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• Visual Studio macro to navigate to T4MVC link

  - by shannon

  I use T4MVC and I'm happy with it and want to keep it - it keeps down run time defects. Unfortunately, it makes it harder to navigate to views and content (a.k.a. Views and Links in T4MVC) though. Even using Resharper, I can't navigate to the referenced item: T4MVC and Resharper Navigation Can I get a hand building a macro to do this? Never having built a VS IDE macro before, I don't have a grasp on how to get at some things, like the internal results of the "Go To Definition" process, if that's even possible. If you aren't familiar with T4MVC, here's generally what the macro might do to help: Given the token: Links.Content.Scripts.jQuery_js in the file MyView.cshtml, '(F12) Go To Definition'. This behaves properly. Having arrived at the the related assignment: public readonly string jQuery_js = "~/Content/Scripts/jQuery.js"; in a file generated by T4MVC (which is very nice, thank you David, but we really don't ever need to see), capture the string assigned and close the file. Navigate in Solution Explorer to the PhysicalPath represented by the captured string. This process would also work for views/layouts/master-pages/partials, etc. If you provide a macro or link to a macro to do this, or have another solution, wonderful. Otherwise, hints on how to do step 3 simply in a VS macro would be especially appreciated and receive upvote from me. I'd post the macro back here as an answer when done. Thanks!

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• juqery image fading with tabs

  - by StealthRT

  Hey all, i am trying my best to figure out how to go about doing this: I have 2 tabs. When the page loads tab1 is selected automatically. This shows the tab as 1.0 transparency while tab2 stays at 0.7. Once the user clicks on tab2, tab1 goes to 0.7 transparency and tab2 goes to 1.0. However, i can not seem to get it to do that! Here is my code: function checkTab(theTab) { $('#tab1').fadeTo(250, 0.70); $('#tab2').fadeTo(250, 0.70); if ($("#tabActive").val() == theTab) { $(theTab).fadeTo(250, 1); } } $(document).ready(function() { $('#tab1').hover(function() {$(this).fadeTo(250, 1)}, function() {checkTab('#tab1')}); $('#tab2').hover(function() {$(this).fadeTo(250, 1)}, function() {checkTab('#tab2')}); $('#tab2').fadeTo(250, 0.70); $('#tabActive').val('tab1'); }); </script> <li class="stats"><img src="images/Stats.png" name="nav1" width="70" height="52" id="tab1" onclick="$('#tabActive').val('tab1');" /></li> <li class="cal"><img src="images/cal.png" name="nav1" width="70" height="52" id="tab2" onclick="$('#tabActive').val('tab2');" /></li> <input name="tabActive" id="tabActive" type="text" /> Any help would be great! :) David

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• What is the preferred way in C++ for converting a builtin type (int) to bool?

  - by Martin

  When programming with Visual C++, I think every developer is used to see the warning warning C4800: 'BOOL' : forcing value to bool 'true' or 'false' from time to time. The reason obviously is that BOOL is defined as int and directly assigning any of the built-in numerical types to bool is considered a bad idea. So my question is now, given any built-in numerical type (int, short, ...) that is to be interpreted as a boolean value, what is the/your preferred way of actually storing that value into a variable of type bool? Note: While mixing BOOL and bool is probably a bad idea, I think the problem will inevitably pop up whether on Windows or somewhere else, so I think this question is neither Visual-C++ nor Windows specific. Given int nBoolean; I prefer this style: bool b = nBoolean?true:false; The following might be alternatives: bool b = !!nBoolean; bool b = (nBoolean != 0); Is there a generally preferred way? Rationale? I should add: Since I only work with Visual-C++ I cannot really say if this is a VC++ specific question or if the same problem pops up with other compilers. So it would be interesting to specifically hear from g++ or users how they handle the int-bool case. Regarding Standard C++: As David Thornley notes in a comment, the C++ Standard does not require this behavior. In fact it seems to explicitly allow this, so one might consider this a VC++ weirdness. To quote the N3029 draft (which is what I have around atm.): 4.12 Boolean conversions [conv.bool] A prvalue of arithmetic, unscoped enumeration, pointer, or pointer to member type can be converted to a prvalue of type bool. A zero value, null pointer value, or null member pointer value is converted to false; any other value is converted to true. (...)

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• fullcalendar events from REST-ful php server.

  - by biagidp

  I've written a very simple RESTful php server (my first experiment with REST, so feel free to make suggestions) to respond to the fullcalendar events callback. It produces exactly the same string output as the json-events.php file in the fullcalendar json example, but for some reason fullcalendar will not accept my server's output. I've tried messing with the headers because they're different from the ones produced by json-events.php, but I'm not really sure what's awry there, if anything. The code for the server is below: <?php class Listener{ function __construct() { $this->getResource(); $this->buildResponse(); } function getResource(){ $parts = explode('/', $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]); $script_name = end(explode('/', $_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"])); $this->resource = $parts[array_search($script_name, $parts) + 1]; $this->resource_id = $parts[array_search($script_name, $parts) + 2]; } function buildResponse(){ $method = strtolower($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"]); $this->response_string = $method . ucwords($this->resource); } function getResponse(){ return $this->response_string; } } $listener = new Listener(); $thing = $listener->getResponse(); #$thing(); function getEvents(){ $year = date('Y'); $month = date('m'); echo json_encode(array( array( 'id' => 111, 'title' => "Event1", 'start' => "$year-$month-10", 'url' => "http://yahoo.com/" ), array( 'id' => 222, 'title' => "Event2", 'start' => "$year-$month-20", 'end' => "$year-$month-22", 'url' => "http://yahoo.com/" ) )); } ?> Any input, help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David

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• Return value from Object match

  - by Hito_kun

  I'm, by no means, JS fluent, so forgive me if im asking for some really basic stuff, but I've not being able to find a proper answer to my question. Im writting my first Node.js (plus Extra Framework and Socket.io) app and Im having some fun setting up the server side of a FB-like messenger (surprise!!!). So, let's say I have this data structure to store online users(This is a JSON Array, but I'm not sure it is the best way to do it or should I go with Javascript Objects): [ { "site": 45, "users": [ { "idUser": 5, "idSocket": "qwe87r7w8qwe", "name": "Carlos Ray Norris" }, { "idUser": 6, "idSocket": "v8d9d0fgfs7d", "name": "John Connor" } ] }, { "site": 48, "users": [ { "idUser": 22, "idSocket": "qwe87r7w8qwe", "name": "David Bowie" }, { "idUser": 23, "idSocket": "v8d9d0fgfs7d", "name": "Barack H. Obama" } ] } ] What I want to do is to search in the array for x value given y. In this case, retrieving the idSocket knowing the idUser WITHOUT having to run through the array values. So I have basically 2 questions: first, what would be the proper way to store users online? and secondly, how to find values matching with the values I already know (find the idSocket that has a given idUser). I would like a pure JS approach(or using some of the tools given by Node, Socket.io or Express), but if that's not possible then I can look for some JQuery.

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• Internet Explorer not incrementing number for non-sibling <li> elements

  - by biagidp

  I've got some html that looks like this: <ol> <div> <li>one</li> </div> <div> <li>two</li> </div> <div> <li>three</li> </div> </ol> Which looks like this in Chrome/Firefox: 1. one 2. two 3. three But looks like this in IE: 1. one 1. two 1. three If I change the code so that the li element is the parent of the div element instead of the other way around (so that all the li elements are siblings) IE renders it correctly. Anyone know what causes this or if this is the intended working behavior of IE? Furthermore is one way technically more correct than the other? <div><li></li></div> VS. <li><div></div></li> Thanks, David

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• What is the benefit of using ONLY OpenID authentication on a site?

  - by Peter

  From my experience with OpenID, I see a number of significant downsides: Adds a Single Point of Failure to the site It is not a failure that can be fixed by the site even if detected. If the OpenID provider is down for three days, what recourse does the site have to allow its users to login and access the information they own? Takes a user to another sites content and every time they logon to your site Even if the OpenID provider does not have an error, the user is re-directed to their site to login. The login page has content and links. So there is a chance a user will actually be drawn away from the site to go down the Internet rabbit hole. Why would I want to send my users to another company's website? [ Note: my provider no longer does this and seems to have fixed this problem (for now).] Adds a non-trivial amount of time to the signup To sign up with the site a new user is forced to read a new standard, chose a provider, and signup. Standards are something that the technical people should agree to in order to make a user experience frictionless. They are not something that should be thrust on the users. It is a Phisher's Dream OpenID is incredibly insecure and stealing the person's ID as they log in is trivially easy. [ taken from David Arno's Answer below ] For all of the downside, the one upside is to allow users to have fewer logins on the Internet. If a site has opt-in for OpenID then users who want that feature can use it. What I would like to understand is: What benefit does a site get for making OpenID mandatory?

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• WPF: Binding an integer to a TextBlock with TemplateBinding

  - by haagel

  I have a custom control in WPF. In this I have a DependencyProperty of the type integer. In the template for the custom control I have a TextBlock, I and would like to show the value of the integer in the TextBlock. But I can't get it to work. I'm using TemplateBinding. If I use the same code but change the type of the DependencyProperty to string it works fine. But I really want it to be an integer for the rest of my application to work. How can I do this? I've written simplified code that shows the problem. First the custom control: public class MyCustomControl : Control { static MyCustomControl() { DefaultStyleKeyProperty.OverrideMetadata(typeof(MyCustomControl), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(typeof(MyCustomControl))); MyIntegerProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("MyInteger", typeof(int), typeof(MyCustomControl), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(0)); } public int MyInteger { get { return (int)GetValue(MyCustomControl.MyIntegerProperty); } set { SetValue(MyCustomControl.MyIntegerProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty MyIntegerProperty; } And this is my default template: <Style TargetType="{x:Type local:MyCustomControl}"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type local:MyCustomControl}"> <Border BorderThickness="1" CornerRadius="4" BorderBrush="Black" Background="Azure"> <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical"> <TextBlock Text="{TemplateBinding MyInteger}" HorizontalAlignment="Center" /> </StackPanel> </Border> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> What am I doing wrong? Thanks // David

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• VB.net XML Parser loop

  - by StealthRT

  Hey all i am new to XML parsing on VB.net. This is the code i am using to parse an XML file i have: Dim output As StringBuilder = New StringBuilder() Dim xmlString As String = _ "<ip_list>" & _ "<ip>" & _ "<ip>192.168.1.1</ip>" & _ "<ping>9 ms</ping>" & _ "<hostname>N/A</hostname>" & _ "</ip>" & _ "<ip>" & _ "<ip>192.168.1.6</ip>" & _ "<ping>0 ms</ping>" & _ "<hostname>N/A</hostname>" & _ "</ip>" & _ "</ip_list>" Using reader As XmlReader = XmlReader.Create(New StringReader(xmlString)) Do Until reader.EOF reader.ReadStartElement("ip_list") reader.ReadStartElement("ip") reader.ReadStartElement("ip") reader.MoveToFirstAttribute() Dim theIP As String = reader.Value.ToString reader.ReadToFollowing("ping") Dim thePing As String = reader.ReadElementContentAsString().ToString reader.ReadToFollowing("hostname") Dim theHN As String = reader.ReadElementContentAsString().ToString MsgBox(theIP & " " & thePing & " " & theHN) Loop End Using I put the "do until reader.EOF" myself but it does not seem to work. It keeps giving an error after the first go around. I must be missing something? David

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• Querying calender events even if they do not have any for the day

  - by StealthRT

  Hey everyone, i am trying to figure out a way of query my mysql server so that even if a company does not have anything posted for the day the user clicks on their logo, it still adds them to the list. That sounds a little confusing so let me try to explain it another way. Say i have 3 company's in my database: Comp1 Comp2 Comp3 And Comp1 & Comp3 have something for today on the calender but Comp2 does not. I still need it to populate and place that company on the page but have something along the lines of "nothing on the calender for today". The other 2 companys (Comp1 & Comp3) would show the calender posting for that day. This is the code i have right now: SELECT clientinfo.id, clientinfo.theCompName, clientinfo.theURL, clientinfo.picURL, clientinfo.idNumber, clientoffers.idNumber, clientoffers.theDateStart, clientoffers.theDateEnd FROM clientinfo, clientoffers WHERE clientinfo.accountStats = 'OPEN' AND clientinfo.idNumber = clientinfo.idNumber AND '2010-05-08' BETWEEN clientoffers.theDateStart AND clientoffers.theDateEnd GROUP BY clientinfo.idNumber ORDER BY clientinfo.theCompName ASC That executes just fine but for Comp2, it just places the calender info from Comp1 into it when it really doesn't have anything. The output looks like this: Comp1 | 2010-05-08 | this is the calender event 1 | etc etc Comp2 | 2010-05-08 | this is the calender event 1 | etc etc comp3 | 2010-05-09 | this is the calender event 2 | etc etc Any help would be great :o) David

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• Problem accessing private variables in jQuery like chainable design pattern

  - by novogeek

  Hi folks, I'm trying to create my custom toolbox which imitates jQuery's design pattern. Basically, the idea is somewhat derived from this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2061501/jquery-plugin-design-pattern-common-practice-for-dealing-with-private-function (Check the answer given by "David"). So here is my toolbox function: (function(window){ var mySpace=function(){ return new PrivateSpace(); } var PrivateSpace=function(){ var testCache={}; }; PrivateSpace.prototype={ init:function(){ console.log('init this:', this); return this; }, ajax:function(){ console.log('make ajax calls here'); return this; }, cache:function(key,selector){ console.log('cache selectors here'); testCache[key]=selector; console.log('cached selector: ',testCache); return this; } } window.hmis=window.m$=mySpace(); })(window) Now, if I execute this function like: console.log(m$.cache('firstname','#FirstNameTextbox')); I get an error 'testCache' is not defined. I'm not able to access the variable "testCache" inside my cache function of the prototype. How should I access it? Basically, what I want to do is, I want to cache all my jQuery selectors into an object and use this object in the future.

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• Detect modification of variable at runtime in C/C++

  - by YuppieNetworking

  Hello, I am developing a library in C++ where users/programmer will extend a class BaseClass that has a method initArray. This method should be implemented by the user/programmer and it should normally initialize all elements of the array m_arr. Here is a snipplet, modified to this example: class BaseClass { public: BaseClass(int n) { m_arr = new double[n]; size = n; }; virtual ~BaseClass(); int size; double* m_arr; virtual int initArray(); }; Sometimes, the user/programmer implements a initArray that does not initialize some elements of m_arr. What I would like is to create a function in my library that checks if initArray did initialize all elements of m_arr. This function should be called by a sanity-check rutine at runtime. My question: is it possible to detect changes on this array? I can only think of initializing the array with some invalid values (like NaN or Inf), call initArray and check that all values have changed. Thanks for your ideas, David

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• Error with zoomStartTime and AnnotatedTimeLine

  - by user973025

  I'm a bit of a beginner with Javascript, but last month I had a working Google chart linked to a Google Docs file, which uses a start date for the graph at 90 days before the current date. I checked the page today and in Chrome I get the message "Object # has no method 'getTime'", and in Firefox I get the message "b.zoomStartTime[y] is not a function". Both stop the graph from loading. I have simplified the code to help me with the error, but I'm not getting anywhere... Here's the code: <script type="text/javascript"> var oldDate = new Date(); oldDate.setDate(oldDate.getDate() - 90); </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/static/modules/gviz/1.0/chart.js"> { "dataSourceUrl": "//docs.google.com/spreadsheet/tq?key=0AkQH6d2CUv_qdDhwd3gtZzdTVFlNX3AwX2xUSUVuclE&transpose=0&headers=-1&range=A1%3AB2436&gid=0&pub=1", "options": { "zoomStartTime": oldDate, "width": 650, "height": 371 }, "chartType": "AnnotatedTimeLine", } </script> Any ideas would be hugely appreciated. David.

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• Aliasing `T*` with `char*` is allowed. Is it also allowed the other way around?

  - by StackedCrooked

  Note: This question has been renamed and reduced to make it more focused and readable. Most of the comments refer to the old text. According to the standard objects of different type may not share the same memory location. So this would not be legal: int i = 0; short * s = reinterpret_cast<short*>(&i); // BAD! The standard however allows an exception to this rule: any object may be accessed through a pointer to char or unsigned char: int i = 0; char * c = reinterpret_cast<char*>(&i); // OK However, it is not clear to me if this is also allowed the other way around. For example: char * c = read_socket(...); unsigned * u = reinterpret_cast<unsigned*>(c); // huh? Summary of the answers The answer is NO for two reasons: You an only access an existing object as char*. There is no object in my sample code, only a byte buffer. The pointer address may not have the right alignment for the target object. In that case dereferencing it would result in undefined behavior. On the Intel and AMD platforms it will result performance overhead. On ARM it will trigger a CPU trap and your program will be terminated! This is a simplified explanation. For more detailed information see answers by @Luc Danton, @Cheers and hth. - Alf and @David Rodríguez.

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• Session in php are not enough clear to me

  - by Lulzim

  I find sessions in php kind of confusing, can anybody of you explain those to me. I have an example which is not working in my case: I register sessions this way, would you please tell me is this the right way of registering sessions //this is the page from where i register myusername in sessions if($count==1){ session_start(); $_SESSION['myusername'] = $_POST['myusername']; include("enterpincover.php"); } else { echo "Wrong Pin"; } here i check first whether the username is registered in sessions in oder to open his account , otherwise open again login. It works, if user is not loged in, it will show login page which is right, if user is loged it shows welcome message but not the Welcome the name of the user as I want. for ex: Welcome David <?php session_start(); if(isset($_SESSION['myusername'])) { echo 'Welcome '.$_SESSION['myusername']; } else { include("leftmodules.php"); include("rightmodules.php"); include("login.php"); } ?>

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• What is a good solution to log the deletion of a row in MySQL?

  - by hobodave

  Background I am currently logging deletion of rows from my tickets table at the application level. When a user deletes a ticket the following SQL is executed: INSERT INTO alert_log (user_id, priority, priorityName, timestamp, message) VALUES (9, 4, 'WARN', NOW(), "TICKET: David A. deleted ticket #6 from Foo"); Please do not offer schema suggestions for the alert_log table. Fields: user_id - User id of the logged in user performing the deletion priority - Always 4 priorityName - Always 'WARN' timestamp - Always NOW() message - Format: "[NAMESPACE]: [FullName] deleted ticket #[TicketId] from [CompanyName]" NAMESPACE - Always TICKET FullName - Full name of user identified by user_id above TicketId - Primary key ID of the ticket being deleted CompanyName - Ticket has a Company via tickets.company_id Situation/Questions Obviously this solution does not work if a ticket is deleted manually from the mysql command line client. However, now I need to. The issues I'm having are as follows: Should I use a PROCEDURE, FUNCTION, or TRIGGER? -- Analysis: TRIGGER - I don't think this will work because I can't pass parameters to it, and it would trigger when my application deleted the row too. PROCEDURE or FUNCTION - Not sure. Should I return the number of deleted rows? If so, that would require a FUNCTION right? How should I account for the absence of a logged in user? -- Possibilities: Using either a PROC or FUNC, require the invoker to pass in a valid user_id Require the user to pass in a string with the name Use the CURRENT_USER - meh Hard code the FullName to just be "Database Administrator" Could the name be an optional parameter? I'm rather green when it comes to sprocs. Assuming I went with the PROC/FUNC approach, is it possible to outright restrict regular DELETE calls to this table, yet still allow users to call this PROC/FUNC to do the deletion for them? Ideally the solution is usable by my application as well, so that my code is DRY.

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• Update php 5.2.0 to 5.2.4 with aptitude

  - by Kiva

  Hi guy, I would like to update my php 5 in my server. At this moment, I use php 5.2.0 so I want to update it to php 5.2.4 (not php 5.3). I tried to do this: aptitude update aptitude upgrade 63 packets were updated but not php which is always in 5.0 How can I update my php please ? Here is the output of commands asked by David in another post: aptitude search php5 p libapache-mod-php5 - server-side, HTML-embedded scripting langu i A libapache2-mod-php5 - server-side, HTML-embedded scripting langu i php5 - server-side, HTML-embedded scripting langu p php5-apache2-mod-bt - PHP bindings for mod_bt p php5-auth-pam - A PHP5 extension for PAM authentication i php5-cgi - server-side, HTML-embedded scripting langu p php5-clamavlib - PHP ClamAV Lib - ClamAV Interface for PHP5 p php5-cli - command-line interpreter for the php5 scri i A php5-common - Common files for packages built from the p i php5-curl - CURL module for php5 p php5-dev - Files for PHP5 module development i A php5-gd - GD module for php5 p php5-idn - PHP api for the IDNA library p php5-imagick - ImageMagick module for php5 p php5-imap - IMAP module for php5 p php5-interbase - interbase/firebird module for php5 p php5-json - JSON serialiser for PHP5 p php5-ldap - LDAP module for php5 p php5-mapscript - module for php5-cgi to use mapserver p php5-maxdb - PHP extension to access MaxDB databases fo i A php5-mcrypt - MCrypt module for php5 p php5-memcache - memcache extension module for PHP5 p php5-mhash - MHASH module for php5 p php5-ming - Ming module for php5 i A php5-mysql - MySQL module for php5 p php5-odbc - ODBC module for php5 p php5-pgsql - PostgreSQL module for php5 p php5-ps - ps module for PHP 5 p php5-pspell - pspell module for php5 p php5-radius - PECL radius module for PHP 5 p php5-recode - recode module for php5 p php5-snmp - SNMP module for php5 p php5-sqlite - SQLite module for php5 p php5-sqlite3 - SQLite3 module for php5 p php5-sqlrelay - SQL Relay PHP API p php5-suhosin - advanced protection module for php5 p php5-sybase - Sybase / MS SQL Server module for php5 p php5-tidy - tidy module for php5 p php5-uuid - OSSP uuid module for php5 p php5-xapian - Xapian search engine interface for PHP5 p php5-xcache - Fast, stable PHP opcode cacher p php5-xmlrpc - XML-RPC module for php5 p php5-xsl - XSL module for php5 aptitude show php5 | grep Version Version : 5.2.0-8+etch13 aptitude show php5-cgi | grep Version Version : 5.2.0-8+etch13 php5 --version -bash: php5: command not found php-cgi --version PHP 5.2.0-8+etch13 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Oct 2 2008 08:21:17) Copyright (c) 1997-2006 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

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• l2tp server always 'sent [CCP ResetReq id=0x3]' when got compressed data request

  - by wilbur

  I have built a xl2tpd/ipsec server on my ubuntu 12.04.3, and I managed to make a l2tp vpn connection to the xl2tpd server from my android phone. The xl2tpd log said xl2tpd[10828]: Enabling IPsec SAref processing for L2TP transport mode SAs xl2tpd[10828]: IPsec SAref does not work with L2TP kernel mode yet, enabling forceuserspace=yes xl2tpd[10828]: setsockopt recvref[22]: Protocol not available xl2tpd[10828]: This binary does not support kernel L2TP. xl2tpd[10828]: xl2tpd version xl2tpd-1.2.8 started on atime.me PID:10828 xl2tpd[10828]: Written by Mark Spencer, Copyright (C) 1998, Adtran, Inc. xl2tpd[10828]: Forked by Scott Balmos and David Stipp, (C) 2001 xl2tpd[10828]: Inherited by Jeff McAdams, (C) 2002 xl2tpd[10828]: Forked again by Xelerance (www.xelerance.com) (C) 2006 xl2tpd[10828]: Listening on IP address 0.0.0.0, port 1701 xl2tpd[10828]: control_finish: Peer requested tunnel 39154 twice, ignoring second one. xl2tpd[10828]: Connection established to 117.136.8.59, 43149. Local: 25339, Remote: 39154 (ref=0/0). LNS session is 'default' However I cannot access the web in my browser. The pppd log said rcvd [Compressed data] 00 1d 82 c4 7c 04 d8 09 ... sent [CCP ResetReq id=0x7] I have googled a lot and found that this was mostly caused by a mppe decompression error. I have disabled BSD-Compress compression with nobsdcomp in /etc/ppp/xl2tpd-options but it did not work. I used openswan-2.6.33 and xl2tpd-1.2.8 which were built from source. And my configurations: /etc/ipsec.conf version 2.0 config setup nat_traversal=yes virtual_private=%v4:10.0.0.0/8,%v4:192.168.0.0/16,%v4:172.16.0.0/12 oe=off protostack=netkey conn L2TP-PSK-NAT rightsubnet=vhost:%priv also=L2TP-PSK-noNAT conn L2TP-PSK-noNAT authby=secret pfs=no auto=add keyingtries=3 rekey=no ikelifetime=8h keylife=1h type=transport left=106.186.121.214 leftprotoport=17/1701 right=%any rightprotoport=17/%any /etc/xl2tpd/xl2tpd.conf [global] ipsec saref = yes [lns default] local ip = 10.10.11.1 ip range = 10.10.11.2-10.10.11.245 refuse chap = yes refuse pap = yes require authentication = yes ppp debug = yes pppoptfile = /etc/ppp/xl2tpd-options length bit = yes /etc/ppp/xl2tpd-options require-mschap-v2 ms-dns 8.8.8.8 ms-dns 8.8.4.4 asyncmap 0 auth crtscts lock hide-password modem name l2tpd proxyarp lcp-echo-interval 30 lcp-echo-failure 4 debug nobsdcomp Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

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• Looking for personal scheduling software / todo list with rather particular requirements

  - by Cthulhu

  I've been scouring the web for a couple of (my boss') hours, looking for a piece of software that can organize my tasks in two ways. First, I have a list of bullet points / todo items I can do at any given time. Think of stuff like solve issue X, ask X about Y, write documentation about Z, etcetera. Second, I have a number of running projects I'd like to organize better, as in schedule for a certain part of a day of the week. Ideally (I think), my day would be organized as 50% spent on projects and 50% on the other small things. Now, I don't like most calendar applications (such as Outlook & friends), their UI is too 'official', not really easy to move stuff around (in my experience). I don't like most todo lists either, too static and things. I like new, fast and hip software. I've looked at GTD versions of Tiddlywiki, and I like mGSD for one particular feature. You can make lists of tasks and basically give them one of three statusses - Now (nothing required, you can do it right away), Waiting (you need someone or something before you can work on this), or the most gratifying of all, Done. I like that feature because it's a simple todo list, but indicates more accurately the things you can do right now and the things you depend on someone else for to do. Anyways, that's just a small aspect of that program - most of the other things in there I can't find a particularly good use for. If there's something like that (maybe something that works even snappier, cleaner UI), combined with an easy to use bit of scheduling software (optionally separated into two applications, but preferrably not), I think I'd like that. (Besides something like that, I also use several instances of Trac to monitor tasks and bugs and things for the various clients and projects I have to serve, and TaskCoach to monitor the amount of time I spend on each task / each client. An easy / low-maintenance time tracking software would be neat too) Of course, the software has to be free to use. I don't like shareware, trials, limited software and the like. I could develop my own too, but I'm lazy like that and there's a dozen other projects I'd like to do in my free time (neither of which I actually do). Edit: I like David Seah's printable CEO stuff, if something like that (with some video game / instant achievement / gratification) exists in software, it'd be awesome.

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• understanding my site's DNS records

  - by DaveM

  firstly apologies for using the word 'pointage' this is the word my french domain registrar uses so I may have used to wrong term. OK I would like to better understand what is going on on my 'pointage' record on my domain registrars site. for my (currently empty) web site it reports the following details... Type : Host : Destination A : www.mydomain.org : 62.210.176.146 A : mail.mydomain.org : 84.246.225.176 Mx : .mydomain.org : mail.mydomain.org I think I understand the MX record, that simply relays anything onto the mail.mydomain.org location. However why are the destination for the www and mail domains different. Even more confusing (for me) is the fact that if I ping either of www.mydomain.org or mail.mydomain.org the ping returns a different IP address. This IP address is consistent with that of my server (ie 92.39.247.92). So what exactly is going on ? I'm sure I could find the information on the web,I've read a few thing on the debianhelp site regarding DNS records, and it seems to suggest that the record should be a reverse lookup, but certains isn't the reverse of my servers IP ? but I don't what I should be looking for, so links to docs and search terms for google will be happily accepteed (even though they go against the grain of SO answers to question). thanks in advance. David. ps. I should add that everything seems to work just fine, and I've just descovered this part of the management page of my registrar. Edit: Addition of DNS records and ping results. The DNS record for the site. From what I've read there should only realy be a single 'A' record, so has something gone wrong ? should I change it (remove the extras and then just point www.facilitee.org - .facilitee.org and mail.facilitee.org - .facilitee.org here is the DNS record A www.facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 A .facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 A mail.facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 A webmail.facilitee.org ? 92.39.247.92 MX .facilitee.org ? mail.facilitee.org ping results... ~$ ping www.facilitee.org PING www.facilitee.org (92.39.247.92) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from vps4576-cloud.dns26.com (92.39.247.92): ~$ ping mail.facilitee.org PING mail.facilitee.org (92.39.247.92) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from vps4576-cloud.dns26.com (92.39.247.92): So the DNS and the ping correspond, but the 'pointage' doesn't. ~ how can I get a report of the pointage records other than from my registrar ?

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• The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

  - by Ross

  The Apple iPad is the latest new toy, and we’ve put together a comprehensive list of every tip, trick, and tutorial that we could find to help you get the most out of it—and we’re even giving one away to one lucky reader. So read on! Note: We’ll be keeping this page updated as we find more great articles, so you should bookmark this page for future reference. Want Your Own iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away! All you have to do to enter is become a fan of our Facebook page, and we’ll pick a random fan to win the prize. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Disable the “clicking sound” on the iPad Keyboard Does the clicking sound when you tap the iPad keyboard bother you? Thankfully it’s easy to disable with a couple of taps. How to disable the “clicking sound” on your iPad’s keyboard Enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad By default, Safari doesn’t display the Bookmarks Bar. This tip shows you how to change that. How to enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad Clear the Cache, History and Cookies in Safari for the iPad You’re probably used to clearing this kind of data right from within the browser. Not so with Safari on the iPad – but here’s how you can. How to clear the cache, history and cookies in Safari for iPad How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock The iPad has four icons in its ‘dock’. Did you know it can hold 6? How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock Convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks ePub is the format that iBooks are in. So for those of you with large eBook collections in PDF, here’s how you convert them to read in iBooks. How to convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks How to force your iPad to restart Has an app caused your iPad to freeze up, and you can’t escape? This tip shows you how to force your iPad to restart. How to force your iPad to restart How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC Exporting Keynote presentations from your iPad to your Mac or PC isn’t as straight forward as you might have expected. This tutorial shows you how. How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad Having trouble getting your presentations onto your iPad? How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad How to import documents to Pages on your iPad This guide shows you how to transfer documents (MS Word or Pages) from your Mac/PC to your iPad. How to import documents to Pages on your iPad How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF Want to spice up that doc with a picture you just took? This tutorial will show you how – and how to export that document as a PDF. How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF How to lock your iPad If you have kids or co-workers/friends who think it’s funny to mess with your iPad – lock it. How to lock your iPad How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad Does everyone need to know you just sent that email from your iPad? Probably not. This guide shows you how to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature and replace it with your own (or none). How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad How To Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync This tutorial will show you a workaround on how to sync multiple calendars on your iPad using Google Sync. How to Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync How to determine the MAC address of your iPad If your network restricts connections via MAC address – this guide will show you how to determine what yours is. How to determine the MAC address of your iPad How to take a screenshot of your iPad Do you need to take a screenshot of your iPad? This quick tip shows you how to do just that. How to take a screenshot of your iPad How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad Anyone who had an iPod Touch or iPhone before they had an iPad won’t need this tutorial. But if you’re new to the experience, this one will help. How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad How to determine the iPad ECID on Windows and Mac iPadintosh shows us how to determine the iPad’s ECID code – something you’ll want to have come Jailbreak time. How to grab the iPad ECID in Windows or OS X iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials Enggadget has you covered with reviews of the first slew of iPad specific Twitter and other social networking apps. iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials What does your website look like on an iPad? iPad Peek is a web based tool that allows you to enter any given URL, and it will display that page the same way Safari on the iPad does. Great for web site owners who don’t have access to an iPad. iPadPeek Stream Music and Videos to your iPad Gizmodo reviews the iPad app StreamToMe, which allows you to stream media from your Mac to your iPad across your local network. Their feelings in a nutshell – worth the $3, but not perfect. Review: StreamToMe for the iPad Apple iPad : Change links in Google Reader to point to full HTML webpage How to change links in Safari for iPad so that Google Reader points to a full HTML webpage How to connect an iPad to your existing wireless keyboard This video will show you how to connect your iPad to a wireless keyboard if you’re having any problems – and from the sound of things, quite a few folks are. via TUAW How to get started with the iPad Mashable has a very entry-level guide that will help you set up your iPad for the first time. Mashable’s Guide to Setting up the iPad Essential iPad Apps Downloadsquad gives mini-reviews to 8 iPad apps that you should install as soon as you get your iPad. iPad App Buyers Guide: Essential Apps you should get on day one Videos: The Official iPad Guided Tours From none other than Apple! Great getting started videos for all the included iPad apps. The Official iPad Guided Tours The Official iPad Manual When you buy an iPad, you don’t get a manual. But that’s not to say there isn’t one. Apple provides a 150 guide for your iPad in PDF format. The Official iPad Manual (pdf) How to print from your iPad Sure, it’s actually just an App (PrintCentral – $9.99 USD), but as of right now, it’s the only way. PrintCentral How to make your own iPad Wallpaper A perfectly detailed tutorial on how to make your own wallpaper for your iPad. The author also provides a really nice sample wallpaper, published under the Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. How to make your own iPad Wallpaper Got any more tips? Share them in the comments, and we’ll update the post with the links, or just the tip itself. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookAsk the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and MalwareStupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos

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• C#: System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue vs. Queue

  - by James Michael Hare

  I love new toys, so of course when .NET 4.0 came out I felt like the proverbial kid in the candy store!  Now, some people get all excited about the IDE and it’s new features or about changes to WPF and Silver Light and yes, those are all very fine and grand.  But me, I get all excited about things that tend to affect my life on the backside of development.  That’s why when I heard there were going to be concurrent container implementations in the latest version of .NET I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the dinner bell. They seem so simple, really, that one could easily overlook them.  Essentially they are implementations of containers (many that mirror the generic collections, others are new) that have either been optimized with very efficient, limited, or no locking but are still completely thread safe -- and I just had to see what kind of an improvement that would translate into. Since part of my job as a solutions architect here where I work is to help design, develop, and maintain the systems that process tons of requests each second, the thought of extremely efficient thread-safe containers was extremely appealing.  Of course, they also rolled out a whole parallel development framework which I won’t get into in this post but will cover bits and pieces of as time goes by. This time, I was mainly curious as to how well these new concurrent containers would perform compared to areas in our code where we manually synchronize them using lock or some other mechanism.  So I set about to run a processing test with a series of producers and consumers that would be either processing a traditional System.Collections.Generic.Queue or a System.Collection.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue. Now, I wanted to keep the code as common as possible to make sure that the only variance was the container, so I created a test Producer and a test Consumer.  The test Producer takes an Action<string> delegate which is responsible for taking a string and placing it on whichever queue we’re testing in a thread-safe manner: 1: internal class Producer 2: { 3: public int Iterations { get; set; } 4: public Action<string> ProduceDelegate { get; set; } 5: 6: public void Produce() 7: { 8: for (int i = 0; i < Iterations; i++) 9: { 10: ProduceDelegate(“Hello”); 11: } 12: } 13: } Then likewise, I created a consumer that took a Func<string> that would read from whichever queue we’re testing and return either the string if data exists or null if not.  Then, if the item doesn’t exist, it will do a 10 ms wait before testing again.  Once all the producers are done and join the main thread, a flag will be set in each of the consumers to tell them once the queue is empty they can shut down since no other data is coming: 1: internal class Consumer 2: { 3: public Func<string> ConsumeDelegate { get; set; } 4: public bool HaltWhenEmpty { get; set; } 5: 6: public void Consume() 7: { 8: bool processing = true; 9: 10: while (processing) 11: { 12: string result = ConsumeDelegate(); 13: 14: if(result == null) 15: { 16: if (HaltWhenEmpty) 17: { 18: processing = false; 19: } 20: else 21: { 22: Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(10)); 23: } 24: } 25: else 26: { 27: DoWork(); // do something non-trivial so consumers lag behind a bit 28: } 29: } 30: } 31: } Okay, now that we’ve done that, we can launch threads of varying numbers using lambdas for each different method of production/consumption.  First let's look at the lambdas for a typical System.Collections.Generics.Queue with locking: 1: // lambda for putting to typical Queue with locking... 2: var productionDelegate = s => 3: { 4: lock (_mutex) 5: { 6: _mutexQueue.Enqueue(s); 7: } 8: }; 9:  10: // and lambda for typical getting from Queue with locking... 11: var consumptionDelegate = () => 12: { 13: lock (_mutex) 14: { 15: if (_mutexQueue.Count > 0) 16: { 17: return _mutexQueue.Dequeue(); 18: } 19: } 20: return null; 21: }; Nothing new or interesting here.  Just typical locks on an internal object instance.  Now let's look at using a ConcurrentQueue from the System.Collections.Concurrent library: 1: // lambda for putting to a ConcurrentQueue, notice it needs no locking! 2: var productionDelegate = s => 3: { 4: _concurrentQueue.Enqueue(s); 5: }; 6:  7: // lambda for getting from a ConcurrentQueue, once again, no locking required. 8: var consumptionDelegate = () => 9: { 10: string s; 11: return _concurrentQueue.TryDequeue(out s) ? s : null; 12: }; So I pass each of these lambdas and the number of producer and consumers threads to launch and take a look at the timing results.  Basically I’m timing from the time all threads start and begin producing/consuming to the time that all threads rejoin.  I won't bore you with the test code, basically it just launches code that creates the producers and consumers and launches them in their own threads, then waits for them all to rejoin.  The following are the timings from the start of all threads to the Join() on all threads completing.  The producers create 10,000,000 items evenly between themselves and then when all producers are done they trigger the consumers to stop once the queue is empty. These are the results in milliseconds from the ordinary Queue with locking: 1: Consumers Producers 1 2 3 Time (ms) 2: ---------- ---------- ------ ------ ------ --------- 3: 1 1 4284 5153 4226 4554.33 4: 10 10 4044 3831 5010 4295.00 5: 100 100 5497 5378 5612 5495.67 6: 1000 1000 24234 25409 27160 25601.00 And the following are the results in milliseconds from the ConcurrentQueue with no locking necessary: 1: Consumers Producers 1 2 3 Time (ms) 2: ---------- ---------- ------ ------ ------ --------- 3: 1 1 3647 3643 3718 3669.33 4: 10 10 2311 2136 2142 2196.33 5: 100 100 2480 2416 2190 2362.00 6: 1000 1000 7289 6897 7061 7082.33 Note that even though obviously 2000 threads is quite extreme, the concurrent queue actually scales really well, whereas the traditional queue with simple locking scales much more poorly. I love the new concurrent collections, they look so much simpler without littering your code with the locking logic, and they perform much better.  All in all, a great new toy to add to your arsenal of multi-threaded processing!

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• Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

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• TFS, G.I. Joe and Under-doing

  If I were to rank the most consistently irritating parts of my work day, using TFS would come in first by a wide margin. Even repeated network outages this week seem like a pleasant reprieve from this monolithic beast. This is not a reflexive anti-Microsoft feeling, that attitude just wouldnt work for a consultant who does .NET development. It is also not an utter dismissal of TFS as worthless; Ive seen people use it effectively on several projects. So why? Ill start with a laundry list of shortcomings. An out of the box UI for work items that is insultingly bad, a source control system that is confoundingly fragile when handling merges, folder renames and long file names, the arcane XML wizardry necessary to customize a template and a build system that adds an extra layer of oddness on top of msbuild. Im sure my legion of readers will soon point out to me how I can work around all these issues, how this is fixed in TFS 2010 or with this add-in, and how once you have everything set up, youre fine. And theyd be right, any one of these problems could be worked around. If not dirty laundry, what else? I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that TFS is so irritating to me because it represents a vision of software development that I find unappealing. To expand upon this, lets start with some wisdom from those great PSAs at the end of the G.I. Joe cartoons of the 80s: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. In software development, Id go further and say knowing is more than half the battle. Understanding the dimensions of the problem you are trying to solve, the needs of the users, the value that your software can provide are more than half the battle. Implementation of this understanding is not easy, but it is not even possible without this knowledge. Assuming we have a fixed amount of time and mental energy for any project, why does this spell trouble for TFS? If you think about what TFS is doing, its offering you a huge array of options to track the day to day implementation of your project. From tasks, to code churn, to test coverage. All valuable metrics, but only in exchange for valuable time to get it all working. In addition, when you have a shiny toy like TFS, the temptation is to feel obligated to use it. So the push from TFS is to encourage a project manager and team to focus on process and metrics around process. You can get great visibility, and graphs to show your project stakeholders, but none of that is important if you are not implementing the right product. Not just unimportant, these activities can be harmful as they drain your time and sap your creativity away from the rest of the project. To be more concrete, lets suppose your organization has invested the time to create a template for your projects and trained people in how to use it, so there is no longer a big investment of time for each project to get up and running. First, Id challenge if that template could be specific enough to be full featured and still applicable for any project. Second, the very existence of this template would be a indication to a project manager that the success of their project was somehow directly related to fitting management of that project into this format. Again, while the capabilities are wonderful, the mirage is there; just get everything into TFS and your project will run smoothly. Ill close the loop on this first topic by proposing a thought experiment. Think of the projects youve worked on. How many times have you been chagrined to discover youve implemented the wrong feature, misunderstood how a feature should work or just plain spent too much time on a screen that nobody uses? That sounds like a really worthwhile area to invest time in improving. How about going back to these projects and thinking about how many times you wished you had optimized the state change flow of your tasks or been embarrassed to not have a code churn report linked back to the latest changeset? With thanks to the Real American Heroes, Ill move on to a more current influence, that of the developers at 37signals, and their philosophy towards software development. This philosophy, fully detailed in the books Getting Real and Rework, is a vision of software that under does the competition. This is software that is deliberately limited in functionality in order to concentrate fully on making sure ever feature that is there is awesome and needed. Why is this relevant? Well, in one of those fun seeming paradoxes in life, constraints can be a spark for creativity. Think Twitter, the small screen of an iPhone, the limitations of HTML for applications, the low memory limits of older or embedded system. As long as there is some freedom within those constraints, amazing things emerge. For project management, some of the most respected people in the industry recommend using just index cards, pens and tape. They argue that with change the constant in software development, your process should be as limited (yet rigorous) as possible. Looking at TFS, this is not a system designed to under do anybody. It is a big jumble of components and options, with every feature you could think of. Predictably this means many basic functions are hard to use. For task management, many people just use an Excel spreadsheet linked up to TFS. Not a stirring endorsement of the tooling there. TFS as a whole would be far more appealing to me if there was less of it, but better. Id cut 50% of the features to make the other half really amaze and inspire me. And thats really the heart of the matter. TFS has great promise and I want to believe it can work better. But ultimately it focuses your attention on a lot of stuff that doesnt really matter and then clamps down your creativity in a mess of forms and dialogs obscuring what does.   --- Relevant Links --- All those great G.I. Joe PSAs are on YouTube, including lots of mashed up versions. A simple Google search will get you on the right track.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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• Robotic Arm &ndash; Hardware

  - by Szymon Kobalczyk

  This is first in series of articles about project I've been building  in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm).  I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm  Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics).  However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program.   The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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