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• Canvas draw calls are rendering out of sequence

  - by Tom Murray

  I have the following code for writing draw calls to a "back buffer" canvas, then placing those in a main canvas using drawImage. This is for optimization purposes and to ensure all images get placed in sequence. Before placing the buffer canvas on top of the main one, I'm using fillRect to create a dark-blue background on the main canvas. However, the blue background is rendering after the sprites. This is unexpected, as I am making its fillRect call first. Here is my code: render: function() { this.buffer.clearRect(0,0,this.w,this.h); this.context.fillStyle = "#000044"; this.context.fillRect(0,0,this.w,this.h); for (var i in this.renderQueue) { for (var ii = 0; ii < this.renderQueue[i].length; ii++) { sprite = this.renderQueue[i][ii]; // Draw it! this.buffer.fillStyle = "green"; this.buffer.fillRect(sprite.x, sprite.y, sprite.w, sprite.h); } } this.context.drawImage(this.bufferCanvas,0,0); } This also happens when I use fillRect on the buffer canvas, instead of the main one. Changing the globalCompositeOperation between 'source-over' and 'destination-over' (for both contexts) does nothing to change this. Paradoxically, if I instead place the blue fillRect inside the nested for loops with the other draw calls, it works as expected... Thanks in advance!

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• Why is this one div container blocking the other from floating right?

  - by user2824289

  I know the answer is very simple, it's probably one little CSS property, but I've tried to find the solution without asking it here, no luck.. There are two div containers within a div container, and they aren't playing nice. The one is positioned to float right in the upper righthand corner of the parent div, and it won't let any other container float to the right of it. I tried display:inline and display:inline-block but no luck... Here's the code, though something tells me the answer is so easy you won't need it!: The parent div, the upper righthand corner div, and the poor div trying to float right: #um-home-section4 { width:100%; height:300px; background-color: green; } #um-title-right { float:right; width:500px; height:50px; margin-right:20px; margin-top:20px; background-color: fuchsia; } #take-me-there { float:right; margin-top:240px; margin-right:0px; height:50px; width:100px; background-color: gray; } <div id="um-home-section4"> <div id="um-title-right"></div> <div id="take-me-there"></div> </div>

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• Processing JSON data with jQuery - strange results needing alert()

  - by James

  I have this code below. I randomly ran across that it will work if I have that alert message exactly where it is. If I take it out or move it to any other spot the tabs will not appear. What exactly is that alert doing that allows the code to work and how can I make it work without the alert? If I move the each loop into the success section it does not work even with the alert. $.ajax({ type: "GET", url: "../ajax.php", data: "action=tabs", dataType: "json", success: function(data){ Projects = data; } }); alert("yes"); $.each(Projects, function(i){ /* Sequentially creating the tabs and assigning a color from the array: */ var tmp = $('<li><a href="#" class="tab green">'+Projects[i].name+'<span class="left" /><span class="right" /></a></li>'); /* Setting the page data for each hyperlink: */ tmp.find('a').data('page','../ajax.php?action=lists&projectID='+Projects[i].project_id); /* Adding the tab to the UL container: */ $('ul.tabContainer').append(tmp); }); The ajax code is retuning json with this code $query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `projects` ORDER BY `position` ASC"); $projects = array(); // Filling the $projects array with new project objects: while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)){ $projects[] = $row; } echo json_encode($projects); The returning data is very small and very fast so I don't think that is the problem.

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• Editing XML file content with Python.

  - by Hooloovoo

  Hi, I am trying to use Python to read in an XML file containing some parameter names and values, e.g. ... <parameter name='par1'> <value>24</value> </parameter> <parameter name='par2'> <value>Blue/Red/Green</value> </parameter> ... and then pass it a dictionary with the parameter names {'par1':'53','par2':'Yellow/Pink/Black',...} and corresponding new values to replace the old ones in the XML file. The output should then overwrite the original XML file. At the moment I am converting the XML to a python dictionary and after some element comparison and regular expression handling, writing the output again in XML format. I am not too happy with this and was wondering whether anyone can recommend a more efficient way of doing it? Thanks.

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• multiple touches: touchend event fired only when a touchmove occurs

  - by dridri

  I would like to add some multitouch features to my javascript application when it is accessed from an ios device (and maybe android later). I want to provide a shiftkey-like functionality: the user may hold a button on the screen with one finger, and while this button is pressed, the behavior for a tap action on the rest of the screen is slightly different from the classic tap. The problem i'm running into is that i do not receive any touchend event for the tapping finger unless a touchmove is fired for the first finger holding the shiftkey button. Because the screen is very sensitive, touchmove events gets easily fired and in most cases everything works fine. But when the user's finger is a bit too still, the tapping is not detected until the user moves his finger a bit. This induces a variable 'delay' between the tapping and the action that occurs on the screen (the delay may vary and last a few seconds if the user is very calm). My guess is that this delay will cause the user to tap again and thus fire the action a second time, which is something that i don't want ! You can test it here with your ipad/iphone : http://jsfiddle.net/jdeXH/8/ Try to make the body remain green for a few seconds by holding your finger very still on the cyan div while tapping on the red div. Is this behavior to be expected ? Is there some known workaround for the problem ? I would have expected the touchend event to be fired right away when the finger is removed from the screen. i tested this with iOS 5.1.1 (ipad1 and iphone4s) edit: found a similar question Multitouch touchEvents not triggered as they should on Safari Mobile

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• Issue in alternate Row color using each() method of JQuery

  - by user1323981

  I have a table as under <table > <tr> <th scope="col">EmpId</th><th scope="col">EmpName</th> </tr> <tr> <td>1</td><td>ABC</td> </tr> <tr> <td>2</td><td>DEF</td> </tr> </table> I want to set the alternate row color of only the "td" elements of the table and not "th" by using only each() function. I have tried with <style type="text/css"> tr.even { background-color: green; } tr.odd { background-color: yellow; } </style> $(document).ready(function () { $('table > tbody').each(function () { $('tr:odd', this).addClass('odd').removeClass('even'); $('tr:even', this).addClass('even').removeClass('odd'); }); }); Though this works but it accepts also "th" element. How to avoid that? Please help Thanks

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• Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup

  - by constant

  Solaris 11 is here! And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter go to eleven. Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure: Getting Started/Overview A lot of people speculated that the official launch of Solaris 11 would be on 11/11 (whatever way you want to turn it), but it actually happened two days earlier. Larry Wake himself offers 11 Reasons Why Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Isn't Being Released on 11/11/11. Then, Larry goes on with a summary: Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS gives you a short and sweet rundown of what the major new features of Solaris 11 are. Jeff Victor has his own list of What's New in Oracle Solaris 11. A popular Solaris 11 meme is to write a blog post about 11 favourite features: Jim Laurent's 11 Reasons to Love Solaris 11, Darren Moffat's 11 Favourite Solaris 11 Features, Mike Gerdt's 11 of My Favourite Things! are just three examples of "11 Favourite Things..." type blog posts, I'm sure many more will follow... More official overview content for Solaris 11 is available from the Oracle Tech Network Solaris 11 Portal. Also, check out Rick Ramsey's blog post Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators on the OTN Blog and his secret 5 Commands That Make Solaris Administration Easier post from the OTN Garage. (Automatic) Installation and the Image Packaging System (IPS) The brand new Image Packaging System (IPS) and the Automatic Installer (IPS), together with numerous other install/packaging/boot/patching features are among the most significant improvements in Solaris 11. But before installing, you may wonder whether Solaris 11 will support your particular set of hardware devices. Again, the OTN Garage comes to the rescue with Rick Ramsey's post How to Find Out Which Devices Are Supported By Solaris 11. Included is a useful guide to all the first steps to get your Solaris 11 system up and running. Tim Foster had a whole handful of blog posts lined up for the launch, teaching you everything you need to know about IPS but didn't dare to ask: The IPS System Repository, IPS Self-assembly - Part 1: Overlays and Part 2: Multiple Packages Delivering Configuration. Watch out for more IPS posts from Tim! If installing packages or upgrading your system from the net makes you uneasy, then you're not alone: Jim Laurent will tech you how Building a Solaris 11 Repository Without Network Connection will make your life easier. Many of you have already peeked into the future by installing Solaris 11 Express. If you're now wondering whether you can upgrade or whether a fresh install is necessary, then check out Alan Hargreaves's post Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11. The trick is in upgrading your pkg(1M) first. Networking One of the first things to do after installing Solaris 11 (or any operating system for that matter), is to set it up for networking. Solaris 11 comes with the brand new "Network Auto-Magic" feature which can figure out everything by itself. For those cases where you want to exercise a little more control, Solaris 11 left a few people scratching their heads. Fortunately, Tschokko wrote up this cool blog post: Solaris 11 manual IPv4 & IPv6 configuration right after the launch ceremony. Thanks, Tschokko! And Milek points out a long awaited networking feature in Solaris 11 called Solaris 11 - hostmodel, which I know for a fact that many customers have looked forward to: How to "bind" a Solaris 11 system to a specific gateway for specific IP address it is using. Steffen Weiberle teaches us how to tune the Solaris 11 networking stack the proper way: ipadm(1M). No more fiddling with ndd(1M)! Check out his tutorial on Solaris 11 Network Tunables. And if you want to get even deeper into the networking stack, there's nothing better than DTrace. Alan Maguire teaches you in: DTracing TCP Congestion Control how to probe deeply into the Solaris 11 TCP/IP stack, the TCP congestion control part in particular. Don't miss his other DTrace and TCP related blog posts! DTrace And there we are: DTrace, the king of all observability tools. Long time DTrace veteran and co-author of The DTrace book*, Brendan Gregg blogged about Solaris 11 DTrace syscall provider changes. BTW, after you install Solaris 11, check out the DTrace toolkit which is installed by default in /usr/dtrace/DTT. It is chock full of handy DTrace scripts, many of which contributed by Brendan himself! Security Another big theme in Solaris 11, and one that is crucial for the success of any operating system in the Cloud is Security. Here are some notable posts in this category: Darren Moffat starts by showing us how to completely get rid of root: Completely Disabling Root Logins on Solaris 11. With no root user, there's one major entry point less to worry about. But that's only the start. In Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS, Darren shows us how to double the security of your services: First by locking them into the new Immutable Zones feature, then by encrypting their data using the new ZFS encryption feature. And if you're still missing sudo from your Linux days, Darren again has a solution: Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo". If you're wondering how much compute power all this encryption will cost you, you're in luck: The Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine will make sure you'll use your Intel's embedded crypto support to its fullest. And if you own a brand new SPARC T4 machine you're even luckier: It comes with its own SPARC T4 OpenSSL Engine. Dan Anderson's posts show how there really is now excuse not to encrypt any more... Developers Solaris 11 has a lot to offer to developers as well. Ali Bahrami has a series of blog posts that cover diverse developer topics: elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility, Using Stub Objects and The Stub Proto: Not Just For Stub Objects Anymore to name a few. BTW, if you're a developer and want to shape the future of Solaris 11, then Vijay Tatkar has a hint for you: Oracle (Sun Systems Group) is hiring! Desktop and Graphics Yes, Solaris 11 is a 100% server OS, but it can also offer a decent desktop environment, especially if you are a developer. Alan Coopersmith starts by discussing S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system, then Calum Benson shows us around What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop. Even accessibility is a first-class citizen in the Solaris 11 user interface. Peter Korn celebrates: Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Performance Gone are the days of "Slowaris", when Solaris was among the few OSes that "did the right thing" while others cut corners just to win benchmarks. Today, Solaris continues doing the right thing, and it delivers the right performance at the same time. Need proof? Check out Brian's BestPerf blog with continuous updates from the benchmarking lab, including Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11! Send Me More Solaris 11 Launch Articles! These are just a few of the more interesting blog articles that came out around the Solaris 11 launch, I'm sure there are many more! Feel free to post a comment below if you find a particularly interesting blog post that hasn't been listed so far and share your enthusiasm for Solaris 11! *Affiliate link: Buy cool stuff and support this blog at no extra cost. We both win! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup'; var flattr_dsc = '<strong>Solaris 11 is here!</strong>And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven">go to eleven</a>.Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure:'; var flattr_tag = 'blogging,digest,Oracle,Solaris,solaris,solaris 11'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2011/11/solaris-11-launch-blog-carnival-roundup'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Over the years, I endured enough delayed flights, air turbulence and misadventures in airport security clearance to watch my expectations for the air travel experience fall to abysmally low levels. The extent of my loyalty to any one carrier had more to do with the proximity of the airport parking garage to their particular gate than to any effort on the airline’s part to actually earn and retain my business. That all changed one day when I found myself at the airport hoping to catch a return flight home a few hours earlier than expected, using an airline I had flown with for the first time just that week.  When you travel regularly for business, being able to catch a return flight home that’s even an hour or two earlier than originally scheduled is a big deal. It can mean the difference between having a normal evening with your family and having to sneak in like a cat burglar after everyone is fast asleep. And so I found myself on this particular day hoping to catch an earlier flight home. I approached the gate agent and was told that I could go on standby for their next flight out. Then I asked how much it was going to cost to change the flight, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get reimbursed by my company for any change fees. “Oh, there’s no charge to fly on standby,” the gate agent told me. I made a funny look. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This airline was going to let my fly on standby, at no additional charge, even though I was a new customer with no status or points. It had been years since I’d seen an airline pass up a short term revenue generating opportunity in favor of a long term loyalty generating one.  At that moment, this particular airline gained my loyal business. Since then, this airline has had the opportunity to learn a lot about me. They know where I live, where I fly from, where I usually fly to, and where I like to sit on the plane. In general, I’ve found their customer service to be quite good whether at the airport, via call center and even through social channels. They email me occasionally, and when they do, they demonstrate that they know me by promoting deals for flights from where I live to places that I’d be interested in visiting. And that’s part of why I’m always so puzzled when I visit their website.Does this company with the great service, customer friendly policies, and clean planes demonstrate that they know me at all when I visit their website? The answer is no. Even when I log in using my loyalty program credentials, it’s pretty obvious that they’re presenting the same old home page and same old offers to every single one of their site visitors. I mean, those promotional offers that they’re featuring so prominently  -- they’re for flights that originate thousands of miles from where I live! There’s no way I’d ever book one of those flights and I’m sure I’m not the only one of their customers to feel that way.My reason for recounting this story is not to pick on the one customer experience flaw I've noticed with this particular airline, in fact, they do so many things right that I’ll continue to fly with them. But I did want to illustrate just how glaringly obvious it is to customers today when a touch point they have with a brand is impersonal, unconnected and out of sync. As someone who’s spent a number of years in the web experience management and online marketing space, it particularly peeves me when that out of sync touch point is a brand’s website, perhaps because I know how important it is to make a customer’s online experience relevant and how many powerful tools are available for making a relevant experience a reality. The fact is, delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable or particularly effective in today’s world. Today’s savvy customers expect you to know who they are and to understand their preferences, behavior and relationship with your brand. Not only do they expect you to know about them, but they also expect you to demonstrate this knowledge across all of their touch points with your brand in a consistent and compelling fashion, whether it be on your traditional website, your mobile web presence or through various social channels.Delivering the kind of personalized online experiences that customers want can have tremendous business benefits. This is not just about generating feelings of goodwill and higher customer satisfaction ratings either. More relevant and personalized online experiences boost the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives and the statistics prove this out. Personalized web experiences can help increase online conversion rates by 70% -- that’s a huge number.1  And more than three quarters of consumers indicate that they’ve made additional online purchases based on personalized product recommendations.2Now if only this airline would get on board with delivering a more personalized online customer experience. I’d certainly be happier and more likely to spring for one of their promotional offers. And by targeting relevant offers on their home page to appropriate segments of their site visitors, I bet they’d be happier and generating additional revenue too. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}  ***** If you're interested in hearing more perspectives on the benefits of demonstrating that you know your customers by delivering a more personalized experience, check out this white paper on creating a successful and meaningful customer experience on the web.  Also catch the video below on the business value of CX in attracting new customers featuring Oracle's VP of Customer Experience Strategy, Brian Curran. 1 Search Engine Watch 2 Marketing Charts

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• MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 2 Silverlight + Windows 7 Phone

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay.  Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together.  Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments. Silverlight Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote.  His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft.  This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools.  This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront. The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight.  Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration.  Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including;  ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more.  Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation.  All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail. The key piece of Scott's various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source.  Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they're getting involved in the right ways. One of the last points I'll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support.  Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress – providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition. Windows 7 Phone The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don't let your mind explode!!).  Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone.  At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface.  The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately.  Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces.  The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard.  From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone. Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs.  These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis.  This basis being determined by the user.  These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone.  This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media.  The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you've seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive. Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices.  Belfiore's also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations.  The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people's, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered.  This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn't even as powerful as the planned end device. Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This was all good stuff, but I'll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment. When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This is were I have to give serious props.  He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people.  That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes.  The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs.  The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now.  The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn't available yet.  I personally can't wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone. Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again! When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again.  The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary).  The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold.  So this didn't actually sell me on the phone, because I'm already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone. Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today.  Lunch is over and I'm off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking.  Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day. Original Post – Check out my other blog for even more technical ramblings and reads.

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• Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

  - by jasont

  The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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• PASS: Election Changes for 2011

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee.  This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process.  You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White.  This group worked from October to April on our election process.  Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did.  They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections.  I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting.  We reviewed those and made a few modifications.  I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes.  Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page.  Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections.  If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in.  If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members.  Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions.  I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC.  I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist.  Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom.  There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members.  Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large.  The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly).  We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members.  It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members.  That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails.  If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate.  Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care.  I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes.  This is something I suggested.  I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be.  I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes.  Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President).  My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified.  As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them.  This has interesting implications.  This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it.  This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates.  You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it.  It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are.  I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom.  This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot.  Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair.  After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place.  We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board.  If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board.  The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process.  That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others.  I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently.  I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents.  I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates.  That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill.  The first is the NomCom.  We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role.  It won’t be easy.  You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members.  Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be.  There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday.  This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates.  If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year.  We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before.  Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year.  Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election.  And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process?  It isn’t.  Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed.  Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes.  After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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• Thou shalt not put code on a piedestal - Code is a tool, no more, no less

  - by Ralf Westphal

  “Write great code and everything else becomes easier” is what Paul Pagel believes in. That´s his version of an adage by Brian Marick he cites: “treat code as an end, not just a means.” And he concludes: “My post-Agile world is software craftsmanship.” I wonder, if that´s really the way to go. Will “simply” writing great code lead the software industry into the light? He´s alluding to the philosopher Kant who proposed, a human beings should never be treated as a means, but always as an end. But should we transfer this ethical statement into the world of software? I doubt it.   Reason #1: Human beings are categorially different from code. They are autonomous entities who need to find a way of living happily together. To Kant it seemed this goal could only be reached if nobody (ab)used a human being for his/her purposes. Because using a human being, i.e. treating it as a means, would contradict the fundamental autonomy and freedom of human beings. People should hold up a symmetric view of their relationships: Since nobody wants to be (ab)used, nobody should (ab)use anybody else. If you want to be treated decently, with respect, in accordance with your own free will - which means as an end - then do the same to other people. Code is dead, it´s a product, it´s a tool for people to reach their goals. No company spends any money on code other than to save money or earn money in the long run. Code is not a puppy. Enterprises do not commission software development to just feel good in its company. Code is not a buddy. Code is a slave, if you will. A mechanical slave, a non-tangible robot. Code is a tool, is a tool. And if we start to treat it differently, if we elevate its status unduely… I guess that will contort our relationship in a contraproductive way. Please get me right: Just because something is “just a tool”, “just a product” does not mean we should not be careful while designing, building, using it. Right to the contrary. We should be very careful when writing code – but not for the code´s sake! We should be careful because we respect our customers who are fellow human beings who should be treated as an end. If we are careless, neglectful, ignorant when producing code on their behalf, then we´re using them. Being sloppy means you´re caring more for yourself that for your customer. You´re then treating the customer as a means to fulfill some of your own needs. That´s plain unethical behavior.   Reason #2: The focus should always be on your purpose, not on any tool. But if code is treated as an end, then the focus is on the code. That might sound right, because where else should be your focus as a software developer? But, well, I´d say, your focus should be on delivering value to your customer. Because in the end your customer does not care if you write a single line of code. She just wants her problem to be solved. Solving problems is the purpose of any contractor. Code must be treated just as a means, a tool we know how to handle very well. But if we´re really trying to be craftsmen then we should be conscious about exactly that and act ethically. That means we must never be so focused on our tool as to be unable to suggest better solutions to the problems of our customers than code.   I´m all with Paul when he urges us to “Write great code”. Sure, if you need to write code, then by all means do so. Write the best code you can think of – and then try to improve it. Paul has all the best intentions when he signs Brians “treat code as an end” - but as we all know: “The road to hell is paved with best intentions” ;-) Yes, I can imagine a “hell of code focus”. In fact, I don´t need to imagine it, I´m seeing it quite often. Because code hell is whereever two developers stand together and are so immersed in talking about all sorts of coding tricks, design patterns, code smells, technologies, platforms, tools that they lose sight of the big picture. Talking about TDD or SOLID or refactoring is a sign of consciousness – relative to the “cowboy coders” view of the world. But from yet another point of view TDD, SOLID, and refactoring are just cures for ailments within a system. And I fear, if “Writing great code” is the only focus or the main focus of software development, then we as an industry lose the ability to see that. Focus draws a line around something, it defines a horizon for perceptions and thinking. So if we focus on code our horizon ends where “the land of code” ends. I don´t think that should be our professional attitude.   So what about Software Craftsmanship as the next big thing after Agility? I think Software Craftsmanship has an important message for all software developers and beyond. But to make it the successor of the Agility movement seems to miss a point. Agility never claimed to solve all software development problems, I´d say. So to blame it for having missed out on certain aspects of it is wrong. If I had to summarize Agility in one word I´d say “Value”. Agility put value for the customer back in software development. Focus on delivering value early and often – that´s Agility´s mantra. All else follows from that. And I ask you: Is that obsolete? Is delivering value not hip anymore? No, sure not. That´s our very purpose as software developers. So how can Agility become obsolete and need to be replaced? We need to do away with this “either/or”-thinking. It´s either Agility or Lean or Software Craftsmanship or whatnot. Instead we should start integrating concepts and movements. Think “both/and”. Think Agility plus Software Craftsmanship plus Lean plus whatnot. We don´t neet to tear down anything from a piedestal and replace it with a new idol. Instead we should do away with piedestals and arrange whatever is helpful is a circle. Then we can turn to concepts, movements for whatever they are best. After 10 years of Agility we should be able to identify what it was good at – and keep that. Keep Agility around and add whatever Agility was lacking or never concerned with. Add whatever is at the core of Software Craftsmanship. Add whatever is at the core of Lean etc. But don´t call out the age of Post-Agility. Because it better never will end. Because once we start to lose Agility´s core we´re losing focus of the customer.

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• iSCSI timeouts under high load

  - by Antonio

  I have two servers connected via Gigabit Ethernet. One is iSCSI target, the second one is initiator. When I run mkfs.ext4 at initiator, after a while disk IO slows down critically. In the target host I can see the following in syslog: Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_task_set(1139) found 119668c 0 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_cmd(1115) found 119668c 6 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_task_set(1139) found 119668d 0 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_cmd(1115) found 119668d 6 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_task_set(1139) found 119668e 0 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_cmd(1115) found 119668e 6 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_task_set(1139) found 1196696 0 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_cmd(1115) found 1196696 6 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_task_set(1139) found 119669e 0 Sep 14 09:40:03 sh11 tgtd: abort_cmd(1115) found 119669e 6 Sep 14 09:40:04 sh11 tgtd: abort_task_set(1139) found 119669f 0 Sep 14 09:40:04 sh11 tgtd: abort_cmd(1115) found 119669f 6 And load average grows to 12 or even more: # uptime 12:37:00 up 23 days, 13:25, 1 user, load average: 12.00, 7.00, 4.00 CentOS 6.3 tgtd 1.0.24 Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz 1Gb RAM 2Tb WD Cavlar Green SATA 2.0 #lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 02) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE Host-to-AGP Bridge (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 82) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV200 QW [Radeon 7500] 02:01.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc DGE-530T Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev 11) (rev 11) 02:02.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE/SATA Controller (rev 50) 02:03.0 RAID bus controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6421 IDE/SATA Controller (rev 50) 02:04.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02) 02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB PRO/100 VE (CNR) Ethernet Controller (rev 82) Is there a way to tune target host to avoid these timeouts?

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• IRP_MJ_WRITE latency up to 15 seconds

  - by racitup

  We have written an application that performs small (22kB) writes to multiple files at once (one thread performing asynchronous queued writes to multiple locations on behalf of other threads) on the same local volume (RAID1). 99.9% of the writes are low-latency but occasionally (maybe every minute or two) we get one or two huge latency writes (I have seen 10 seconds and above) without any real explanation. Platform: Win2003 Server with NTFS. Monitoring: Sysinternals Process Monitor (see link below) and our own application logging. We have tried multiple things to try and solve this that have been gleaned from a few websites, e.g.: Making the first part of file names unique to aid 8.3 name generation Writing files to multiple directories Changing Intel Disk Write Caching Windows File/Printer Sharing Minimize memory used Balance Maximize data throughput for file sharing Maximize data throughput for network applications System-Advanced-Performance-Advanced NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate - use fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1 disable 8.3 name generation - use "fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1" + restart Enable a large size file system cache Disable paging of the kernel code IO Page Lock Limit Turn Off (or On) the Indexing Service But nothing seems to make much difference. There's a whole host of things we haven't tried yet but we wondered if anyone had come across the same problem, a reason and a solution (programmatic or not)? We can reproduce the problem using IOMeter and a simple setup: Start IOMeter and remove all but the first worker thread in 'Topology' using the disconnect button. Select the Worker thread and put a cross in the box next to the disk you want to use in the Disk Targets tab and put '2000000' in Maximum Disk Size (NOTE: must have at least 1GB free space; sector size is 512 bytes) Next create a new access specification and add it to the worker thread: Transfer Request Size = 22kB 100% Sequential Percent of Access Spec = 100% Percent Read/Write = 100% Write Change Results Display Update Frequency to 5 seconds, Test Setup Run Time to 20 seconds and both 'Number of Workers to Spawn Automatically' settings to zero. Select the Worker Thread in the Topology panel and hit the Duplicate Worker button 59 times to create 60 threads with identical settings. Hit the 'Go' button (green flag) and monitor the Results tab. The 'Maximum I/O Response Time (ms)' always hits at least 3500 on our machine. Our machine isn't exactly slow (Xeon 8 core rack server with 4GB and onboard RAID). I'd be interested to see what other people get. We have a feeling it might be something to do with the NTFS filesystem (ours is currently 75% full of fragmented files) and we are going to try a few things around this principle. But it is also related to disk performance since we don't see it on a RAMDisk and it's not as severe on a RAID10 array. Any help is much appreciated. Richard Right-click and select 'Open Link in New Tab': ProcMon Result

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• Blank Screen After Login on Windows 7

  - by Leigh Riffel

  When unlocking a Windows 7 computer the screen briefly (less than a second) goes blank before showing the screen. Abound once a month (but sometimes within a few days) when I unlock my computer the screen doesn't come back from this brief blackout and stays black. Sometimes after five minutes or so the display will come back. Other times it has been blank for over 20 minutes, so I give up and restart the computer. It seems to happen more often when the computer has been locked for a longer period of time - I lock my computer several times a day, but the problem most happens when I come in at the start of the day. I have updated my video card and monitor drivers. I have two monitors driven by the same graphics card. The computer is a Dell Optiplex 740. When the problem occurs both monitors have a green light on to indicate that they are receiving signal. I've tried unplugging the monitors from the video card and turning the monitors on and off. The screen saver is set to one that is not blank screen. The Windows power settings are set to never turn off the display. When the problem occurs there is no significant disk activity occurring. When the problem occurs I can connect over the network to the hard drive on my computer. When the problem occurs I can't connect over the network with a VNC connection. The VNC client doesn't give an error, but also won't show the screen. The task actually seems to hang as I can see the task, but there is no window for it. This problem occurred when I was running a pre-release version of Windows 7. The hard drive was formatted for release version and the problem still occurs. I've been stopping some of my always running programs to see if one of them may be the culprit, but given the span between failures that will take some time to find the problem if it will even help at all. Some programs I have always running include IE, Firefox, Outlook, Evernote, Kana Reminder, Ditto, Macro Express, Timesnapper, and DisplayFusion. Any ideas appreciated.

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• HP DAT72x6 autoloader

  - by ericmayo

  Hoping someone here has seen this similar issue and can offer soem advise... I have an HP DAT72x6 auto loader tape backup unit. The external kind, here is a link to an owner's manual I found of it. http://www.dectrader.com/docs/set2/emr_na-c00070400-1.pdf I purchased the unit used about 6 months ago. The unit stopped working after 3-4 back-ups, it's used one day a month to do a monthly backup of another system. Suffice it to say the unit gets very little usage. There is an amber light on the front of the unit called the OAR (Operator Attention Required). The manual states to call for service when this light comes on and stays on. I've tried a few things to resolve but none are working. I've tried power cycling, re-securing the SCSI cables at both ends. Unit was used so I didn't pay much ($500) and so I don't want to spend a lot to have it fixed; might as well buy something new one if fixing this is going to cost more than $100-$150 bucks. I'm curious to see if anyone here has been around these devices or possibly is an HP repair person that can give me some things to try to resolve. The manual states that a solid amber OAR light indicates a hardware failure. When I power cycle the unit I see one of two scenarios so far. The unit powers up, shows self test in the LCD, then LCD changes to show all possible images and the OAR light comes on. The unit powers up, LCD is completely blank, the green lights go through some sort of process of going on and off and later the amber OAR light comes on and stays on. If it's a simple misalignment issue, I may be able to fix myself but not knowing what could cause the OAR light to come on gives me no where to even start. Google around gave no help either. I hoping someone here has experience with this and can help or point me in the right direction. Also, I don't have the HP Diagnostic tools mentioned in many manuals. The unit is connected to a Linux box. The 3-4 backups I've done with it so far have had no issues. We run amanda backup. Before this incident the unit was backing up and reading tapes fine. Thanks for any help or suggestions.

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• HT Link Sync Error after Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Installation

  - by marklab

  Update 1 I just assembled an exact replica of this server, and successfully installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in a RAID10 configuration. The success was confirmed by a login to the initial account. There must be a hardware component that is faulty. Since the error mentions HT, which I believe to be Hyper Threading, I will start with the CPUs. Please indicate if this error is more strongly associated with any other piece of hardware. Or make a recommendation of another approach that would be good for this issue. Issue I was attempting to install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on this system with the board RAID10 configured. However, the installation failed at the partitioning stage by rebooting the system. Upon reboot, there is an error report after POST listing the following: Node0: NB WatchDog Timer Error Node1: HT Link Sync Error Node2: HT Link Sync Error ... Node7: HT Link Sync Error Press F1 to continue/resume. After pressing F1 the system will boot from the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation disc. However, it will fail at the same stage, and go through the same process from there. Hardware CPU: AMD OPTERON X12 6172 G34 2.1G 18MB Motherboard: Supermicro H8QG6-F HDD: WD Caviar Green 2TB 5.4K RPM Troubleshooting I disabled RAID10 on the system, and installed the Ubuntu on a single drive. It installed successfully. I then went back to a RAID10 setup and attempted to install on the system again, and was able to make it through the partitioning stage. However, upon reboot, the system reported: Error: file not found, and then booted me into the Grub Rescue console. I feel I have aggravated the problem at this point because when I attempted to install from the boot disc again, the system reboots upon hitting enter to even start the installation process. It does the same thing when trying to boot from an Ubuntu 11 disc. I have not been able to find any information on this HT Link Sync Error, which I feel may have started the problems I am experiencing now with the installation of the OS. I am also aware that Ubuntu is said not to be supported by the motherboard according to Supermicro's site. However, since I was able to install it successfully on a single drive, I do not believe it is incompatible. I would like to know a reason for why it's failing to install on/off.

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• Microphones not working on Apple macbook Air 1,1 (Early 2008) under Linux

  - by jj_p

  I'm running Linux on an mba. I can't make the microphones (neither external nor internal) work. I test using alsamixer and arecord -d 5 test-mic.waw together with aplay test-mic.waw It seems there is a problem with kernel trying to decipher Apple (intentionally) corrupted 'bios', in particular the mic pins are wrongly assigned. As far as we are concerned here, is there any difference between using EFI and BIOS-compatibility mode? (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook where they claim to have everything working out of the box on mba1,1) A nice proposal would be to compile the latest Linux kernel and run hda-jack-retask to find the right configuration (in the case of Realtek codec, the missing things I'm supposed to check are either some vendor-specific COEF verbs, EAPD or GPIO setup.), and then come up with a kernel patch to address the issue. Since I'm not that familiar with this last part of the story, can anyone help me through this process? Some useful data: The output from alsa script run as root http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=adae8ebee1007043fe83414ac4972319e02255fa The command hda-jack-sense-test -a (with external mic in) Pin 0x14 (Internal Speaker): present = No Pin 0x15 (Green HP Out): present = Yes Pin 0x16 (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x17 (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x18 (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x19 (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x1a (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x1b (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x1c (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x1d (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x1e (Not connected): present = No Pin 0x1f (Not connected): present = No Most likely the chip is Realtek ALC885 (compare also ALC889A) http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/bBTSqaeK5JpQ1AWe.large , although at the moment alsa reads it as ALC889A Takashi Iwai's tutorial https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio.txt Some people researched the original files from a running OS X installation on this same model (I think the relevant files are AppleHDA.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleHDA AppleHDA.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleHDAHardwareConfigDriver.kext/Contents/Info.p????list AppleHDA.kext/Contents/Resources/layout12.xml.zlib AppleHDA.kext/Contents/Resources/Platforms.xml.zlib) http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/220090-alc889a-pin-configuration/#entry1554954 Datasheet http://www.realtek.info/pdf/ALC885_1-1.pdf (from the same Realtek, one can also try to download Linux driver, but this is just taken from ALSA project, as stated in the readme file.) Compare with this Arch guy http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=3ca8243c0626844f0264a3faad0aa72018bc14f4 Here for the first time support to audio (except mics) for mba1,2 (which is morally the same as 1,1) is patched into the kernel http://www.alsa-project.org/pipermail/alsa-devel/2010-February/025511.html The same jack supposedly works both for HP and ext MIC, I think it's called TRRS, and it's the same as the one used e.g. for iphones This guy might have done a similar job, though to a more recent version and for sound globally, not just mics: http://blogs.aerys.in/jeanmarc-leroux/2013/09/15/fixing-2013-macbook-air-ubuntu-sound-issue/ (this is mirror to http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/73044/microphones-not-working-on-apple-macbook-air-1-1-early-2008-under-linux )

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• Has the hardware in my modem gone bad?

  - by Tyler Scott

  I contacted CenturyLink about my modem recently and received useless and unrelated information. The problem seems to be that the modem will no longer save settings, the web interface is unusable except in internet explorer for some reason, and the modem keeps resetting. CenturyLink claimed it had to do with signal strength but I checked and it is currently between good and outstanding according to this. All of the lights remain green even when it starts acting up and I lose internet and shortly before it crashes and reboots. Does anyone have any idea what is going on or what I can do to fix it? (Asking CenturyLink again is obviously not going to help.) Update 1: Accessing the syslog from the web interface causes a crash. After it reboots, the log looks like as follows: 01/01/1970 12:01:29 AM Ethernet Ethernet client connected ,ip(192.168.0.2), mac(1c:6f:65:4c:6d:3b) 01/01/1970 12:01:38 AM Wireless 802.11 client connected ,ip(192.168.0.18), mac(d0:df:c7:c2:73:ca) 01/01/1970 12:01:41 AM System Event Line 0: VDSL2 link up, Bearer 0, us=20128, ds=40127 01/01/1970 12:01:43 AM dhcp6s[2028] dhcp6_ctl_authinit: failed to open /etc/dhcp6sctlkey: No such file or directory 01/01/1970 12:01:50 AM dhcp6s[2469] dhcp6_ctl_authinit: failed to open /etc/dhcp6sctlkey: No such file or directory 01/01/1970 12:01:52 AM radvd[2306] poll error: Interrupted system call 01/01/1970 12:01:56 AM PPP Link PPP server detected. 01/01/1970 12:01:56 AM PPP Link PPP session established. 01/01/1970 12:01:56 AM PPP Link PPP LCP UP. 01/01/1970 12:01:56 AM System Event Received valid IP address from server. Connection UP. 06/05/2014 08:16:01 AM radvd[2511] poll error: Interrupted system call 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:03 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:04 AM System Event Dead loop on virtual device tun6rd, fix it urgently! 06/05/2014 08:16:04 AM dhcp6s[3236] dhcp6_ctl_authinit: failed to open /etc/dhcp6sctlkey: No such file or directory 06/05/2014 08:16:08 AM Wireless 802.11 client connected ,ip(192.168.0.7), mac(44:6d:57:c4:d7:08) I also get it to crash on various other pages. I am guessing the web server is unstable.

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• Looking for Fiddler2 help. connection to gateway refused? Just got rid of a virus

  - by John Mackey

  I use Fiddler2 for facebook game items, and it's been a great success. I accessed a website to download some dat files I needed. I think it was eshare, ziddu or megaupload, one of those. Anyway, even before the rar file had downloaded, I got this weird green shield in the bottom right hand corner of my computer. It said a Trojan was trying to access my computer, or something to that extent. It prompted me to click the shield to begin anti-virus scanning. It turns out this rogue program is called Antivirus System Pro and is pretty hard to get rid of. After discovering the rogue program, I tried using Fiddler and got the following error: [Fiddler] Connection to Gateway failed.Exception Text: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:5555 I ended up purchasing SpyDoctor + Antivirus, which I'm told is designed specifically for getting rid of these types of programs. Anyway, I did a quick-scan last night with spydoctor and malware bytes. Malware picked up 2 files, and Spydoctor found 4. Most were insignificant, but it did find a worm called Worm.Alcra.F, which was labeled high-priority. I don’t know if that’s the Anti-Virus Pro or not, but SpyDoctor said it got rid of all of those successfully. I tried to run Fiddler again before leaving home, but was still getting the "gateway failed" error. Im using the newest version of firefox. When I initially set up the Fiddler 2.2.8.6, I couldn’t get it to run at first, so I found this faq on the internet that said I needed to go through ToolsOptionsSettings and set up an HTTP Proxy to 127.0.0.1 and my Port to 8888. Once I set that up and downloaded this fiddler helper as a firefox add-on, it worked fine. When I turn on fiddler, it automatically takes my proxy setting from no proxy (default) to the 127.0.0.1 with Port 8888 set up. It worked fine until my computer detected this virus. Anyway, hopefully I've given you sufficient information to offer me your best advice here. Like I said, Spydoctor says the bad stuff is gone, so maybe the rogue program made some type of change in my fiddler that I could just reset or uncheck or something like that? Or will I need to completely remove fiddler and those dat files and rar files I downloaded? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

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• Looking for Fiddler2 help. connection to gateway refused...just got rid of a virus?

  - by john mackey

  I use Fiddler2 for facebook game items, and it's been a great success. I accessed a website to download some dat files I needed. I think it was eshare, ziddu or megaupload, one of those. Anyway, even before the rar file had downloaded, I got this weird green shield in the bottom right hand corner of my computer. It said a Trojan was trying to access my computer, or something to that extent. It prompted me to click the shield to begin anti-virus scanning. It turns out this rogue program is called Antivirus System Pro and is pretty hard to get rid of. After discovering the rogue program, I tried using Fiddler and got the following error: [Fiddler] Connection to Gateway failed. Exception Text: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:5555 I ended up purchasing SpyDoctor + Antivirus, which I'm told is designed specifically for getting rid of these types of programs. Anyway, I did a quick-scan last night with spydoctor and malware bytes. Malware picked up 2 files, and Spydoctor found 4. Most were insignificant, but it did find a worm called Worm.Alcra.F, which was labeled high-priority. I don’t know if that’s the Anti-Virus Pro or not, but SpyDoctor said it got rid of all of those successfully. I tried to run Fiddler again before leaving home, but was still getting the "gateway failed" error. Im using the newest version of firefox. When I initially set up the Fiddler 2.2.8.6, I couldn’t get it to run at first, so I found this faq on the internet that said I needed to go through ToolsOptionsSettings and set up an HTTP Proxy to 127.0.0.1 and my Port to 8888. Once I set that up and downloaded this fiddler helper as a firefox add-on, it worked fine. When I turn on fiddler, it automatically takes my proxy setting from no proxy (default) to the 127.0.0.1 with Port 8888 set up. It worked fine until my computer detected this virus. Anyway, hopefully I've given you sufficient information to offer me your best advice here. Like I said, Spydoctor says the bad stuff is gone, so maybe the rogue program made some type of change in my fiddler that I could just reset or uncheck or something like that? Or will I need to completely remove fiddler and those dat files and rar files I downloaded? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

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• Why do some games randomly turn my screen a random solid color?

  - by Emlena.PhD

  When playing some games my computer will randomly have an error that I cannot fix without turning it off and back on again. The screen changes to one solid color, which varies (off the top of my head I can remember seeing solid green, magenta, etc..) and the sound blares a single tone. The sound sometimes briefly restores and I can still hear the game sounds and even hear and still be heard by people in my Mumble channel, but the screen doesn't right itself so I'm still blind. What's more is this happens in some games but not in others. While the game is actually running, not while I'm still in the menu. However, it does happen if I'm afk or idle but the game world is still rendering. Games where the error occurs: League of Legends World of Warcraft Trine The Sims 2 Dungeon Defenders Safe games: games where it has never occurred: Tribes: Ascend Star Wars: the Old Republic Battlefield 3 So relatively older games cause the problem while newer games do not? I cannot predict when it will happen, it just seems random. However, if it happens and I try playing the same game further after restart it does appear to occur more frequently after the first time. But if I switch to a safe game it doesn't continue happening. Both of my RAM sticks appear fine, flipped position or either one on their own and games still run, computer still boots. I would think over-heating, but then why not all games? ALso, sometimes it happens immediately after I start playing, within seconds of the 3D world booting up. I'm looking to upgrade very soon so I want to figure out what component or software is fubar and replace/repair it. Any suggestions or recommendations of tools would be helpful. Below is some system information. Dxdiag does not detect any problems. Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.120305-1505) System Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. System Model: EP45-UD3R BIOS: Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz (2 CPUs), ~3.2GHz Memory: 4096MB RAM DirectX Version: DirectX 11 DxDiag Version: 6.01.7601.17514 64bit Unicode Graphics card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 Driver Version: 8.17.12.9610 (error has occurred w/several driver versions) Sound: I do not have a sound card, been using motherboard's built in sound)

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• Syncronizing XML file with MySQL database

  - by Fred K

  My company uses an internal management software for storing products. They want to transpose all the products in a MySql database so they can do available their products on the company website. Notice: they will continue to use their own internal software. This software can exports all the products in various file format (including XML). The syncronization not have to be in real time, they are satisfied to syncronize the MySql database once a day (late night). Also, each product in their software has one or more images, then I have to do available also the images on the website. Here is an example of an XML export: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <export_management userid="78643"> <product id="1234"> <version>100</version> <insert_date>2013-12-12 00:00:00</insert_date> <warrenty>true</warrenty> <price>139,00</price> <model> <code>324234345</code> <model>Notredame</model> <color>red</color> <size>XL</size> </model> <internal> <color>green</color> <size>S</size> </internal> <options> <s_option>some option</standard_option> <s_option>some option</standard_option> <extra_option>some option</extra> <extra_option>some option</extra> </options> <images> <image> <small>1234_0.jpg</small> </image> <image> <small>1234_1.jpg</small> </image> </images> </product> </export_management> Some ideas for how can I do it? Or if you have better ideas to do that.

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• Detection of battery status totally messed up

  - by Faabiioo

  I already posted this question in the Ubuntu forum and stackOverflow. I forward it here with the hope to find some different opinions about the problem. I have an Acer TravelMate 5730, which is 3 y.o., running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. One year ago I changed the battery because the old one died. Since then, everything worked like a charm. A week ago I was using my laptop running on battery; it was charged up to 60%. Suddenly it shut down and for about 24h it was like the battery was totally broken: it didn't charge anymore and the 'upower --dump' said state: critical. I was kind of resigned to buy a new battery, when suddenly the orange light became green: battery was charged and actually working; strangely the battery indicator was stuck to 100%, even after 2 hours running. I tried again with 'upower --dump' or 'acpi -b' commands and it kept saying battery is discharging, though maintaining the percentage to 100%. Thus, battery working fine up to 3 hours, without any warning when it was almost empty, likely to result in a brute shut down. Today something different. the 'upower --dump' command says: ... present: yes rechargeable: yes state: fully-charged energy: 0 Wh energy-empty: 0 Wh energy-full: 65.12 Wh energy-full-design: 65.12 Wh energy-rate: 0 W voltage: 14.481 V percentage: 0% capacity: 100% technology: lithium-ion I tried to boot WinXP and the problem is pretty much the same, with the battery fully-charged, percentage equal to 0% and no way to fix it. While writing, the situation has changed again: present: yes rechargeable: yes state: charging energy: 0 Wh energy-empty: 0 Wh energy-full: 65.12 Wh energy-full-design: 65.12 Wh energy-rate: 0 W voltage: 14.474 V percentage: 0% capacity: 100% technology: lithium-ion ...charging, but it does not charge up. (Recall, the battery lasted 3 hours until yesterday!). So, the big question is: is it an hardware issue, like a dedicated internal circuit is broken? or maybe it is just the battery that must be changed. Or, rather, some BIOS problem that could be fixed in some way. I'd appreciate every help that can shed some light on this annoying problem thanks

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• [CentOS 4.8] nslookup resolves domains to IPs, but I can't get a response to pings to external servers

  - by Beco

  I have a fresh install of CentOS 4.8 running on an internal development server. I haven't done anything to it besides setting up sudoers and SSH. I can SSH into the server and from there resolve domains to IPs and ping internal servers, but for some reason I don't get any response from pinging external servers. The software firewall is disabled, and the problem is present with both static and DHCP-assigned network configurations. The network domain controller is a Windows Server 2003 box. $ nslookup google.com Server: 10.254.2.5 Address: 10.254.2.5#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: google.com Address: 74.125.47.147 Name: google.com Address: 74.125.47.99 <etc...> 10.254.2.5 is the Win2K3 server. $ ping google.com PING google.com (74.125.47.106) 56(84) bytes of data. It just hangs here indefinitely. $ cat /etc/resolv.conf ; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script search <...snip...>.local nameserver 10.254.2.5 nameserver 10.254.2.124 10.254.2.124 is the backup DC server, which is currently off and tombstoned by this point. The snipped section is our company name. # ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr <snip> inet addr:10.254.2.101 Bcast:10.254.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: <snip>/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:80066 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:4421 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:7810133 (7.4 MiB) TX bytes:590550 (576.7 KiB) Interrupt:225 Base address:0xc000 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:32 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:32 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:8104 (7.9 KiB) TX bytes:8104 (7.9 KiB) # route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 10.254.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 10.254.2.5 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 And, for good measure, a snapshot of the current ethernet config via the system-config-network GUI. Edit: I don't yet have enough rep to post images, so here's a link. Sorry! system-config-network snapshot I'm pretty green when it comes to setting up *nix dev servers and network configuration in general, so please let me know if I've left out critical information, or posted information I shouldn't have posted. Thanks!

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