. The other EJBs in the same module do appear, as does Foo. Any ideas what could cause this or how to diagnose it further? The beans are pretty straightforward: @Stateless(name = "Foo") @RolesAllowed("FOOUSER") @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.SUPPORTS) public class FooImpl extends BaseBean implements Foo { I'm also having some problems with the deployment descriptor for Bar (I'd like to eliminate it, but glassfish doesn't seem to like having a bean appear only in sun-ejb-jar.xml, or having some beans in a module declared in the descriptor and others use only annotations), but I can't see how that could cause the ClassNotFoundException on Foo. Is there a way to see the ClassPath that Glassfish is actually using?

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• Why does filter: blur(0) still cause text to blur under Webkit?

  - by johnkavanagh

  I've come across a bug today that's taken far longer than I would like to admit to identify. Essentially: setting a filter: blur(0) (or the vendor-specific -webkit-filter) on an element should - I believe - mean that no form of blur is applied. However, having tested this today, it would appear that Webkit based browsers still blur the text within any element with either blur(0) or blur(0px) assigned to it. I've knocked together a quick Fiddle here: http://jsfiddle.net/f9rBE/ These are three identical dixs containing text (no custom fonts): This has absolutely nothing assigned Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam facilisis orci in quam venenatis, in tempus ipsum sagittis. Suspendisse potenti. Donec ullamcorper lacus vel odio accumsan, vel aliquam libero tempor. Praesent nec libero venenatis, ultrices arcu non, luctus quam. Morbi scelerisque sit amet turpis sit amet tincidunt. Praesent semper erat non purus pretium consequat. Aenean et iaculis turpis. Curabitur diam tellus, consectetur non massa et, commodo venenatis metus. One has no styles at all assigned, the other two have blur(0) and blur(0px): .no-blur{} .zero-px-blur{ -webkit-filter: blur(0px); -moz-filter: blur(0px); -o-filter: blur(0px); -ms-filter: blur(0px); filter: blur(0px); } .zero-blur{ -webkit-filter: blur(0); -moz-filter: blur(0); -o-filter: blur(0); -ms-filter: blur(0); filter: blur(0); } If you preview this under Chrome/Safari you'll see that the text in the second two are still blurred: A few things worth noting: This unintentional blurring occurs in Safari on iOS7 devices (both iPhones and iPads); It also occurs on Chrome and Safari under OSX; It doesn't happen under FireFox in OSX. Of course, this isn't supported at all in Firefox just yet so it's hard to tell whether the behaviour I'm seeing is intentional/expected behaviour, or whether this is a bug in Webkit? Is it possible that this is only prevalent in higher-density resolution devices (ie: retina MacBook/iPhone/iPad)? With this in mind, how do you actually overwrite an item that has blur applied to it to set it back to non-blurred?

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• IoC/DI in the face of winforms and other generated code

  - by Kaleb Pederson

  When using dependency injection (DI) and inversion of control (IoC) objects will typically have a constructor that accepts the set of dependencies required for the object to function properly. For example, if I have a form that requires a service to populate a combo box you might see something like this: // my files public interface IDataService { IList<MyData> GetData(); } public interface IComboDataService { IList<MyComboData> GetComboData(); } public partial class PopulatedForm : BaseForm { private IDataService service; public PopulatedForm(IDataService service) { //... InitializeComponent(); } } This works fine at the top level, I just use my IoC container to resolve the dependencies: var form = ioc.Resolve<PopulatedForm>(); But in the face of generated code, this gets harder. In winforms a second file composing the rest of the partial class is generated. This file references other components, such as custom controls, and uses no-args constructors to create such controls: // generated file: PopulatedForm.Designer.cs public partial class PopulatedForm { private void InitializeComponent() { this.customComboBox = new UserCreatedComboBox(); // customComboBox has an IComboDataService dependency } } Since this is generated code, I can't pass in the dependencies and there's no easy way to have my IoC container automatically inject all the dependencies. One solution is to pass in the dependencies of each child component to PopulatedForm even though it may not need them directly, such as with the IComboDataService required by the UserCreatedComboBox. I then have the responsibility to make sure that the dependencies are provided through various properties or setter methods. Then, my PopulatedForm constructor might look as follows: public PopulatedForm(IDataService service, IComboDataService comboDataService) { this.service = service; InitializeComponent(); this.customComboBox.ComboDataService = comboDataService; } Another possible solution is to have the no-args constructor to do the necessary resolution: public class UserCreatedComboBox { private IComboDataService comboDataService; public UserCreatedComboBox() { if (!DesignMode && IoC.Instance != null) { comboDataService = Ioc.Instance.Resolve<IComboDataService>(); } } } Neither solution is particularly good. What patterns and alternatives are available to more capably handle dependency-injection in the face of generated code? I'd love to see both general solutions, such as patterns, and ones specific to C#, Winforms, and Autofac.

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• c# Xna keydown with a delay of 1 sec

  - by bld

  Hi!. im writing a tetris in xna. i have a class with a method rotateBlocks. When i press the "Up" arrow key. i wanna have that when i hold the button down for 1 sec or more that it executes the arguments in the first else if(rotating the blocks fast) right now nothing is happening. i have declared oldState globally in the class. if i remove the gametime check in first the else if the block will rotate fast imedietley. if i try to step through the code with linebreaks the resolution get f****d up public void RotateBlocks(loadBlock lb, KeyboardState newState, GameTime gameTime) { _elapsedSeconds2 += (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; if (lb._name.Equals("block1")) { if (newState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up) && !oldState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) { // the player just pressed Up if (_rotated) { lb._position[0].X -= 16; lb._position[0].Y -= 16; lb._position[2].X += 16; lb._position[2].Y += 16; lb._position[3].X += 32; lb._position[3].Y += 32; _rotated = false; } else if (!_rotated) { lb._position[0].X += 16; lb._position[0].Y += 16; lb._position[2].X -= 16; lb._position[2].Y -= 16; lb._position[3].X -= 32; lb._position[3].Y -= 32; _rotated = true; } } if (newState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up) && oldState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) { // the player is holding the key down if (gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds >=1) { if (_rotated) { lb._position[0].X -= 16; lb._position[0].Y -= 16; lb._position[2].X += 16; lb._position[2].Y += 16; lb._position[3].X += 32; lb._position[3].Y += 32; _rotated = false; } else if (!_rotated) { lb._position[0].X += 16; lb._position[0].Y += 16; lb._position[2].X -= 16; lb._position[2].Y -= 16; lb._position[3].X -= 32; lb._position[3].Y -= 32; _rotated = true; } _elapsedSeconds2 = 0; } }

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• jquery anchor to html extract

  - by Benjamin Ortuzar

  I would like to implement something similar to the Google quick scroll extension with jquery for the extracts of a search result, so when the full document is opened (within the same website) it gives the user the opportunity to go straight to the extract location. Here is a sample of what I get returned from the search engine when I search for 'food'. <doc> <docid>129305</docid> <title><span class='highlighted'>Food</span></title> <summary> <summarytext>Papers subject to Negative Resolution: 4 <span class='highlighted'>Food</span> <span class='highlighted'>Food</span> Irradiation (England) Regulations 2009 (S.I., 2009, No. 1584), dated 24 June 2009 (by Act), </summarytext> </summary> <paras> <paraitemcount>2</paraitemcount> <para> <paraitem>1</paraitem> <paraid>42</paraid> <pararelevance>100</pararelevance> <paraweights>50</paraweights> <paratext>4 <span class='highlighted'>Food</span></paratext> </para> <para> <paraitem>2</paraitem> <paraid>54</paraid> <pararelevance>100</pararelevance> <paraweights>50</paraweights> <paratext><span class='highlighted'>Food</span> Irradiation (England) Regulations 2009 (S.I., 2009, No. 1584), dated 24 June 2009 (by Act), with an Explanatory Memorandum and an Impact Assessment (</paratext> </para> </paras> </doc> As you see the search engine has returned a document that contains one summary and two extracts. So let's say the user clicks on the second extract in the search resutls page, the browser would open the detailed document in the same website, and would offer the user the possibility to go to the extract as the Google quick scroll extension does. Is there an existing jquery script for this? If not, can you suggest any jquery/javascript code that would simplify my task to implement this. Notes: I can access the extracts from the document details page. I'm aware that the HTML in some cases could be slightly different in the extract than in the details page, finding no match. The search engine does not return where the extract was located. At the moment I'm trying to understand the JS code that the extension uses.

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• SQLiteException and SQLite error near "(": syntax error with Subsonic ActiveRecord

  - by nvuono

  I ran into an interesting error with the following LiNQ query using LiNQPad and when using Subsonic 3.0.x w/ActiveRecord within my project and wanted to share the error and resolution for anyone else who runs into it. The linq statement below is meant to group entries in the tblSystemsValues collection into their appropriate system and then extract the system with the highest ID. from ksf in KeySafetyFunction where ksf.Unit == 2 && ksf.Condition_ID == 1 join sys in tblSystems on ksf.ID equals sys.KeySafetyFunction join xval in (from t in tblSystemsValues group t by t.tblSystems_ID into groupedT select new { sysId = groupedT.Key, MaxID = groupedT.Max(g=>g.ID), MaxText = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID == groupedT.Max(g=>g.ID)).TextValue, MaxChecked = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID == groupedT.Max(g=>g.ID)).Checked }) on sys.ID equals xval.sysId select new {KSFDesc=ksf.Description, sys.Description, xval.MaxText, xval.MaxChecked} On its own, the subquery for grouping into groupedT works perfectly and the query to match up KeySafetyFunctions with their System in tblSystems also works perfectly on its own. However, when trying to run the completed query in linqpad or within my project I kept running into a SQLiteException SQLite Error Near "(" First I tried splitting the queries up within my project because I knew that I could just run a foreach loop over the results if necessary. However, I continued to receive the same exception! I eventually separated the query into three separate parts before I realized that it was the lazy execution of the queries that was killing me. It then became clear that adding the .ToList() specifier after the myProtectedSystem query below was the key to avoiding the lazy execution after combining and optimizing the query and being able to get my results despite the problems I encountered with the SQLite driver. // determine the max Text/Checked values for each system in tblSystemsValue var myProtectedValue = from t in tblSystemsValue.All() group t by t.tblSystems_ID into groupedT select new { sysId = groupedT.Key, MaxID = groupedT.Max(g => g.ID), MaxText = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID ==groupedT.Max(g => g.ID)).TextValue, MaxChecked = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID ==groupedT.Max(g => g.ID)).Checked}; // get the system description information and filter by Unit/Condition ID var myProtectedSystem = (from ksf in KeySafetyFunction.All() where ksf.Unit == 2 && ksf.Condition_ID == 1 join sys in tblSystem.All() on ksf.ID equals sys.KeySafetyFunction select new {KSFDesc = ksf.Description, sys.Description, sys.ID}).ToList(); // finally join everything together AFTER forcing execution with .ToList() var joined = from protectedSys in myProtectedSystem join protectedVal in myProtectedValue on protectedSys.ID equals protectedVal.sysId select new {protectedSys.KSFDesc, protectedSys.Description, protectedVal.MaxChecked, protectedVal.MaxText}; // print the gratifying debug results foreach(var protectedItem in joined) { System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(protectedItem.Description + ", " + protectedItem.KSFDesc + ", " + protectedItem.MaxText + ", " + protectedItem.MaxChecked); }

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• How to convert a 32bpp image to an indexed format?

  - by Ed Swangren

  So here are the details (I am using C# BTW): I receive a 32bpp image (JPEG compressed) from a server. At some point, I would like to use the Palette property of a bitmap to color over-saturated pixels (brightness 240) red. To do so, I need to get the image into an indexed format. I have tried converting the image to a GIF, but I get quality loss. I have tried creating a new bitmap in an index format by these methods: // causes a "Parameter not valid" error Bitmap indexed = new Bitmap(orig.Width, orig.Height, PixelFormat.Indexed) // no error, but the resulting image is black due to information loss I assume Bitmap indexed = new Bitmap(orig.Width, orig.Height, PixelFormat.Format8bppIndexed) I am at a loss now. The data in this image is changed constantly by the user, so I don't want to manually set pixels that have a brightness 240 if I can avoid it. If I can set the palette once when the image is created, my work is done. If I am going about this the wrong way to begin with please let me know. EDIT: Thanks guys, here is some more detail on what I am attempting to accomplish. We are scanning a tissue slide at high resolution (pathology application). I write the interface to the actual scanner. We use a line-scan camera. To test the line rate of the camera, the user scans a very small portion and looks at the image. The image is displayed next to a track bar. When the user moves the track bar (adjusting line rate), I change the overall intensity of the image in an attempt to model what it would look like at the new line rate. I do this using an ImageAttributes and ColorMatrix object currently. When the user adjusts the track bar, I adjust the matrix. This does not give me per pixel information, but the performance is very nice. I could use LockBits and some unsafe code here, but I would rather not rewrite it if possible. When the new image is created, I would like for all pixels with a brightness value of 240 to be colored red. I was thinking that defining a palette for the bitmap up front would be a clean way of doing this.

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• HowTo stick QDialog to Screen Borders like Skype do?

  - by mosg

  Hello. A long time ago I tried to find method how to stick QDialog window to screen borders for my small projects like Skype windows do it, but I failed. May be I was looking this code not in the right place, so now I'm looking the solution here, on stack! :) So, does any one have a deal with some kind of such code, links, samples? In my opinion, we have to reimplement QDialog moveEvent function, like below, but that code does not working: void CDialog::moveEvent(QMoveEvent * event) { QRect wndRect; int leftTaskbar = 0, rightTaskbar = 0, topTaskbar = 0, bottomTaskbar = 0; // int top = 0, left = 0, right = 0, bottom = 0; wndRect = this->frameGeometry(); // Screen resolution int screenWidth = QApplication::desktop()->width(); int screenHeight = QApplication::desktop()->height(); int wndWidth = wndRect.right() - wndRect.left(); int wndHeight = wndRect.bottom() - wndRect.top(); int posX = event->pos().x(); int posY = event->pos().y(); // Snap to screen border // Left border if (posX >= -m_nXOffset + leftTaskbar && posX <= leftTaskbar + m_nXOffset) { //left = leftTaskbar; this->move(leftTaskbar, posY); return; } // Top border if (posY >= -m_nYOffset && posY <= topTaskbar + m_nYOffset) { //top = topTaskbar; this->move(posX, topTaskbar); return; } // Right border if (posX + wndWidth <= screenWidth - rightTaskbar + m_nXOffset && posX + wndWidth >= screenWidth - rightTaskbar - m_nXOffset) { //right = screenWidth - rightTaskbar - wndWidth; this->move(screenWidth - rightTaskbar - wndWidth, posY); return; } // Bottom border if (posY + wndHeight <= screenHeight - bottomTaskbar + m_nYOffset && posY + wndHeight >= screenHeight - bottomTaskbar - m_nYOffset) { //bottom = screenHeight - bottomTaskbar - wndHeight; this->move(posX, screenHeight - bottomTaskbar - wndHeight); return; } QDialog::moveEvent(event); } Thanks.

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