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• url rewriting with antlr

  - by jgray

  My java program needs to rewrite urls in html (just in time). I am looking for the right tool and wonder if antlr is doing the job for me?

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• Sanitize GET query with Apache

  - by Freelancer

  Hello everyone, I see there's a lot of talk here about how to go about sanitizing data. Could it be as simple as adding this rewrite rule to .htaccess? RewriteRule ^([\w\-]+)$ index.php?page=$1 To my understanding this will allow only letters, numbers, _ and - in $1, am I right? If you add to this usage of prepared statements for SQL queries, it should be pretty proof, is that right? Somehow feels like too easy to be true, am I missing something, any ways to firm it up?

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• Moving rails javascript to public while keeping ruby code?

  - by tesmar

  Hi guys, I have a project to move some JS code outside of rails into the public direcotry, but some of it has ruby code embedded, and depends on the values of the variables from the controllers to set some of its code. How can I move it out of the view and still maintain the same structure, or do I need to just rewrite the JS from scratch?

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• how to reuse a CASE in the WHERE ?

  - by Thibault Witzig

  Hello I'm trying to do a request that looks like this SELECT field1, field2, field3 = CASE WHEN field2 = 'something' THEN 'something' WHEN field1 IS NOT NULL and field2 IS NULL THEN 'somethingElse' ELSE NULL END FROM SomeTable WHERE field3 IS NOT NULL This results in a syntax error. I have to rewrite the CASE in the WHERE instead of just refering to it. Is there a better way to achieve this ? And out of curiosity, why is "WHERE field3 IS NOT NULL" refused while for example "ORDER BY field3" would pass ?

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• String formatting help

  - by Camran

  I have this: 2010-04-08T01:01:00Z I want to remove the 'T' and everything behind it as well. Also I would like to rewrite the date into this format: 08-04-2010 How can I do this the easiest way? Thanks

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• Where do I find good example data? [closed]

  - by Silvanus

  Where do people find sample data that they need for development but can't get directly from their employer for whatever reason? I am looking to rewrite my employers' delivery track and trace software as an exercise.

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• chaining and getting the value of an input

  - by cf_PhillipSenn

  This code gets the text that's in a certain column of a table row: var keyA = $(a).children('td').eq(column).text().toUpperCase(); Q: How do I rewrite this to get the value of an input tag that's in the table cell? var keyA = $(a).children('td').eq(column).('input').val().toUpperCase();

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• GeoIP and Nginx

  - by JavierMartinez

  I have a nginx with geoip, but it is not working rightly. The issue is the next: Nginx are getting geodata from $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] instead of $_SERVER['HTTP_X_HAPROXY_IP'], which have the real client ip. So, the reported geodata belongs to my server ip instead of client ip. Does anybody where could be the error to fix it? Nginx version and compiled modules: nginx -V nginx version: nginx/1.2.3 TLS SNI support enabled configure arguments: --prefix=/etc/nginx --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --error-log- path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/body --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/fastcgi --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/proxy --http-scgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/scgi --http-uwsgi-temp-path=/var/lib/nginx/uwsgi --lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid --with-pcre-jit --with-debug --with-file-aio --with-http_addition_module --with-http_dav_module --with-http_geoip_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_image_filter_module --with-http_realip_module --with-http_secure_link_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_sub_module --with-http_xslt_module --with-ipv6 --with-sha1=/usr/include/openssl --with-md5=/usr/include/openssl --with-mail --with-mail_ssl_module --add-module=/usr/src/nginx/source/nginx-1.2.3/debian/modules/nginx-auth-pam --add-module=/usr/src/nginx/source/nginx-1.2.3/debian/modules/nginx-echo --add-module=/usr/src/nginx/source/nginx-1.2.3/debian/modules/nginx-upstream-fair --add-module=/usr/src/nginx/source/nginx-1.2.3/debian/modules/nginx-dav-ext-module --add-module=/usr/src/nginx/source/nginx-1.2.3/debian/modules/nginx-syslog --add-module=/usr/src/nginx/source/nginx-1.2.3/debian/modules/nginx-cache-purge nginx site conf (frontend machine) server { root /var/www/storage; server_name ~^.*(\.)?mydomain.com$; if ($host ~ ^(.*)\.mydomain\.com$) { set $new_host $1.mydomain.com; } if ($host !~ ^(.*)\.mydomain\.com$) { set $new_host www.mydomain.com; } add_header Staging true; real_ip_header X-HAProxy-IP; set_real_ip_from 10.5.0.10/32; location /files { expires 30d; if ($uri !~ ^/files/([a-fA-F0-9]+)_(220|45)\.jpg$) { return 403; } rewrite ^/files/([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])([a-fA-F0-9]+)_(220|45)\.jpg$ /files/$1/$2/$3/$4/$1$2$3$4$5_$6.jpg break; try_files $uri @to_backend; } location /assets { if ($uri ~ ^/assets/r([a-zA-Z0-9]+[^/])(/(css|js|fonts)/.*)) { rewrite ^/assets/r([a-zA-Z0-9]+[^/])/(css|js|fonts)/(.*)$ /assets/$2/$3 break; } try_files $uri @to_backend; } location / { proxy_set_header Host $new_host; proxy_set_header X-HAProxy-IP $remote_addr; proxy_pass http://10.5.0.10:8080; } location @to_backend { proxy_set_header Host $new_host; proxy_pass http://10.5.0.10:8080; } } nginx.conf (backend machine) http{ ... ## # GeoIP Config ## geoip_country /etc/nginx/geoip/GeoIP.dat; # the country IP database geoip_city /etc/nginx/geoip/GeoLiteCity.dat; # the city IP database ... } fastcgi_params (backend machine) ### SET GEOIP Variables ### fastcgi_param GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE $geoip_country_code; fastcgi_param GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE3 $geoip_country_code3; fastcgi_param GEOIP_COUNTRY_NAME $geoip_country_name; fastcgi_param GEOIP_CITY_COUNTRY_CODE $geoip_city_country_code; fastcgi_param GEOIP_CITY_COUNTRY_CODE3 $geoip_city_country_code3; fastcgi_param GEOIP_CITY_COUNTRY_NAME $geoip_city_country_name; fastcgi_param GEOIP_REGION $geoip_region; fastcgi_param GEOIP_CITY $geoip_city; fastcgi_param GEOIP_POSTAL_CODE $geoip_postal_code; fastcgi_param GEOIP_CITY_CONTINENT_CODE $geoip_city_continent_code; fastcgi_param GEOIP_LATITUDE $geoip_latitude; fastcgi_param GEOIP_LONGITUDE $geoip_longitude; haproxy.conf (frontend machine) defaults log global option forwardfor option httpclose mode http retries 3 option redispatch maxconn 4096 contimeout 100000 clitimeout 100000 srvtimeout 100000 listen cluster_webs *:8080 mode http option tcpka option httpchk option httpclose option forwardfor balance roundrobin server backend-stage 10.5.0.11:80 weight 1 $_SERVER dump: http://paste.laravel.com/7dy Where 10.5.0.10 is frontend private ip and 10.5.0.11 backend private ip

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• Why is this mod_rewrite RewriteRule directive not working in the .htaccess file?

  - by morgant

  I've got a site that was hosted on a linux el cheapo hosting service that I'm migrating to my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server server running Apache 2.2.8 & PHP 5.2.5 w/rewrite_module enabled and AllowOverride All, but I'm running into an issue with the following lines in the .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On #RewriteRule ^view/([^/\.]+)/?$ /view.php?item=$1 [L] #RewriteRule ^order/([^/\.]+)/?$ /order.php?item=$1 [L] RewriteRule ^category/([^/\.]+)/?$ /category.php?category=$1 [L] As you can see, I've commented out the RewriteRule directives for /view/ and /order/, so I'm only dealing with /category/. When I attempt to load http://domain.tld/category/2/ it runs category.php (I've added debug code to confirm), but $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] comes through as /category/2/ and $_GET['category'] comes through as empty. I'm usually fine with troubleshooting .htaccess files and mod_rewrite directives, but this one's got me stumped for some reason. Update: I followed Josh's suggestion and here's the what's dumped to mod_rewrite.log when I try to access http://domain.tld/category/2/: 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /category/13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (3) applying pattern '.*' to uri '/category/13' 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (1) pass through /category/13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6aa98/subreq] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] add path info postfix: /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php -> /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php/13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6aa98/subreq] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] strip per-dir prefix: /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php/13 -> category.php/13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6aa98/subreq] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] applying pattern '^category/([^/\.]+)/?$' to uri 'category.php/13' 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6aa98/subreq] (1) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] pass through /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] add path info postfix: /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php -> /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php/13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] strip per-dir prefix: /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php/13 -> category.php/13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] applying pattern '^category/([^/\.]+)/?$' to uri 'category.php/13' 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b5ea98/initial] (1) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] pass through /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/category.php 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6ea98/subreq] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6ea98/subreq] (3) applying pattern '.*' to uri '/13' 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6ea98/subreq] (1) pass through /13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6ea98/subreq] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] strip per-dir prefix: /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/13 -> 13 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6ea98/subreq] (3) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] applying pattern '^category/([^/\.]+)/?$' to uri '13' 65.19.81.253 - - [22/Oct/2009:17:31:53 --0400] [domain.tld/sid#100aae0b0][rid#100b6ea98/subreq] (1) [perdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/] pass through /Library/WebServer/Documents/tld.domain.www/13

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• Apache cyclic redirection problem

  - by slicedlime

  I have an extremely weird problem with one of my sites. I run a number of blogs off a single apache2 server with a shared wordpress install. Each site has a www.domain.com main domain, but a ServerAlias of domain.com. This works fine for all the blogs except one, which instead of redirecting to www.domain.com redirects to domain.com, causing a cyclic redirection. The configuration for each host looks like this: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName www.domain.com ServerAlias domain.com DocumentRoot "/home/www/www.domain.com" <Directory "/home/www/www.domain.com"> Options MultiViews Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> As this didn't work, I tried a mod_rewrite rule for it, which still didn't redirect correctly. The weird thing here is that if i rewrite it to redirect to any other domain it will redirect correctly, even to another subdomain. So a rewrite rule for domain.com that redirects to foo.domain.com works, but not to www.domain.com. In the same way, trying to redirec to www.domain.com/foo/ ends me up with a redirection to domain.com/foo/. Even weirder, I tried setting up domain.com as a completely separate virtual host, and ran this php test script as index.php on it: <?php header('Location: http://www.domain.com/' . $_SERVER["request_uri"]); ?> Hitting domain.com still redirects to domain.com! Checking out the headers sent to the server verifies that I get exactly the redirect URL I wanted, except with the "www." stripped. The same script works like a charm if I replace www. with foo or redirect to any other domain. This has now foiled me for a long time. I've diffed the vhosts configs for a working domain and the faulty one, and the only difference is the domain name itself. I've diffed the .htaccess files for both sites, and the only difference is a path related to the sharing of wordpress installation for the blogs: php_value include_path ".:/home/www/www.domain.com/local/:/home/www/www.domain.com/" I searched through everything in /etc (including apache conf) for the domain name of the faulty host and found nothing weird, searched through everything in /etc for one of the working ones to make sure it didn't differ, I even went so far to check on the DNS setup of two domains to make sure there wasn't anything strange going on. Here's the response for the faulty one: user@localhost dir $ wget -S domain.com --2010-03-20 21:47:24-- http://domain.com/ Resolving domain.com... x.x.x.x Connecting to domain.com|x.x.x.x|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Via: 1.1 ISA Connection: Keep-Alive Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 0 Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:47:24 GMT Location: http://domain.com/ Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10-pl0-gentoo X-Pingback: http://domain.com/xmlrpc.php Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Location: http://domain.com/ [following] And a working one: user@localhost dir $ wget -S domain.com --2010-03-20 21:51:33-- http://domain.com/ Resolving domain.com... x.x.x.x Connecting to domain.com|x.x.x.x|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Via: 1.1 ISA Connection: Keep-Alive Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 0 Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:51:33 GMT Location: http://www.domain.com/ Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Server: Apache X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10-pl0-gentoo X-Pingback: http://www.domain.com/xmlrpc.php Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Location: http://www.domain.com/ [following] I'm stumped. I've had this problem for a long time, and I feel like I've tried everything. I can't see why the different domains would act differently under the same installation with the same settings. Help :(

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• KVM guest io is much slower than host io: is that normal?

  - by Evolver

  I have a Qemu-KVM host system setup on CentOS 6.3. Four 1TB SATA HDDs working in Software RAID10. Guest CentOS 6.3 is installed on separate LVM. People say that they see guest performance almost equal to host performance, but I don't see that. My i/o tests are showing 30-70% slower performance on guest than on host system. I tried to change scheduler (set elevator=deadline on host and elevator=noop on guest), set blkio.weight to 1000 in cgroup, change io to virtio... But none of these changes gave me any significant results. This is a guest .xml config part: <disk type='file' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/> <source file='/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/> </disk> There are my tests: Host system: iozone test # iozone -a -i0 -i1 -i2 -s8G -r64k random random KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 8388608 64 189930 197436 266786 267254 28644 66642 dd read test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.23044 s, 254 MB/s # dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=1024 & dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=2048 & dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=3072 & dd if=/dev/vgkvmnode/lv2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=4096 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.4528 s, 74.3 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.562 s, 73.7 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.6341 s, 73.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 14.7006 s, 73.0 MB/s dd write test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.2039 s, 173 MB/s # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test2 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test3 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test4 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.7173 s, 32.8 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.8868 s, 32.6 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.9097 s, 32.6 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.9688 s, 32.6 MB/s Guest system: iozone test # iozone -a -i0 -i1 -i2 -s512M -r64k random random KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 524288 64 93374 154596 141193 149865 21394 46264 dd read test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=1024 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 5.04356 s, 213 MB/s # dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=1024 & dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=2048 & dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=3072 & dd if=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_home of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024 iflag=direct skip=4096 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.7348 s, 43.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.7378 s, 43.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.7408 s, 43.4 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.744 s, 43.4 MB/s dd write test: one process and then four simultaneous processes # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 10.415 s, 103 MB/s # dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test2 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test3 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct & dd if=/dev/zero of=test4 bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.8874 s, 21.5 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.8608 s, 21.5 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.8693 s, 21.5 MB/s 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 49.9427 s, 21.5 MB/s I wonder is that normal situation or did I missed something?

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• Apache reverse proxy POST 403

  - by qkslvrwolf

  I am trying to get Jira and Stash to talk to each other via a Trusted Application link. The setup, currently, looks like this: Jira - http - Jira Proxy -https- stash proxy -http- stash. Jira and the Jira proxy are on the same machine. The Jira Proxy is showing 403 Forbidden for POST requests from the stash server. It works (or seems to ) for everything else. I contend that since we're seeing 403 forbiddens in the access log for apache, Jira is never seeing the request. Why is apache forbidding posts,and how do I fix it? Note that the IPs for both Stash and the Stash Proxy are in the "trusted host" section. My config: LogLevel info CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/apache2/access.log 86400" common ServerSignature off ServerTokens prod Listen 8443 <VirtualHost *:443> ServerName jira.company.com SSLEngine on SSLOptions +StrictRequire SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/server.cer SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/server.key SSLProtocol +SSLv3 +TLSv1 SSLCipherSuite DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA:AES128-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA # If context path is not "/wiki", then send to /jira. RedirectMatch 301 ^/$ https://jira.company.com/jira RedirectMatch 301 ^/gsd(.*)$ https://jira.company.com/jira$1 ProxyRequests On ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyVia On ProxyPass /jira http://localhost:8080/jira ProxyPassReverse /jira http://localhost:8080/jira <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> RewriteEngine on RewriteLog "/var/log/apache2/rewrite.log" RewriteLogLevel 2 # Disable TRACE/TRACK requests, per security. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK) RewriteRule .* - [F] DocumentRoot /var/www DirectoryIndex index.html <Directory /var/www> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Allow from all </Directory> <LocationMatch "/"> Order deny,allow Deny from all allow from x.x.71.8 allow from x.x.8.123 allow from x.x.120.179 allow from x.x.120.73 allow from x.x.120.45 satisfy any SetEnvif Remote_Addr "x.x.71.8" TRUSTED_HOST SetEnvif Remote_Addr "x.x.8.123" TRUSTED_HOST SetEnvif Remote_Addr "x.x.120.179" TRUSTED_HOST SetEnvif Remote_Addr "x.x.120.73" TRUSTED_HOST SetEnvif Remote_Addr "x.x.120.45" TRUSTED_HOST </LocationMatch> <LocationMatch ^> SSLRequireSSL AuthType CompanyNet PubcookieInactiveExpire -1 PubcookieAppID jira.company.com require valid-user RequestHeader set userid %{REMOTE_USER}s </LocationMatch> </VirtualHost> # Port open for SSL, non-pubcookie access. Used to access APIs with Basic Auth. <VirtualHost *:8443> SSLEngine on SSLOptions +StrictRequire SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/server.cer SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/server.key SSLProtocol +SSLv3 +TLSv1 SSLCipherSuite DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA:AES128-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA ProxyRequests On ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyVia On ProxyPass /jira http://localhost:8080/jira ProxyPassReverse /jira http://localhost:8080/jira <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> RewriteEngine on RewriteLog "/var/log/apache2/rewrite.log" RewriteLogLevel 2 # Disable TRACE/TRACK requests, per security. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK) RewriteRule .* - [F] DocumentRoot /var/www DirectoryIndex index.html <Directory /var/www> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost jira.company.com:80> ServerName jira.company.com RedirectMatch 301 /(.*)$ https://jira.company.com/$1 RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK) RewriteRule .* - [F] </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName go.company.com RedirectMatch 301 /(.*)$ https://jira.company.com/$1 RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK) RewriteRule .* - [F] </VirtualHost>

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• Can I get advice on my nginx configuration (as a proxy in front of Jira and Confluence)?

  - by Nate

  I was wondering if I could get some advice on my nginx configuration. The config seems to be working, but I'm unsure if I'm doing everything properly. The basic idea is to have a Jira and Confluence server (in separate Tomcat instances) running on the same machine, with nginx in front to handle SSL for both. I want only SSL connections to be made to Jira/Confluence. Jira is running on 127.0.0.1:9090 and Confluence on 127.0.0.1:8080. Here is my nginx.conf, any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated. user nginx; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] $request ' '"$status" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; #keepalive_timeout 0; keepalive_timeout 65; #gzip on; # Load config files from the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; # Our self-signed cert ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/fissl.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/fissl.key; # redirect non-ssl Confluence to ssl server { listen 80; server_name confluence.example.com; rewrite ^(.*) https://confluence.example.com$1 permanent; } # redirect non-ssl Jira to ssl server { listen 80; server_name jira.example.com; rewrite ^(.*) https://jira.example.com$1 permanent; } # # The Confluence server # server { listen 443; server_name confluence.example.com; ssl on; access_log /var/log/nginx/confluence.access.log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/confluence.error.log; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; } error_page 404 /404.html; location = /404.html { root /usr/share/nginx/html; } redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/html; } } # # The Jira server # server { listen 443; server_name jira.example.com; ssl on; access_log /var/log/nginx/jira.access.log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/jira.error.log; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9090/; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; } error_page 404 /404.html; location = /404.html { root /usr/share/nginx/html; } # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/html; } } }

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• phpmyadmin login redirect fails with custom ssl port

  - by baraboom

  The server is running Ubuntu 10.10, Apache 2.2.16, PHP 5.3.3-1ubuntu9.3, phpMyAdmin 3.3.7deb5build0.10.10.1. Since this same server is also running Zimbra on port 443, I've configured apache to serve SSL on port 81. So far, I have one CMS script running on this virtual host successfully. However, when I access /phpmyadmin (set up with the default alias) on my custom ssl port and submit the login form, I am redirected to http://vhost.domain.com:81/index.php?TOKEN=foo (note the http:// instead of the https:// that the login url was using). This generates an Error 400 Bad Request complaining about "speaking plain HTTP to an SSL-enabled server port." I can then manually change the http:// to https:// in the URL and use phpmyadmin as expected. I was annoyed enough to spend an hour trying to fix it and now even more annoyed that I cannot figure it out. I've tried various things, including: Adding $cfg['PmaAbsoluteUri'] = 'https://vhost.domain.com:81/phpmyadmin/'; to the /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php file but this did not correct the problem (even though /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/auth/cookie.auth.lib.php looks like it should honor it and use it as the redirect). Adding $cfg['ForceSSL'] = 1; to the same config.inc.php but then apache spirals into an infinite redirect. Adding a rewrite rule to the vhost-ssl conf file in apache but I was unable to figure out the condition to use when http:// was present along with the correct ssl port of :81. Lots of googling. Here are the relevant Apache configuration pieces: /etc/apache2/ports.conf <IfModule mod_ssl.c> NameVirtualHost *:81 Listen 81 </IfModule> /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/vhost-nonssl <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost ServerName vhost.domain.com DocumentRoot /home/xxx/sites/vhost/html RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}:81%{REQUEST_URI} </Virtualhost> /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/vhost-ssl <VirtualHost *:81> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost ServerName vhost.domain.com DocumentRoot /home/xxx/sites/vhost/html <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None AuthType Basic AuthName "Restricted Vhost" AuthUserFile /home/xxx/sites/vhost/.users Require valid-user </Directory> <Directory /home/xxx/sites/vhost/html/> Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf Alias /phpmyadmin /usr/share/phpmyadmin (The rest of the default .conf truncated.) Everything in the apache config seems to work ok - the rewrite from non-ssl to ssl, the http authentication, the problem only happens when I am submitting the login form for phpmyadmin from https://vhost.domain.com:81/index.php. Other configs: The phpmyadmin config is completely default and the php.ini has only had some minor changes to memory and timeout limits. These seem to work fine, as mentioned, another php script runs with no problem and phpmyadmin works great once I manually enter in the correct schema after login. I'm looking for either a bandaid I can add to save me the trouble of manually entering in the https:// after login, a real fix that will make phpmyadmin behave as I think it should or some greater understanding of why my desired config is not possible.

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• Nginx and multiple wordpress instances with fastcgi under same domain

  - by damnsweet

  My site is running on apache. two instances of wordpress exist under paths /tr/ and /eng/. I want to move the setup to nginx but could not manage to get it working. My setup consists of nging 0.7.66, php 5.3.2, and php-fpm. /tr/ and /eng/ are two separate wordpress instances located under /home/istci/webapps/wordpress_tr and /home/istci/webapps/wordpress respectively. Below is the server section from nginx.conf containing only configuration for tr, yet could not get it working either. server { listen 80; server_name www.example.com; charset utf-8; location ~ ^/$ { rewrite ^(.+)$ http://www.example.com/tr/ permanent; } location ~ /tr/.*php$ { fastcgi_pass unix:/home/istci/var/run/wptr.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/istci/webapps/wordpress_tr$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root; fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol; fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1; fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx/$nginx_version; fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr; fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr; fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name; # required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect fastcgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS 200; } location /tr/ { root /home/istci/webapps/wordpress_tr/; index index.php index.html index.htm; if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite ^(.+)$ /tr/index.php?q=$1 last; break; } if (-f $request_filename) { expires 30d; break; } } } php-fpm listens on unix:/home/istci/var/run/wptr.sock. running it in debug-mode shows no active handlers, which means no connection is made to unix socket from nginx. nginx access logs: 127.0.0.1 - - [09/Jun/2010:03:45:11 -0500] "GET /tr/ HTTP/1.0" 404 20 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100527 Firefox/3.6.4" nginx debug logs : 2010/06/09 03:38:53 [notice] 6922#0: built by gcc 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-48) 2010/06/09 03:38:53 [notice] 6922#0: OS: Linux 2.6.18-164.9.1.el5PAE 2010/06/09 03:38:53 [notice] 6922#0: getrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE): 4096:4096 2010/06/09 03:38:53 [notice] 6923#0: start worker processes 2010/06/09 03:38:53 [notice] 6923#0: start worker process 6924 2010/06/09 03:38:53 [notice] 6923#0: start worker process 6925 2010/06/09 03:39:01 [notice] 6925#0: *1 "^(.+)$" matches "/tr/", client: 127.0.0.1, server: www.example.com, request: "GET /tr/ HTTP/1.0", host: "www.example.com" 2010/06/09 03:39:01 [notice] 6925#0: *1 rewritten data: "/tr/index.php", args: "q=/tr/", client: 127.0.0.1, server: www.example.com, request: "GET /tr/ HTTP/1.0", host: "www.example.com" Any clues about what is wrong with my configuration? Thanks.

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• Nginx Multiple Domains

  - by showFocus

  I am trying to add a second virtual host to nginx. When i go to the new domain it redirects to the old one. I have tried restarting Nginx, rebooting the server. Has anyone come across this before, care to share? File: nginx.conf ### user www-data www-data; worker_processes 4; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay off; keepalive_timeout 5; gzip on; gzip_comp_level 2; gzip_proxied any; gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript; include /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled/*; } File: ../sites-enabled/domain1.co.uk server { listen 80; server_name www.domain1.co.uk; rewrite ^/(.*) http://domain1.co.uk/$1 permanent; } server { listen 80; server_name domain1.co.uk; access_log /home/me/public_html/domain1.co.uk/log/access.log; error_log /home/me/public_html/domain1.co.uk/log/error.log; location / { root /home/me/public_html/domain1.co.uk/public/; index index.php index.html; # WordPress supercache & permalinks. include /usr/local/nginx/conf/wordpress_params.super_cache; } # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/me/public_html/domain1.co.uk/public/$fastcgi_script_name; } } File: ../sites-enabled/domain2.co.uk server { listen 80; server_name www.domain2.co.uk; rewrite ^/(.*) http://domain2.co.uk/$1 permanent; } server { listen 80; server_name domain2.co.uk; access_log /home/me/public_html/domain2.co.uk/log/access.log; error_log /home/me/public_html/domain2.co.uk/log/error.log; location / { root /home/me/public_html/domain2.co.uk/public/; index index.php index.html; # Basic version of WordPress parameters, supporting nice permalinks. # include /usr/local/nginx/conf/wordpress_params.regular; # Advanced version of WordPress parameters supporting nice permalinks and WP Super Cache plugin include /usr/local/nginx/conf/wordpress_params.super_cache; } # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/me/public_html/domain2/public/$fastcgi_script_name; } }

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• Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization

  - by Mark Virtue

  Is your desk a paragon of neatness, or does it look like a paper-bomb has gone off? If you’ve been putting off getting organized because the task is too huge or daunting, or you don’t know where to start, we’ve got 40 tips to get you on the path to zen mastery of your filing system. For all those readers who would like to get their files and folders organized, or, if they’re already organized, better organized—we have compiled a complete guide to getting organized and staying organized, a comprehensive article that will hopefully cover every possible tip you could want. Signs that Your Computer is Poorly Organized If your computer is a mess, you’re probably already aware of it.  But just in case you’re not, here are some tell-tale signs: Your Desktop has over 40 icons on it “My Documents” contains over 300 files and 60 folders, including MP3s and digital photos You use the Windows’ built-in search facility whenever you need to find a file You can’t find programs in the out-of-control list of programs in your Start Menu You save all your Word documents in one folder, all your spreadsheets in a second folder, etc Any given file that you’re looking for may be in any one of four different sets of folders But before we start, here are some quick notes: We’re going to assume you know what files and folders are, and how to create, save, rename, copy and delete them The organization principles described in this article apply equally to all computer systems.  However, the screenshots here will reflect how things look on Windows (usually Windows 7).  We will also mention some useful features of Windows that can help you get organized. Everyone has their own favorite methodology of organizing and filing, and it’s all too easy to get into “My Way is Better than Your Way” arguments.  The reality is that there is no perfect way of getting things organized.  When I wrote this article, I tried to keep a generalist and objective viewpoint.  I consider myself to be unusually well organized (to the point of obsession, truth be told), and I’ve had 25 years experience in collecting and organizing files on computers.  So I’ve got a lot to say on the subject.  But the tips I have described here are only one way of doing it.  Hopefully some of these tips will work for you too, but please don’t read this as any sort of “right” way to do it. At the end of the article we’ll be asking you, the reader, for your own organization tips. Why Bother Organizing At All? For some, the answer to this question is self-evident. And yet, in this era of powerful desktop search software (the search capabilities built into the Windows Vista and Windows 7 Start Menus, and third-party programs like Google Desktop Search), the question does need to be asked, and answered. I have a friend who puts every file he ever creates, receives or downloads into his My Documents folder and doesn’t bother filing them into subfolders at all.  He relies on the search functionality built into his Windows operating system to help him find whatever he’s looking for.  And he always finds it.  He’s a Search Samurai.  For him, filing is a waste of valuable time that could be spent enjoying life! It’s tempting to follow suit.  On the face of it, why would anyone bother to take the time to organize their hard disk when such excellent search software is available?  Well, if all you ever want to do with the files you own is to locate and open them individually (for listening, editing, etc), then there’s no reason to ever bother doing one scrap of organization.  But consider these common tasks that are not achievable with desktop search software: Find files manually.  Often it’s not convenient, speedy or even possible to utilize your desktop search software to find what you want.  It doesn’t work 100% of the time, or you may not even have it installed.  Sometimes its just plain faster to go straight to the file you want, if you know it’s in a particular sub-folder, rather than trawling through hundreds of search results. Find groups of similar files (e.g. all your “work” files, all the photos of your Europe holiday in 2008, all your music videos, all the MP3s from Dark Side of the Moon, all your letters you wrote to your wife, all your tax returns).  Clever naming of the files will only get you so far.  Sometimes it’s the date the file was created that’s important, other times it’s the file format, and other times it’s the purpose of the file.  How do you name a collection of files so that they’re easy to isolate based on any of the above criteria?  Short answer, you can’t. Move files to a new computer.  It’s time to upgrade your computer.  How do you quickly grab all the files that are important to you?  Or you decide to have two computers now – one for home and one for work.  How do you quickly isolate only the work-related files to move them to the work computer? Synchronize files to other computers.  If you have more than one computer, and you need to mirror some of your files onto the other computer (e.g. your music collection), then you need a way to quickly determine which files are to be synced and which are not.  Surely you don’t want to synchronize everything? Choose which files to back up.  If your backup regime calls for multiple backups, or requires speedy backups, then you’ll need to be able to specify which files are to be backed up, and which are not.  This is not possible if they’re all in the same folder. Finally, if you’re simply someone who takes pleasure in being organized, tidy and ordered (me! me!), then you don’t even need a reason.  Being disorganized is simply unthinkable. Tips on Getting Organized Here we present our 40 best tips on how to get organized.  Or, if you’re already organized, to get better organized. Tip #1.  Choose Your Organization System Carefully The reason that most people are not organized is that it takes time.  And the first thing that takes time is deciding upon a system of organization.  This is always a matter of personal preference, and is not something that a geek on a website can tell you.  You should always choose your own system, based on how your own brain is organized (which makes the assumption that your brain is, in fact, organized). We can’t instruct you, but we can make suggestions: You may want to start off with a system based on the users of the computer.  i.e. “My Files”, “My Wife’s Files”, My Son’s Files”, etc.  Inside “My Files”, you might then break it down into “Personal” and “Business”.  You may then realize that there are overlaps.  For example, everyone may want to share access to the music library, or the photos from the school play.  So you may create another folder called “Family”, for the “common” files. You may decide that the highest-level breakdown of your files is based on the “source” of each file.  In other words, who created the files.  You could have “Files created by ME (business or personal)”, “Files created by people I know (family, friends, etc)”, and finally “Files created by the rest of the world (MP3 music files, downloaded or ripped movies or TV shows, software installation files, gorgeous desktop wallpaper images you’ve collected, etc).”  This system happens to be the one I use myself.  See below:  Mark is for files created by meVC is for files created by my company (Virtual Creations)Others is for files created by my friends and familyData is the rest of the worldAlso, Settings is where I store the configuration files and other program data files for my installed software (more on this in tip #34, below). Each folder will present its own particular set of requirements for further sub-organization.  For example, you may decide to organize your music collection into sub-folders based on the artist’s name, while your digital photos might get organized based on the date they were taken.  It can be different for every sub-folder! Another strategy would be based on “currentness”.  Files you have yet to open and look at live in one folder.  Ones that have been looked at but not yet filed live in another place.  Current, active projects live in yet another place.  All other files (your “archive”, if you like) would live in a fourth folder. (And of course, within that last folder you’d need to create a further sub-system based on one of the previous bullet points). Put some thought into this – changing it when it proves incomplete can be a big hassle!  Before you go to the trouble of implementing any system you come up with, examine a wide cross-section of the files you own and see if they will all be able to find a nice logical place to sit within your system. Tip #2.  When You Decide on Your System, Stick to It! There’s nothing more pointless than going to all the trouble of creating a system and filing all your files, and then whenever you create, receive or download a new file, you simply dump it onto your Desktop.  You need to be disciplined – forever!  Every new file you get, spend those extra few seconds to file it where it belongs!  Otherwise, in just a month or two, you’ll be worse off than before – half your files will be organized and half will be disorganized – and you won’t know which is which! Tip #3.  Choose the Root Folder of Your Structure Carefully Every data file (document, photo, music file, etc) that you create, own or is important to you, no matter where it came from, should be found within one single folder, and that one single folder should be located at the root of your C: drive (as a sub-folder of C:\).  In other words, do not base your folder structure in standard folders like “My Documents”.  If you do, then you’re leaving it up to the operating system engineers to decide what folder structure is best for you.  And every operating system has a different system!  In Windows 7 your files are found in C:\Users\YourName, whilst on Windows XP it was C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents.  In UNIX systems it’s often /home/YourName. These standard default folders tend to fill up with junk files and folders that are not at all important to you.  “My Documents” is the worst offender.  Every second piece of software you install, it seems, likes to create its own folder in the “My Documents” folder.  These folders usually don’t fit within your organizational structure, so don’t use them!  In fact, don’t even use the “My Documents” folder at all.  Allow it to fill up with junk, and then simply ignore it.  It sounds heretical, but: Don’t ever visit your “My Documents” folder!  Remove your icons/links to “My Documents” and replace them with links to the folders you created and you care about! Create your own file system from scratch!  Probably the best place to put it would be on your D: drive – if you have one.  This way, all your files live on one drive, while all the operating system and software component files live on the C: drive – simply and elegantly separated.  The benefits of that are profound.  Not only are there obvious organizational benefits (see tip #10, below), but when it comes to migrate your data to a new computer, you can (sometimes) simply unplug your D: drive and plug it in as the D: drive of your new computer (this implies that the D: drive is actually a separate physical disk, and not a partition on the same disk as C:).  You also get a slight speed improvement (again, only if your C: and D: drives are on separate physical disks). Warning:  From tip #12, below, you will see that it’s actually a good idea to have exactly the same file system structure – including the drive it’s filed on – on all of the computers you own.  So if you decide to use the D: drive as the storage system for your own files, make sure you are able to use the D: drive on all the computers you own.  If you can’t ensure that, then you can still use a clever geeky trick to store your files on the D: drive, but still access them all via the C: drive (see tip #17, below). If you only have one hard disk (C:), then create a dedicated folder that will contain all your files – something like C:\Files.  The name of the folder is not important, but make it a single, brief word. There are several reasons for this: When creating a backup regime, it’s easy to decide what files should be backed up – they’re all in the one folder! If you ever decide to trade in your computer for a new one, you know exactly which files to migrate You will always know where to begin a search for any file If you synchronize files with other computers, it makes your synchronization routines very simple.   It also causes all your shortcuts to continue to work on the other machines (more about this in tip #24, below). Once you’ve decided where your files should go, then put all your files in there – Everything!  Completely disregard the standard, default folders that are created for you by the operating system (“My Music”, “My Pictures”, etc).  In fact, you can actually relocate many of those folders into your own structure (more about that below, in tip #6). The more completely you get all your data files (documents, photos, music, etc) and all your configuration settings into that one folder, then the easier it will be to perform all of the above tasks. Once this has been done, and all your files live in one folder, all the other folders in C:\ can be thought of as “operating system” folders, and therefore of little day-to-day interest for us. Here’s a screenshot of a nicely organized C: drive, where all user files are located within the \Files folder:   Tip #4.  Use Sub-Folders This would be our simplest and most obvious tip.  It almost goes without saying.  Any organizational system you decide upon (see tip #1) will require that you create sub-folders for your files.  Get used to creating folders on a regular basis. Tip #5.  Don’t be Shy About Depth Create as many levels of sub-folders as you need.  Don’t be scared to do so.  Every time you notice an opportunity to group a set of related files into a sub-folder, do so.  Examples might include:  All the MP3s from one music CD, all the photos from one holiday, or all the documents from one client. It’s perfectly okay to put files into a folder called C:\Files\Me\From Others\Services\WestCo Bank\Statements\2009.  That’s only seven levels deep.  Ten levels is not uncommon.  Of course, it’s possible to take this too far.  If you notice yourself creating a sub-folder to hold only one file, then you’ve probably become a little over-zealous.  On the other hand, if you simply create a structure with only two levels (for example C:\Files\Work) then you really haven’t achieved any level of organization at all (unless you own only six files!).  Your “Work” folder will have become a dumping ground, just like your Desktop was, with most likely hundreds of files in it. Tip #6.  Move the Standard User Folders into Your Own Folder Structure Most operating systems, including Windows, create a set of standard folders for each of its users.  These folders then become the default location for files such as documents, music files, digital photos and downloaded Internet files.  In Windows 7, the full list is shown below: Some of these folders you may never use nor care about (for example, the Favorites folder, if you’re not using Internet Explorer as your browser).  Those ones you can leave where they are.  But you may be using some of the other folders to store files that are important to you.  Even if you’re not using them, Windows will still often treat them as the default storage location for many types of files.  When you go to save a standard file type, it can become annoying to be automatically prompted to save it in a folder that’s not part of your own file structure. But there’s a simple solution:  Move the folders you care about into your own folder structure!  If you do, then the next time you go to save a file of the corresponding type, Windows will prompt you to save it in the new, moved location. Moving the folders is easy.  Simply drag-and-drop them to the new location.  Here’s a screenshot of the default My Music folder being moved to my custom personal folder (Mark): Tip #7.  Name Files and Folders Intelligently This is another one that almost goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway:  Do not allow files to be created that have meaningless names like Document1.doc, or folders called New Folder (2).  Take that extra 20 seconds and come up with a meaningful name for the file/folder – one that accurately divulges its contents without repeating the entire contents in the name. Tip #8.  Watch Out for Long Filenames Another way to tell if you have not yet created enough depth to your folder hierarchy is that your files often require really long names.  If you need to call a file Johnson Sales Figures March 2009.xls (which might happen to live in the same folder as Abercrombie Budget Report 2008.xls), then you might want to create some sub-folders so that the first file could be simply called March.xls, and living in the Clients\Johnson\Sales Figures\2009 folder. A well-placed file needs only a brief filename! Tip #9.  Use Shortcuts!  Everywhere! This is probably the single most useful and important tip we can offer.  A shortcut allows a file to be in two places at once. Why would you want that?  Well, the file and folder structure of every popular operating system on the market today is hierarchical.  This means that all objects (files and folders) always live within exactly one parent folder.  It’s a bit like a tree.  A tree has branches (folders) and leaves (files).  Each leaf, and each branch, is supported by exactly one parent branch, all the way back to the root of the tree (which, incidentally, is exactly why C:\ is called the “root folder” of the C: drive). That hard disks are structured this way may seem obvious and even necessary, but it’s only one way of organizing data.  There are others:  Relational databases, for example, organize structured data entirely differently.  The main limitation of hierarchical filing structures is that a file can only ever be in one branch of the tree – in only one folder – at a time.  Why is this a problem?  Well, there are two main reasons why this limitation is a problem for computer users: The “correct” place for a file, according to our organizational rationale, is very often a very inconvenient place for that file to be located.  Just because it’s correctly filed doesn’t mean it’s easy to get to.  Your file may be “correctly” buried six levels deep in your sub-folder structure, but you may need regular and speedy access to this file every day.  You could always move it to a more convenient location, but that would mean that you would need to re-file back to its “correct” location it every time you’d finished working on it.  Most unsatisfactory. A file may simply “belong” in two or more different locations within your file structure.  For example, say you’re an accountant and you have just completed the 2009 tax return for John Smith.  It might make sense to you to call this file 2009 Tax Return.doc and file it under Clients\John Smith.  But it may also be important to you to have the 2009 tax returns from all your clients together in the one place.  So you might also want to call the file John Smith.doc and file it under Tax Returns\2009.  The problem is, in a purely hierarchical filing system, you can’t put it in both places.  Grrrrr! Fortunately, Windows (and most other operating systems) offers a way for you to do exactly that:  It’s called a “shortcut” (also known as an “alias” on Macs and a “symbolic link” on UNIX systems).  Shortcuts allow a file to exist in one place, and an icon that represents the file to be created and put anywhere else you please.  In fact, you can create a dozen such icons and scatter them all over your hard disk.  Double-clicking on one of these icons/shortcuts opens up the original file, just as if you had double-clicked on the original file itself. Consider the following two icons: The one on the left is the actual Word document, while the one on the right is a shortcut that represents the Word document.  Double-clicking on either icon will open the same file.  There are two main visual differences between the icons: The shortcut will have a small arrow in the lower-left-hand corner (on Windows, anyway) The shortcut is allowed to have a name that does not include the file extension (the “.docx” part, in this case) You can delete the shortcut at any time without losing any actual data.  The original is still intact.  All you lose is the ability to get to that data from wherever the shortcut was. So why are shortcuts so great?  Because they allow us to easily overcome the main limitation of hierarchical file systems, and put a file in two (or more) places at the same time.  You will always have files that don’t play nice with your organizational rationale, and can’t be filed in only one place.  They demand to exist in two places.  Shortcuts allow this!  Furthermore, they allow you to collect your most often-opened files and folders together in one spot for convenient access.  The cool part is that the original files stay where they are, safe forever in their perfectly organized location. So your collection of most often-opened files can – and should – become a collection of shortcuts! If you’re still not convinced of the utility of shortcuts, consider the following well-known areas of a typical Windows computer: The Start Menu (and all the programs that live within it) The Quick Launch bar (or the Superbar in Windows 7) The “Favorite folders” area in the top-left corner of the Windows Explorer window (in Windows Vista or Windows 7) Your Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox Bookmarks Each item in each of these areas is a shortcut!  Each of those areas exist for one purpose only:  For convenience – to provide you with a collection of the files and folders you access most often. It should be easy to see by now that shortcuts are designed for one single purpose:  To make accessing your files more convenient.  Each time you double-click on a shortcut, you are saved the hassle of locating the file (or folder, or program, or drive, or control panel icon) that it represents. Shortcuts allow us to invent a golden rule of file and folder organization: “Only ever have one copy of a file – never have two copies of the same file.  Use a shortcut instead” (this rule doesn’t apply to copies created for backup purposes, of course!) There are also lesser rules, like “don’t move a file into your work area – create a shortcut there instead”, and “any time you find yourself frustrated with how long it takes to locate a file, create a shortcut to it and place that shortcut in a convenient location.” So how to we create these massively useful shortcuts?  There are two main ways: “Copy” the original file or folder (click on it and type Ctrl-C, or right-click on it and select Copy):  Then right-click in an empty area of the destination folder (the place where you want the shortcut to go) and select Paste shortcut: Right-drag (drag with the right mouse button) the file from the source folder to the destination folder.  When you let go of the mouse button at the destination folder, a menu pops up: Select Create shortcuts here. Note that when shortcuts are created, they are often named something like Shortcut to Budget Detail.doc (windows XP) or Budget Detail – Shortcut.doc (Windows 7).   If you don’t like those extra words, you can easily rename the shortcuts after they’re created, or you can configure Windows to never insert the extra words in the first place (see our article on how to do this). And of course, you can create shortcuts to folders too, not just to files! Bottom line: Whenever you have a file that you’d like to access from somewhere else (whether it’s convenience you’re after, or because the file simply belongs in two places), create a shortcut to the original file in the new location. Tip #10.  Separate Application Files from Data Files Any digital organization guru will drum this rule into you.  Application files are the components of the software you’ve installed (e.g. Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop or Internet Explorer).  Data files are the files that you’ve created for yourself using that software (e.g. Word Documents, digital photos, emails or playlists). Software gets installed, uninstalled and upgraded all the time.  Hopefully you always have the original installation media (or downloaded set-up file) kept somewhere safe, and can thus reinstall your software at any time.  This means that the software component files are of little importance.  Whereas the files you have created with that software is, by definition, important.  It’s a good rule to always separate unimportant files from important files. So when your software prompts you to save a file you’ve just created, take a moment and check out where it’s suggesting that you save the file.  If it’s suggesting that you save the file into the same folder as the software itself, then definitely don’t follow that suggestion.  File it in your own folder!  In fact, see if you can find the program’s configuration option that determines where files are saved by default (if it has one), and change it. Tip #11.  Organize Files Based on Purpose, Not on File Type If you have, for example a folder called Work\Clients\Johnson, and within that folder you have two sub-folders, Word Documents and Spreadsheets (in other words, you’re separating “.doc” files from “.xls” files), then chances are that you’re not optimally organized.  It makes little sense to organize your files based on the program that created them.  Instead, create your sub-folders based on the purpose of the file.  For example, it would make more sense to create sub-folders called Correspondence and Financials.  It may well be that all the files in a given sub-folder are of the same file-type, but this should be more of a coincidence and less of a design feature of your organization system. Tip #12.  Maintain the Same Folder Structure on All Your Computers In other words, whatever organizational system you create, apply it to every computer that you can.  There are several benefits to this: There’s less to remember.  No matter where you are, you always know where to look for your files If you copy or synchronize files from one computer to another, then setting up the synchronization job becomes very simple Shortcuts can be copied or moved from one computer to another with ease (assuming the original files are also copied/moved).  There’s no need to find the target of the shortcut all over again on the second computer Ditto for linked files (e.g Word documents that link to data in a separate Excel file), playlists, and any files that reference the exact file locations of other files. This applies even to the drive that your files are stored on.  If your files are stored on C: on one computer, make sure they’re stored on C: on all your computers.  Otherwise all your shortcuts, playlists and linked files will stop working! Tip #13.  Create an “Inbox” Folder Create yourself a folder where you store all files that you’re currently working on, or that you haven’t gotten around to filing yet.  You can think of this folder as your “to-do” list.  You can call it “Inbox” (making it the same metaphor as your email system), or “Work”, or “To-Do”, or “Scratch”, or whatever name makes sense to you.  It doesn’t matter what you call it – just make sure you have one! Once you have finished working on a file, you then move it from the “Inbox” to its correct location within your organizational structure. You may want to use your Desktop as this “Inbox” folder.  Rightly or wrongly, most people do.  It’s not a bad place to put such files, but be careful:  If you do decide that your Desktop represents your “to-do” list, then make sure that no other files find their way there.  In other words, make sure that your “Inbox”, wherever it is, Desktop or otherwise, is kept free of junk – stray files that don’t belong there. So where should you put this folder, which, almost by definition, lives outside the structure of the rest of your filing system?  Well, first and foremost, it has to be somewhere handy.  This will be one of your most-visited folders, so convenience is key.  Putting it on the Desktop is a great option – especially if you don’t have any other folders on your Desktop:  the folder then becomes supremely easy to find in Windows Explorer: You would then create shortcuts to this folder in convenient spots all over your computer (“Favorite Links”, “Quick Launch”, etc). Tip #14.  Ensure You have Only One “Inbox” Folder Once you’ve created your “Inbox” folder, don’t use any other folder location as your “to-do list”.  Throw every incoming or created file into the Inbox folder as you create/receive it.  This keeps the rest of your computer pristine and free of randomly created or downloaded junk.  The last thing you want to be doing is checking multiple folders to see all your current tasks and projects.  Gather them all together into one folder. Here are some tips to help ensure you only have one Inbox: Set the default “save” location of all your programs to this folder. Set the default “download” location for your browser to this folder. If this folder is not your desktop (recommended) then also see if you can make a point of not putting “to-do” files on your desktop.  This keeps your desktop uncluttered and Zen-like: (the Inbox folder is in the bottom-right corner) Tip #15.  Be Vigilant about Clearing Your “Inbox” Folder This is one of the keys to staying organized.  If you let your “Inbox” overflow (i.e. allow there to be more than, say, 30 files or folders in there), then you’re probably going to start feeling like you’re overwhelmed:  You’re not keeping up with your to-do list.  Once your Inbox gets beyond a certain point (around 30 files, studies have shown), then you’ll simply start to avoid it.  You may continue to put files in there, but you’ll be scared to look at it, fearing the “out of control” feeling that all overworked, chaotic or just plain disorganized people regularly feel. So, here’s what you can do: Visit your Inbox/to-do folder regularly (at least five times per day). Scan the folder regularly for files that you have completed working on and are ready for filing.  File them immediately. Make it a source of pride to keep the number of files in this folder as small as possible.  If you value peace of mind, then make the emptiness of this folder one of your highest (computer) priorities If you know that a particular file has been in the folder for more than, say, six weeks, then admit that you’re not actually going to get around to processing it, and move it to its final resting place. Tip #16.  File Everything Immediately, and Use Shortcuts for Your Active Projects As soon as you create, receive or download a new file, store it away in its “correct” folder immediately.  Then, whenever you need to work on it (possibly straight away), create a shortcut to it in your “Inbox” (“to-do”) folder or your desktop.  That way, all your files are always in their “correct” locations, yet you still have immediate, convenient access to your current, active files.  When you finish working on a file, simply delete the shortcut. Ideally, your “Inbox” folder – and your Desktop – should contain no actual files or folders.  They should simply contain shortcuts. Tip #17.  Use Directory Symbolic Links (or Junctions) to Maintain One Unified Folder Structure Using this tip, we can get around a potential hiccup that we can run into when creating our organizational structure – the issue of having more than one drive on our computer (C:, D:, etc).  We might have files we need to store on the D: drive for space reasons, and yet want to base our organized folder structure on the C: drive (or vice-versa). Your chosen organizational structure may dictate that all your files must be accessed from the C: drive (for example, the root folder of all your files may be something like C:\Files).  And yet you may still have a D: drive and wish to take advantage of the hundreds of spare Gigabytes that it offers.  Did you know that it’s actually possible to store your files on the D: drive and yet access them as if they were on the C: drive?  And no, we’re not talking about shortcuts here (although the concept is very similar). By using the shell command mklink, you can essentially take a folder that lives on one drive and create an alias for it on a different drive (you can do lots more than that with mklink – for a full rundown on this programs capabilities, see our dedicated article).  These aliases are called directory symbolic links (and used to be known as junctions).  You can think of them as “virtual” folders.  They function exactly like regular folders, except they’re physically located somewhere else. For example, you may decide that your entire D: drive contains your complete organizational file structure, but that you need to reference all those files as if they were on the C: drive, under C:\Files.  If that was the case you could create C:\Files as a directory symbolic link – a link to D:, as follows: mklink /d c:\files d:\ Or it may be that the only files you wish to store on the D: drive are your movie collection.  You could locate all your movie files in the root of your D: drive, and then link it to C:\Files\Media\Movies, as follows: mklink /d c:\files\media\movies d:\ (Needless to say, you must run these commands from a command prompt – click the Start button, type cmd and press Enter) Tip #18. Customize Your Folder Icons This is not strictly speaking an organizational tip, but having unique icons for each folder does allow you to more quickly visually identify which folder is which, and thus saves you time when you’re finding files.  An example is below (from my folder that contains all files downloaded from the Internet): To learn how to change your folder icons, please refer to our dedicated article on the subject. Tip #19.  Tidy Your Start Menu The Windows Start Menu is usually one of the messiest parts of any Windows computer.  Every program you install seems to adopt a completely different approach to placing icons in this menu.  Some simply put a single program icon.  Others create a folder based on the name of the software.  And others create a folder based on the name of the software manufacturer.  It’s chaos, and can make it hard to find the software you want to run. Thankfully we can avoid this chaos with useful operating system features like Quick Launch, the Superbar or pinned start menu items. Even so, it would make a lot of sense to get into the guts of the Start Menu itself and give it a good once-over.  All you really need to decide is how you’re going to organize your applications.  A structure based on the purpose of the application is an obvious candidate.  Below is an example of one such structure: In this structure, Utilities means software whose job it is to keep the computer itself running smoothly (configuration tools, backup software, Zip programs, etc).  Applications refers to any productivity software that doesn’t fit under the headings Multimedia, Graphics, Internet, etc. In case you’re not aware, every icon in your Start Menu is a shortcut and can be manipulated like any other shortcut (copied, moved, deleted, etc). With the Windows Start Menu (all version of Windows), Microsoft has decided that there be two parallel folder structures to store your Start Menu shortcuts.  One for you (the logged-in user of the computer) and one for all users of the computer.  Having two parallel structures can often be redundant:  If you are the only user of the computer, then having two parallel structures is totally redundant.  Even if you have several users that regularly log into the computer, most of your installed software will need to be made available to all users, and should thus be moved out of the “just you” version of the Start Menu and into the “all users” area. To take control of your Start Menu, so you can start organizing it, you’ll need to know how to access the actual folders and shortcut files that make up the Start Menu (both versions of it).  To find these folders and files, click the Start button and then right-click on the All Programs text (Windows XP users should right-click on the Start button itself): The Open option refers to the “just you” version of the Start Menu, while the Open All Users option refers to the “all users” version.  Click on the one you want to organize. A Windows Explorer window then opens with your chosen version of the Start Menu selected.  From there it’s easy.  Double-click on the Programs folder and you’ll see all your folders and shortcuts.  Now you can delete/rename/move until it’s just the way you want it. Note:  When you’re reorganizing your Start Menu, you may want to have two Explorer windows open at the same time – one showing the “just you” version and one showing the “all users” version.  You can drag-and-drop between the windows. Tip #20.  Keep Your Start Menu Tidy Once you have a perfectly organized Start Menu, try to be a little vigilant about keeping it that way.  Every time you install a new piece of software, the icons that get created will almost certainly violate your organizational structure. So to keep your Start Menu pristine and organized, make sure you do the following whenever you install a new piece of software: Check whether the software was installed into the “just you” area of the Start Menu, or the “all users” area, and then move it to the correct area. Remove all the unnecessary icons (like the “Read me” icon, the “Help” icon (you can always open the help from within the software itself when it’s running), the “Uninstall” icon, the link(s)to the manufacturer’s website, etc) Rename the main icon(s) of the software to something brief that makes sense to you.  For example, you might like to rename Microsoft Office Word 2010 to simply Word Move the icon(s) into the correct folder based on your Start Menu organizational structure And don’t forget:  when you uninstall a piece of software, the software’s uninstall routine is no longer going to be able to remove the software’s icon from the Start Menu (because you moved and/or renamed it), so you’ll need to remove that icon manually. Tip #21.  Tidy C:\ The root of your C: drive (C:\) is a common dumping ground for files and folders – both by the users of your computer and by the software that you install on your computer.  It can become a mess. There’s almost no software these days that requires itself to be installed in C:\.  99% of the time it can and should be installed into C:\Program Files.  And as for your own files, well, it’s clear that they can (and almost always should) be stored somewhere else. In an ideal world, your C:\ folder should look like this (on Windows 7): Note that there are some system files and folders in C:\ that are usually and deliberately “hidden” (such as the Windows virtual memory file pagefile.sys, the boot loader file bootmgr, and the System Volume Information folder).  Hiding these files and folders is a good idea, as they need to stay where they are and are almost never needed to be opened or even seen by you, the user.  Hiding them prevents you from accidentally messing with them, and enhances your sense of order and well-being when you look at your C: drive folder. Tip #22.  Tidy Your Desktop The Desktop is probably the most abused part of a Windows computer (from an organization point of view).  It usually serves as a dumping ground for all incoming files, as well as holding icons to oft-used applications, plus some regularly opened files and folders.  It often ends up becoming an uncontrolled mess.  See if you can avoid this.  Here’s why… Application icons (Word, Internet Explorer, etc) are often found on the Desktop, but it’s unlikely that this is the optimum place for them.  The “Quick Launch” bar (or the Superbar in Windows 7) is always visible and so represents a perfect location to put your icons.  You’ll only be able to see the icons on your Desktop when all your programs are minimized.  It might be time to get your application icons off your desktop… You may have decided that the Inbox/To-do folder on your computer (see tip #13, above) should be your Desktop.  If so, then enough said.  Simply be vigilant about clearing it and preventing it from being polluted by junk files (see tip #15, above).  On the other hand, if your Desktop is not acting as your “Inbox” folder, then there’s no reason for it to have any data files or folders on it at all, except perhaps a couple of shortcuts to often-opened files and folders (either ongoing or current projects).  Everything else should be moved to your “Inbox” folder. In an ideal world, it might look like this: Tip #23.  Move Permanent Items on Your Desktop Away from the Top-Left Corner When files/folders are dragged onto your desktop in a Windows Explorer window, or when shortcuts are created on your Desktop from Internet Explorer, those icons are always placed in the top-left corner – or as close as they can get.  If you have other files, folders or shortcuts that you keep on the Desktop permanently, then it’s a good idea to separate these permanent icons from the transient ones, so that you can quickly identify which ones the transients are.  An easy way to do this is to move all your permanent icons to the right-hand side of your Desktop.  That should keep them separated from incoming items. Tip #24.  Synchronize If you have more than one computer, you’ll almost certainly want to share files between them.  If the computers are permanently attached to the same local network, then there’s no need to store multiple copies of any one file or folder – shortcuts will suffice.  However, if the computers are not always on the same network, then you will at some point need to copy files between them.  For files that need to permanently live on both computers, the ideal way to do this is to synchronize the files, as opposed to simply copying them. We only have room here to write a brief summary of synchronization, not a full article.  In short, there are several different types of synchronization: Where the contents of one folder are accessible anywhere, such as with Dropbox Where the contents of any number of folders are accessible anywhere, such as with Windows Live Mesh Where any files or folders from anywhere on your computer are synchronized with exactly one other computer, such as with the Windows “Briefcase”, Microsoft SyncToy, or (much more powerful, yet still free) SyncBack from 2BrightSparks.  This only works when both computers are on the same local network, at least temporarily. A great advantage of synchronization solutions is that once you’ve got it configured the way you want it, then the sync process happens automatically, every time.  Click a button (or schedule it to happen automatically) and all your files are automagically put where they’re supposed to be. If you maintain the same file and folder structure on both computers, then you can also sync files depend upon the correct location of other files, like shortcuts, playlists and office documents that link to other office documents, and the synchronized files still work on the other computer! Tip #25.  Hide Files You Never Need to See If you have your files well organized, you will often be able to tell if a file is out of place just by glancing at the contents of a folder (for example, it should be pretty obvious if you look in a folder that contains all the MP3s from one music CD and see a Word document in there).  This is a good thing – it allows you to determine if there are files out of place with a quick glance.  Yet sometimes there are files in a folder that seem out of place but actually need to be there, such as the “folder art” JPEGs in music folders, and various files in the root of the C: drive.  If such files never need to be opened by you, then a good idea is to simply hide them.  Then, the next time you glance at the folder, you won’t have to remember whether that file was supposed to be there or not, because you won’t see it at all! To hide a file, simply right-click on it and choose Properties: Then simply tick the Hidden tick-box:   Tip #26.  Keep Every Setup File These days most software is downloaded from the Internet.  Whenever you download a piece of software, keep it.  You’ll never know when you need to reinstall the software. Further, keep with it an Internet shortcut that links back to the website where you originally downloaded it, in case you ever need to check for updates. See tip #33 below for a full description of the excellence of organizing your setup files. Tip #27.  Try to Minimize the Number of Folders that Contain Both Files and Sub-folders Some of the folders in your organizational structure will contain only files.  Others will contain only sub-folders.  And you will also have some folders that contain both files and sub-folders.  You will notice slight improvements in how long it takes you to locate a file if you try to avoid this third type of folder.  It’s not always possible, of course – you’ll always have some of these folders, but see if you can avoid it. One way of doing this is to take all the leftover files that didn’t end up getting stored in a sub-folder and create a special “Miscellaneous” or “Other” folder for them. Tip #28.  Starting a Filename with an Underscore Brings it to the Top of a List Further to the previous tip, if you name that “Miscellaneous” or “Other” folder in such a way that its name begins with an underscore “_”, then it will appear at the top of the list of files/folders. The screenshot below is an example of this.  Each folder in the list contains a set of digital photos.  The folder at the top of the list, _Misc, contains random photos that didn’t deserve their own dedicated folder: Tip #29.  Clean Up those CD-ROMs and (shudder!) Floppy Disks Have you got a pile of CD-ROMs stacked on a shelf of your office?  Old photos, or files you archived off onto CD-ROM (or even worse, floppy disks!) because you didn’t have enough disk space at the time?  In the meantime have you upgraded your computer and now have 500 Gigabytes of space you don’t know what to do with?  If so, isn’t it time you tidied up that stack of disks and filed them into your gorgeous new folder structure? So what are you waiting for?  Bite the bullet, copy them all back onto your computer, file them in their appropriate folders, and then back the whole lot up onto a shiny new 1000Gig external hard drive! Useful Folders to Create This next section suggests some useful folders that you might want to create within your folder structure.  I’ve personally found them to be indispensable. The first three are all about convenience – handy folders to create and then put somewhere that you can always access instantly.  For each one, it’s not so important where the actual folder is located, but it’s very important where you put the shortcut(s) to the folder.  You might want to locate the shortcuts: On your Desktop In your “Quick Launch” area (or pinned to your Windows 7 Superbar) In your Windows Explorer “Favorite Links” area Tip #30.  Create an “Inbox” (“To-Do”) Folder This has already been mentioned in depth (see tip #13), but we wanted to reiterate its importance here.  This folder contains all the recently created, received or downloaded files that you have not yet had a chance to file away properly, and it also may contain files that you have yet to process.  In effect, it becomes a sort of “to-do list”.  It doesn’t have to be called “Inbox” – you can call it whatever you want. Tip #31.  Create a Folder where Your Current Projects are Collected Rather than going hunting for them all the time, or dumping them all on your desktop, create a special folder where you put links (or work folders) for each of the projects you’re currently working on. You can locate this folder in your “Inbox” folder, on your desktop, or anywhere at all – just so long as there’s a way of getting to it quickly, such as putting a link to it in Windows Explorer’s “Favorite Links” area: Tip #32.  Create a Folder for Files and Folders that You Regularly Open You will always have a few files that you open regularly, whether it be a spreadsheet of your current accounts, or a favorite playlist.  These are not necessarily “current projects”, rather they’re simply files that you always find yourself opening.  Typically such files would be located on your desktop (or even better, shortcuts to those files).  Why not collect all such shortcuts together and put them in their own special folder? As with the “Current Projects” folder (above), you would want to locate that folder somewhere convenient.  Below is an example of a folder called “Quick links”, with about seven files (shortcuts) in it, that is accessible through the Windows Quick Launch bar: See tip #37 below for a full explanation of the power of the Quick Launch bar. Tip #33.  Create a “Set-ups” Folder A typical computer has dozens of applications installed on it.  For each piece of software, there are often many different pieces of information you need to keep track of, including: The original installation setup file(s).  This can be anything from a simple 100Kb setup.exe file you downloaded from a website, all the way up to a 4Gig ISO file that you copied from a DVD-ROM that you purchased. The home page of the software manufacturer (in case you need to look up something on their support pages, their forum or their online help) The page containing the download link for your actual file (in case you need to re-download it, or download an upgraded version) The serial number Your proof-of-purchase documentation Any other template files, plug-ins, themes, etc that also need to get installed For each piece of software, it’s a great idea to gather all of these files together and put them in a single folder.  The folder can be the name of the software (plus possibly a very brief description of what it’s for – in case you can’t remember what the software does based in its name).  Then you would gather all of these folders together into one place, and call it something like “Software” or “Setups”. If you have enough of these folders (I have several hundred, being a geek, collected over 20 years), then you may want to further categorize them.  My own categorization structure is based on “platform” (operating system): The last seven folders each represents one platform/operating system, while _Operating Systems contains set-up files for installing the operating systems themselves.  _Hardware contains ROMs for hardware I own, such as routers. Within the Windows folder (above), you can see the beginnings of the vast library of software I’ve compiled over the years: An example of a typical application folder looks like this: Tip #34.  Have a “Settings” Folder We all know that our documents are important.  So are our photos and music files.  We save all of these files into folders, and then locate them afterwards and double-click on them to open them.  But there are many files that are important to us that can’t be saved into folders, and then searched for and double-clicked later on.  These files certainly contain important information that we need, but are often created internally by an application, and saved wherever that application feels is appropriate. A good example of this is the “PST” file that Outlook creates for us and uses to store all our emails, contacts, appointments and so forth.  Another example would be the collection of Bookmarks that Firefox stores on your behalf. And yet another example would be the customized settings and configuration files of our all our software.  Granted, most Windows programs store their configuration in the Registry, but there are still many programs that use configuration files to store their settings. Imagine if you lost all of the above files!  And yet, when people are backing up their computers, they typically only back up the files they know about – those that are stored in the “My Documents” folder, etc.  If they had a hard disk failure or their computer was lost or stolen, their backup files would not include some of the most vital files they owned.  Also, when migrating to a new computer, it’s vital to ensure that these files make the journey. It can be a very useful idea to create yourself a folder to store all your “settings” – files that are important to you but which you never actually search for by name and double-click on to open them.  Otherwise, next time you go to set up a new computer just the way you want it, you’ll need to spend hours recreating the configuration of your previous computer! So how to we get our important files into this folder?  Well, we have a few options: Some programs (such as Outlook and its PST files) allow you to place these files wherever you want.  If you delve into the program’s options, you will find a setting somewhere that controls the location of the important settings files (or “personal storage” – PST – when it comes to Outlook) Some programs do not allow you to change such locations in any easy way, but if you get into the Registry, you can sometimes find a registry key that refers to the location of the file(s).  Simply move the file into your Settings folder and adjust the registry key to refer to the new location. Some programs stubbornly refuse to allow their settings files to be placed anywhere other then where they stipulate.  When faced with programs like these, you have three choices:  (1) You can ignore those files, (2) You can copy the files into your Settings folder (let’s face it – settings don’t change very often), or (3) you can use synchronization software, such as the Windows Briefcase, to make synchronized copies of all your files in your Settings folder.  All you then have to do is to remember to run your sync software periodically (perhaps just before you run your backup software!). There are some other things you may decide to locate inside this new “Settings” folder: Exports of registry keys (from the many applications that store their configurations in the Registry).  This is useful for backup purposes or for migrating to a new computer Notes you’ve made about all the specific customizations you have made to a particular piece of software (so that you’ll know how to do it all again on your next computer) Shortcuts to webpages that detail how to tweak certain aspects of your operating system or applications so they are just the way you like them (such as how to remove the words “Shortcut to” from the beginning of newly created shortcuts).  In other words, you’d want to create shortcuts to half the pages on the How-To Geek website! Here’s an example of a “Settings” folder: Windows Features that Help with Organization This section details some of the features of Microsoft Windows that are a boon to anyone hoping to stay optimally organized. Tip #35.  Use the “Favorite Links” Area to Access Oft-Used Folders Once you’ve created your great new filing system, work out which folders you access most regularly, or which serve as great starting points for locating the rest of the files in your folder structure, and then put links to those folders in your “Favorite Links” area of the left-hand side of the Windows Explorer window (simply called “Favorites” in Windows 7):   Some ideas for folders you might want to add there include: Your “Inbox” folder (or whatever you’ve called it) – most important! The base of your filing structure (e.g. C:\Files) A folder containing shortcuts to often-accessed folders on other computers around the network (shown above as Network Folders) A folder containing shortcuts to your current projects (unless that folder is in your “Inbox” folder) Getting folders into this area is very simple – just locate the folder you’re interested in and drag it there! Tip #36.  Customize the Places Bar in the File/Open and File/Save Boxes Consider the screenshot below: The highlighted icons (collectively known as the “Places Bar”) can be customized to refer to any folder location you want, allowing instant access to any part of your organizational structure. Note:  These File/Open and File/Save boxes have been superseded by new versions that use the Windows Vista/Windows 7 “Favorite Links”, but the older versions (shown above) are still used by a surprisingly large number of applications. The easiest way to customize these icons is to use the Group Policy Editor, but not everyone has access to this program.  If you do, open it up and navigate to: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Common Open File Dialog If you don’t have access to the Group Policy Editor, then you’ll need to get into the Registry.  Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft  \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ comdlg32 \ Placesbar It should then be easy to make the desired changes.  Log off and log on again to allow the changes to take effect. Tip #37.  Use the Quick Launch Bar as a Application and File Launcher That Quick Launch bar (to the right of the Start button) is a lot more useful than people give it credit for.  Most people simply have half a dozen icons in it, and use it to start just those programs.  But it can actually be used to instantly access just about anything in your filing system: For complete instructions on how to set this up, visit our dedicated article on this topic. Tip #38.  Put a Shortcut to Windows Explorer into Your Quick Launch Bar This is only necessary in Windows Vista and Windows XP.  The Microsoft boffins finally got wise and added it to the Windows 7 Superbar by default. Windows Explorer – the program used for managing your files and folders – is one of the most useful programs in Windows.  Anyone who considers themselves serious about being organized needs instant access to this program at any time.  A great place to create a shortcut to this program is in the Windows XP and Windows Vista “Quick Launch” bar: To get it there, locate it in your Start Menu (usually under “Accessories”) and then right-drag it down into your Quick Launch bar (and create a copy). Tip #39.  Customize the Starting Folder for Your Windows 7 Explorer Superbar Icon If you’re on Windows 7, your Superbar will include a Windows Explorer icon.  Clicking on the icon will launch Windows Explorer (of course), and will start you off in your “Libraries” folder.  Libraries may be fine as a starting point, but if you have created yourself an “Inbox” folder, then it would probably make more sense to start off in this folder every time you launch Windows Explorer. To change this default/starting folder location, then first right-click the Explorer icon in the Superbar, and then right-click Properties:Then, in Target field of the Windows Explorer Properties box that appears, type %windir%\explorer.exe followed by the path of the folder you wish to start in.  For example: %windir%\explorer.exe C:\Files If that folder happened to be on the Desktop (and called, say, “Inbox”), then you would use the following cleverness: %windir%\explorer.exe shell:desktop\Inbox Then click OK and test it out. Tip #40.  Ummmmm…. No, that’s it.  I can’t think of another one.  That’s all of the tips I can come up with.  I only created this one because 40 is such a nice round number… Case Study – An Organized PC To finish off the article, I have included a few screenshots of my (main) computer (running Vista).  The aim here is twofold: To give you a sense of what it looks like when the above, sometimes abstract, tips are applied to a real-life computer, and To offer some ideas about folders and structure that you may want to steal to use on your own PC. Let’s start with the C: drive itself.  Very minimal.  All my files are contained within C:\Files.  I’ll confine the rest of the case study to this folder: That folder contains the following: Mark: My personal files VC: My business (Virtual Creations, Australia) Others contains files created by friends and family Data contains files from the rest of the world (can be thought of as “public” files, usually downloaded from the Net) Settings is described above in tip #34 The Data folder contains the following sub-folders: Audio:  Radio plays, audio books, podcasts, etc Development:  Programmer and developer resources, sample source code, etc (see below) Humour:  Jokes, funnies (those emails that we all receive) Movies:  Downloaded and ripped movies (all legal, of course!), their scripts, DVD covers, etc. Music:  (see below) Setups:  Installation files for software (explained in full in tip #33) System:  (see below) TV:  Downloaded TV shows Writings:  Books, instruction manuals, etc (see below) The Music folder contains the following sub-folders: Album covers:  JPEG scans Guitar tabs:  Text files of guitar sheet music Lists:  e.g. “Top 1000 songs of all time” Lyrics:  Text files MIDI:  Electronic music files MP3 (representing 99% of the Music folder):  MP3s, either ripped from CDs or downloaded, sorted by artist/album name Music Video:  Video clips Sheet Music:  usually PDFs The Data\Writings folder contains the following sub-folders: (all pretty self-explanatory) The Data\Development folder contains the following sub-folders: Again, all pretty self-explanatory (if you’re a geek) The Data\System folder contains the following sub-folders: These are usually themes, plug-ins and other downloadable program-specific resources. The Mark folder contains the following sub-folders: From Others:  Usually letters that other people (friends, family, etc) have written to me For Others:  Letters and other things I have created for other people Green Book:  None of your business Playlists:  M3U files that I have compiled of my favorite songs (plus one M3U playlist file for every album I own) Writing:  Fiction, philosophy and other musings of mine Mark Docs:  Shortcut to C:\Users\Mark Settings:  Shortcut to C:\Files\Settings\Mark The Others folder contains the following sub-folders: The VC (Virtual Creations, my business – I develop websites) folder contains the following sub-folders: And again, all of those are pretty self-explanatory. Conclusion These tips have saved my sanity and helped keep me a productive geek, but what about you? What tips and tricks do you have to keep your files organized?  Please share them with us in the comments.  Come on, don’t be shy… Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Print or Create a Text File List of the Contents in a Directory the Easy WayCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuAdd Copy To / Move To on Windows 7 or Vista Right-Click Menu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 10, Cancellation in PLINQ and the Parallel class

  - by Reed

  Many routines are parallelized because they are long running processes.  When writing an algorithm that will run for a long period of time, its typically a good practice to allow that routine to be cancelled.  I previously discussed terminating a parallel loop from within, but have not demonstrated how a routine can be cancelled from the caller’s perspective.  Cancellation in PLINQ and the Task Parallel Library is handled through a new, unified cooperative cancellation model introduced with .NET 4.0. Cancellation in .NET 4 is based around a new, lightweight struct called CancellationToken.  A CancellationToken is a small, thread-safe value type which is generated via a CancellationTokenSource.  There are many goals which led to this design.  For our purposes, we will focus on a couple of specific design decisions: Cancellation is cooperative.  A calling method can request a cancellation, but it’s up to the processing routine to terminate – it is not forced. Cancellation is consistent.  A single method call requests a cancellation on every copied CancellationToken in the routine. Let’s begin by looking at how we can cancel a PLINQ query.  Supposed we wanted to provide the option to cancel our query from Part 6: double min = collection .AsParallel() .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } We would rewrite this to allow for cancellation by adding a call to ParallelEnumerable.WithCancellation as follows: var cts = new CancellationTokenSource(); // Pass cts here to a routine that could, // in parallel, request a cancellation try { double min = collection .AsParallel() .WithCancellation(cts.Token) .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); } catch (OperationCanceledException e) { // Query was cancelled before it finished } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here, if the user calls cts.Cancel() before the PLINQ query completes, the query will stop processing, and an OperationCanceledException will be raised.  Be aware, however, that cancellation will not be instantaneous.  When cts.Cancel() is called, the query will only stop after the current item.PerformComputation() elements all finish processing.  cts.Cancel() will prevent PLINQ from scheduling a new task for a new element, but will not stop items which are currently being processed.  This goes back to the first goal I mentioned – Cancellation is cooperative.  Here, we’re requesting the cancellation, but it’s up to PLINQ to terminate. If we wanted to allow cancellation to occur within our routine, we would need to change our routine to accept a CancellationToken, and modify it to handle this specific case: public void PerformComputation(CancellationToken token) { for (int i=0; i<this.iterations; ++i) { // Add a check to see if we've been canceled // If a cancel was requested, we'll throw here token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested(); // Do our processing now this.RunIteration(i); } } With this overload of PerformComputation, each internal iteration checks to see if a cancellation request was made, and will throw an OperationCanceledException at that point, instead of waiting until the method returns.  This is good, since it allows us, as developers, to plan for cancellation, and terminate our routine in a clean, safe state. This is handled by changing our PLINQ query to: try { double min = collection .AsParallel() .WithCancellation(cts.Token) .Min(item => item.PerformComputation(cts.Token)); } catch (OperationCanceledException e) { // Query was cancelled before it finished } PLINQ is very good about handling this exception, as well.  There is a very good chance that multiple items will raise this exception, since the entire purpose of PLINQ is to have multiple items be processed concurrently.  PLINQ will take all of the OperationCanceledException instances raised within these methods, and merge them into a single OperationCanceledException in the call stack.  This is done internally because we added the call to ParallelEnumerable.WithCancellation. If, however, a different exception is raised by any of the elements, the OperationCanceledException as well as the other Exception will be merged into a single AggregateException. The Task Parallel Library uses the same cancellation model, as well.  Here, we supply our CancellationToken as part of the configuration.  The ParallelOptions class contains a property for the CancellationToken.  This allows us to cancel a Parallel.For or Parallel.ForEach routine in a very similar manner to our PLINQ query.  As an example, we could rewrite our Parallel.ForEach loop from Part 2 to support cancellation by changing it to: try { var cts = new CancellationTokenSource(); var options = new ParallelOptions() { CancellationToken = cts.Token }; Parallel.ForEach(customers, options, customer => { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // Check for cancellation here options.CancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested(); // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { theStore.EmailCustomer(customer); customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } }); } catch (OperationCanceledException e) { // The loop was cancelled } Notice that here we use the same approach taken in PLINQ.  The Task Parallel Library will automatically handle our cancellation in the same manner as PLINQ, providing a clean, unified model for cancellation of any parallel routine.  The TPL performs the same aggregation of the cancellation exceptions as PLINQ, as well, which is why a single exception handler for OperationCanceledException will cleanly handle this scenario.  This works because we’re using the same CancellationToken provided in the ParallelOptions.  If a different exception was thrown by one thread, or a CancellationToken from a different CancellationTokenSource was used to raise our exception, we would instead receive all of our individual exceptions merged into one AggregateException.

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• C# coding standards” Use the const directive only on natural constants

  - by Nathan Wilfert

  I've seen these 2 guidelines in coding c# standard and I’m not sure the what the 2nd one means. With the exception of zero and one, never hard-code a numeric value; always declare a constant instead. Use the const directive only on natural constants such as the number of days of the week. 1st what is the definition of a natural constants and if the number is not a natural constants given the 1st rule how does one declare a constant in c# without the const directive? See http://www.scribd.com/doc/10731655/IDesign-C-Coding-Standard-232 for reference.

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• SmoothLife Is a Super Smooth Version of Conway’s Game of Life [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  What happens if you change cellular automaton program Game of Life to use floating point values instead of integers? You end up with SmoothLife, a fluid and organic growth simulator. SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway’s Game of Life – using floating point values instead of integers. This rule is SmoothLifeL which supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the ‘cords’ that join the blobs. You can check out the paper outlining how SmoothLife works here and then grab the source code to run your own simulation here. [via Boing Boing] HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.5 has been released!

  - by FransBouma

  Last weekend we released LLBLGen Pro v3.5! Below the list of what's new in this release. Of course, not everything is on this list, like the large amount of work we put in refactoring the runtime framework. The refactoring was necessary because our framework has two paradigms which are added to the framework at a different time, and from a design perspective in the wrong order (the paradigm we added first, SelfServicing, should have been built on top of Adapter, the other paradigm, which was added more than a year after the first released version). The refactoring made sure the framework re-uses more code across the two paradigms (they already shared a lot of code) and is better prepared for the future. We're not done yet, but refactoring a massive framework like ours without breaking interfaces and existing applications is ... a bit of a challenge ;) To celebrate the release of v3.5, we give every customer a 30% discount! Use the coupon code NR1ORM with your order :) The full list of what's new: Designer Rule based .NET Attribute definitions. It's now possible to specify a rule using fine-grained expressions with an attribute definition to define which elements of a given type will receive the attribute definition. Rules can be assigned to attribute definitions on the project level, to make it even easier to define attribute definitions in bulk for many elements in the project. More information... Revamped Project Settings dialog. Multiple project related properties and settings dialogs have been merged into a single dialog called Project Settings, which makes it easier to configure the various settings related to project elements. It also makes it easier to find features previously not used  by many (e.g. type conversions) More information... Home tab with Quick Start Guides. To make new users feel right at home, we added a home tab with quick start guides which guide you through four main use cases of the designer. System Type Converters. Many common conversions have been implemented by default in system type converters so users don't have to develop their own type converters anymore for these type conversions. Bulk Element Setting Manipulator. To change setting values for multiple project elements, it was a little cumbersome to do that without a lot of clicking and opening various editors. This dialog makes changing settings for multiple elements very easy. EDMX Importer. It's now possible to import entity model data information from an existing Entity Framework EDMX file. Other changes and fixes See for the full list of changes and fixes the online documentation. LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework WCF Data Services (OData) support has been added. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF Data Services application using the VS.NET tools for WCF Data Services. WCF Data Services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 to expose your domain model using OData. More information... New query specification and execution API: QuerySpec. QuerySpec is our new query specification and execution API as an alternative to Linq and our more low-level API. It's build, like our Linq provider, on top of our lower-level API. More information... SQL Server 2012 support. The SQL Server DQE allows paging using the new SQL Server 2012 style. More information... System Type converters. For a common set of types the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework contains built-in type conversions so you don't need to write your own type converters anymore. Public/NonPublic property support. It's now possible to mark a field / navigator as non-public which is reflected in the runtime framework as an internal/friend property instead of a public property. This way you can hide properties from the public interface of a generated class and still access it through code added to the generated code base. FULL JOIN support. It's now possible to perform FULL JOIN joins using the native query api and QuerySpec. It's left to the developer to check whether the used target database supports FULL (OUTER) JOINs. Using a FULL JOIN with entity fetches is not recommended, and should only be used when both participants in the join aren't the target of the fetch. Dependency Injection Tracing. It's now possible to enable tracing on dependency injection. Enable tracing at level '4' on the traceswitch 'ORMGeneral'. This will emit trace information about which instance of which type got an instance of type T injected into property P. Entity Instances in projections in Linq. It's now possible to return an entity instance in a custom Linq projection. It's now also possible to pass this instance to a method inside the query projection. Inheritance fully supported in this construct. Entity Framework support The Entity Framework has been updated in the recent year with code-first support and a new simpler context api: DbContext (with DbSet). The amount of code to generate is smaller and the context simpler. LLBLGen Pro v3.5 comes with support for DbContext and DbSet and generates code which utilizes these new classes. NHibernate support NHibernate v3.2+ built-in proxy factory factory support. By default the built-in ProxyFactoryFactory is selected. FluentNHibernate Session Manager uses 1.2 syntax. Fluent NHibernate mappings generate a SessionManager which uses the v1.2 syntax for the ProxyFactoryFactory location Optionally emit schema / catalog name in mappings Two settings have been added which allow the user to control whether the catalog name and/or schema name as known in the project in the designer is emitted into the mappings.

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• When should JavaScript generate HTML?

  - by VirtuosiMedia

  I try to generate as little HTML from JavaScript as possible. Instead, I prefer to manipulate existing markup whenever I can and only generate HTML when I need to dynamically insert an element that isn't a good candidate for using Ajax. This, I believe, makes it far easier to maintain the code and quickly make changes to it because the markup is easier to read and trace. My rule of thumb is: HTML is for document structure, CSS is for presentation, JavaScript is for behavior. However, I've seen a lot of JS code that generates mounds of HTML, including entire forms and content-heavy modal dialogs. In general, which method is considered best practice? In what circumstances should JavaScript be used to generate HTML and when should it not?

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• Ken Cox explores EF4s Pluralization Service with a WCF Service

  When I have done “what’s new in EF4” talks at user groups and conferences, I like to show off the new pluralization support in the EDM Wizard. I also like to have a little fun showing some cases where it doesn’t do so well. For example, it correctly singularized Breweries to Brewery, but uses the same rule on Movies, turning it to Movy. The wizard uses a runtime feature referred to as the Pluralization Service which you can code against yourself. Ken Cox recently built a WCF...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Don&rsquo;t break that sandbox

  - by Sahil Malik

  SharePoint 2010 Training: more information Hmm .. I hear that some soldiers are spreading rumors that it is OKAY to edit the WSS_Sandbox trust level inside of SharePoint. Afterall, it is just .NET code right? And it’s just a CAS policy, so why not make that tempting little tweet, and well – all I wanna do is call web services! Ummmm ..   DON’T DO IT!   Yes I know it’s just .NET code! But Microsoft has spent a great deal of time, resources, and thoughts in crafting up the boundary of what a sandbox solution can do, and what it cannot do. Soon as you make that tiny little tweak to allow calling web services, you just opened a bunch of security holes in your SharePoint installation. Not to mention, you broke the first cardinal rule of your SharePoint solutions, which is, “No Microsoft files were hurt in the building of this solution” Read full article ....

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