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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 08, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 08, 2010Popular ReleasesAlgorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.1: Added a better ToUTF-8 converter (not just from windows-1256 to utf-8). Refactored OpenFileDialogs to a more MVVM friendly behavior.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration valueHydroDesktop - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Desktop Application: 1.1.340: HydroDesktop 1.1 Stable Release (Build 340)CslaGenFork: CslaGenFork 4.0 CTP 2: The version is 4.0.1 CTP2 and was released 2010 December 7 and includes the following files: CslaGenFork 4.0.1-2010-12-07 Setup.msi Templates-2010-10-07.zip For getting started instructions, refer to How to section. Overview of the changes Since CTP1 there were 53 work items closed (28 features, 24 issues and 1 task). During this 60 days a lot of work has been done on several areas. First the stereotypes: EditableRoot is OK EditableChild is OK EditableRootCollection is OK Editable...My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.0 ALPHA: 2.2.0 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated En...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 4: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous fixes and improvements to core engine Twitter API coverage: a...myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...MiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide New ProjectsCore Motives Tracking Web Part: This C# web part was created to allow users of SharePoint 2007 to place CoreMotives (http://www.coremotives.com) tracking code on any web part page. Can also be used in master pages and page layouts.CPEBook: OsefEatFrsh: Keep Track of contents of your Fridge. Eat items while they are still fresh.ENUH10Publisher: Et prosjekt for studenter ved eCademy H10EVE Community Portal: EVE Community Portal is a complete community portal for EVE alliances (and corporations), which will host everything an eve alliance needs, from a forum and blogs to every tool you could whish for and more...FER CSLA.NET Compact: .NET Compact Framework edition of CSLA.NET application framework.Finger Mouse: it's a good idea and simple program help you to use the mouse feature from webcam (without mouse) note : you should have i3 or higher processorGambaru: Gambaru é um techdemo de um game 3D desenvolvido em Delphi. Utiliza engine de física Newton e Open GL (pacote GL-Scene). Foi apresentado como trabalho de conclusão de curso no SENAC-SP por Marcelo, Daniel e Thais em 2007. Exploramos o universo Samurai. Contribua, programe, sonhe!GameBoyEmu: ????，GameBoy ???GenericList Inherits IDataReader ( ListEx<T>() : IDataReader ): This Generic List implements the IDataReader interface and displays the usage of Linq, Lamba expressions and some creative thought around working with collection types. I hope it can serve as reference to your projects.Guard: Provides the argument validation class Guard, ubiquitously used throughout all .NET projects but with no central place for updates.HolidayChecker Library: HolidayChecker Library is a usefull library that allows programmers to know if a certain date is a festivity or not. This library also allows the calculation of Easter day based on the algorithm of Tondering. It's developed in C#.JuniorTour - Junior Golf Tour Silverlight Application: JuniorTour makes it easier for golf tour operators to publish tournament results for multiple divisions and multiple seasons. You'll no longer have to manually edit player pages, tournament results, or compute rankings. It's developed in C# and Silverlight.LibGT: LibGT aims to reduce the amount of overall code a programmer has to write in C#. This library provides many shortcuts and extension methods to facilitate robust development rapidly even without the use of an IDE.Mayhem: Mayhem makes it simple for end users to control complex events with their PCs. Whether you want to Update a Twitter status when your cat is detected by your webcam or monitor your serial ports and trigger events, it's no problem with Mayhem -- wreak your own personal havoc.mmht: ???????，??????MobilePolice: my mobilepolice projectOpenCallback: This is a implementation of the callback handler pattern that allows you to invoke the callback handle methods with out type switching or if...else if chains.Project Baron: Simple, yet powerful Project Management System.PS3Lib for SDK 1.92: Création d'une librairie de ceveloppement pour le SDK 1.92Remote Controller for Trackmania: Evzrecon is a remote controller for Trackmania Forever dedicated servers, much like XASECO but written in Java.SharePointSocial: SharePointSocial is focused on taking social interaction within SharePoint to the next level, extending beyond the corporate boundaries. Corporate listening, one-click interaction through key social media outlets and data-driven management and reporting are planned features.SIGS: ssSimple Routing: Simple Routing allows you to associate arbitrary routes with static methods in an ASP.NET application through attribution.SlimCRM: Aplicación de referencia de buenas prácticas de programaciónTalkBoard: ????????，?????????！uHelpsy - Umbraco Helper Library: uHelpsy is a tiny (but growing) library which makes programatically interacting with Umbraco 4.5.2 much more pleasant. It provides helper methods for creating and updating nodes, working with the Umbraco cache, and dealing with unpublished nodes. VCSS: VCSS is a decorated version of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that allows you to specify variables and also nest rules. The VCSS file can be compiled into a standard CSS file to be used on any website.Vote: ?，???????????????！WP7 GPS Simulator: Use this project to simulate GPS while doing development on your Windows Phone 7.WPF_CAD: this proyect it's a college proyect form grafic computer course. Consist in the development of a cad soft implementing all grafics algoritms.Xml-Racing: Réaliser une application Web 3-tiers qui permette d'interroger une BD et de restituer les infos sous forme de graphiques et cartes.

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• django, mod_wsgi, MySQL High CPU - Problems

  - by Red Rover

  I am having a problem with an OSQA site. It is Django/Apache/mod_wsgi configured site. Every hour, the CPU spikes to 164% (Average) for task HTTPD. After 10 minutes, it frees back up. I have reviewed the logs, cron tables, made many config changes, but cannot track this problem down. Can someone please look at the information below and let me know if it is a configuration problem, or if anyone else has experienced this issue. Running TOP shows HTTPD using 165% of CPU VMware performance monitor also displays spikes. This happens every hour for 10 minutes. I have the following information from server status Server Version: Apache/2.2.15 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_wsgi/3.2 Python/2.6.6 Server Built: Feb 7 2012 09:50:15 Current Time: Sunday, 10-Jun-2012 21:44:29 EDT Restart Time: Sunday, 10-Jun-2012 19:44:51 EDT Parent Server Generation: 0 Server uptime: 1 hour 59 minutes 37 seconds Total accesses: 1088 - Total Traffic: 11.5 MB CPU Usage: u80.26 s243.8 cu0 cs0 - 4.52% CPU load .152 requests/sec - 1682 B/second - 10.8 kB/request 4 requests currently being processed, 11 idle workers ....._..........__......W....................................... ...................................C._..._....._L__._L_._....... ...................... Scoreboard Key: "_" Waiting for Connection, "S" Starting up, "R" Reading Request, "W" Sending Reply, "K" Keepalive (read), "D" DNS Lookup, "C" Closing connection, "L" Logging, "G" Gracefully finishing, "I" Idle cleanup of worker, "." Open slot with no current process Srv PID Acc M CPU SS Req Conn Child Slot Client VHost Request 0-0 - 0/0/34 . 0.42 327 17 0.0 0.00 0.67 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 1-0 - 0/0/22 . 0.31 339 32 0.0 0.00 0.26 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 2-0 - 0/0/22 . 0.65 358 10 0.0 0.00 0.31 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 3-0 - 0/0/31 . 1.03 378 31 0.0 0.00 0.60 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 4-0 - 0/0/20 . 0.45 356 9 0.0 0.00 0.31 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 5-0 18852 0/16/34 _ 0.98 27 18120 0.0 0.37 0.62 69.180.250.36 osqa.informs.org GET /questions/289/what-is-the-difference-between-operations-re 6-0 - 0/0/32 . 0.94 309 29 0.0 0.00 0.64 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 7-0 - 0/0/31 . 1.15 382 32 0.0 0.00 0.75 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 8-0 - 0/0/21 . 0.28 403 19 0.0 0.00 0.20 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 9-0 - 0/0/32 . 1.37 288 16 0.0 0.00 0.60 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 10-0 - 0/0/33 . 1.72 383 16 0.0 0.00 0.40 127.0.0.1 osqa.informs.org OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 I am running Django 1.3 This is a mod_wsgi configuration and copied is the wsgi.conf file: <IfModule !python_module> <IfModule !wsgi_module> LoadModule wsgi_module modules/mod_wsgi.so <IfModule wsgi_module> <Directory /var/www/osqa> Order allow,deny Allow from all #Deny from all </Directory> WSGISocketPrefix /var/run/wsgi WSGIPythonEggs /var/tmp WSGIDaemonProcess OSQA maximum-requests=10000 WSGIProcessGroup OSQA Alias /admin_media/ /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Django-1.2.5-py2.6.egg/django/contrib/admin/media/ Alias /m/ /var/www/osqa/forum/skins/ Alias /upfiles/ /var/www/osqa/forum/upfiles/ <Directory /var/www/osqa/forum/skins> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/osqa/osqa.wsgi </IfModule> </IfModule> </IfModule> This is the httpd.conf file Timeout 120 KeepAlive Off MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 MaxKeepAliveRequests 400 KeepAliveTimeout 3 <IfModule prefork.c> Startservers 15 MinSpareServers 10 MaxSpareServers 20 ServerLimit 50 MaxClients 50 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> <IfModule worker.c> StartServers 4 MaxClients 150 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> We are using MySQL The server is an ESX4i, configured for the VM to use 4 CPUs and 8 GB Ram. Hyper threading is enabled, 2 physical CPU's, with 4 Logical. the CPU are Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz. Total memory is 12GB

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 06, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 06, 2014Popular ReleasesVirto Commerce Enterprise Open Source eCommerce Platform (asp.net mvc): Virto Commerce 1.10: Virto Commerce Community Edition version 1.10. To install the SDK package, please refer to SDK getting started documentation To configure source code package, please refer to Source code getting started documentation This release includes bug fixes and improvements (including Commerce Manager localization and https support). More details about this release can be found on our blog at http://blog.virtocommerce.com.Load Runner - HTTP Pressure Test Tool: Load Runner 1.3: 1. gracefully stop distributed engine 2. added error handling for distributed load tasks if fail to send the tasks. 3. added easter egg ;-) NPOI: NPOI 2.1: Assembly Version: 2.1.0 New Features a. XSSFSheet.CopySheet b. Excel2Html for XSSF c. insert picture in word 2007 d. Implement IfError function in formula engine Bug Fixes a. fix conditional formatting issue b. fix ctFont order issue c. fix vertical alignment issue in XSSF d. add IndexedColors to NPOI.SS.UserModel e. fix decimal point issue in non-English culture f. fix SetMargin issue in XSSF g.fix multiple images insert issue in XSSF h.fix rich text style missing issue in XSSF i. fix cell...HigLabo: HigLabo_20140605: Modify AsciiCharOnly method implementation. Code clean up of RssItem.Description.51Degrees - Device Detection and Redirection: 3.1.2.3: Version 3.1 HighlightsDevice detection algorithm is over 100 times faster. Regular expressions and levenshtein distance calculations are no longer used. The device detection algorithm performance is no longer limited by the number of device combinations contained in the dataset. Two modes of operation are available: Memory – the detection data set is loaded into memory and there is no continuous connection to the source data file. Slower initialisation time but faster detection performanc...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.27.0: CodeMap now indicates the type name for all members Implemented running scripts 'as administrator'. Just add '//css_npp asadmin' to the script and run it as usual. 'Prepare script for distribution' now aggregates script dependency assemblies. Various improvements in CodeSnipptet, Autcompletion and MethodInfo interactions with each other. Added printing line number for the entries in CodeMap (subject of configuration value) Improved debugging step indication for classless scripts ...Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.6003: Bug fixes: Fixed issue where category could not be saved if parent categories not altered Updated split string function to 500 chars otherwise problems with attribute filtering in PowerPack Improvements: If a user has group pricing below that available through qty discounts, that will show in place of the qty discountClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.72.3: 70426e13c415 ClosedXML for .Net 4.0 now uses Open XML SDK 2.5 b9ef53a6654f Merge branch 'master' of https://git01.codeplex.com/forks/vbjay/closedxml 727714e86416 Fix range.Merge(Boolean) for .Net 3.5 eb1ed478e50e Make public range.Merge(Boolean checkIntersects) 6284cf3c3991 More performance improvements when saving.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.032.018 Release 1: Added ability to merge/join two ships, regardless of origin. Added Language selection menu to set display text language (for SE resources only), and fixed inherent issues. Added full support for Dedicated Servers, allowing use on PC without Steam present, and only the Dedicated Server install. Added Browse button for used specified save game selection in Load dialog. Installation of this version will replace older version.DNN Blog: 06.00.07: Highlights: Enhancement: Option to show management panel on child modules Fix: Changed SPROC and code to ensure the right people are notified of pending comments. (CP-24018) Fix: Fix to have notification actions authentication assume the right module id so these will work from the messaging center (CP-24019) Fix: Fix to issue in categories in a post that will not save when no categories and no tags selectedTEncoder: 4.0.0: --4.0.0 -Added: Video downloader -Added: Total progress will be updated more smoothly -Added: MP4Box progress will be shown -Added: A tool to create gif image from video -Added: An option to disable trimming -Added: Audio track option won't be used for mpeg sources as default -Fixed: Subtitle position wasn't used -Fixed: Duration info in the file list wasn't updated after trimming -Updated: FFMpegVeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0d: Changes between 1.0c and 1.0d (03 June 2014) : Correct issue while creating hidden operating system. Minor fixes (look at git history for more details).Microsoft Web Protection Library: AntiXss Library 4.3.0: Download from nuget or the Microsoft Download Center This issue finally addresses the over zealous behaviour of the HTML Sanitizer which should now function as expected once again. HTML encoding has been changed to safelist a few more characters for webforms compatibility. This will be the last version of AntiXSS that contains a sanitizer. Any new releases will be encoding libraries only. We recommend you explore other sanitizer options, for example AntiSamy https://www.owasp.org/index....Z SqlBulkCopy Extensions: SqlBulkCopy Extensions 1.0.0: SqlBulkCopy Extensions provide MUST-HAVE methods with outstanding performance missing from the SqlBulkCopy class like Delete, Update, Merge, Upsert. Compatible with .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2000, SQL Azure and more! Bulk MethodsBulkDelete BulkInsert BulkMerge BulkUpdate BulkUpsert Utility MethodsGetSqlConnection GetSqlTransaction You like this library? Find out how and why you should support Z Project Become a Memberhttp://zzzproject.com/resources/images/all/become-a-member.png|ht...Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Tweetinvi 0.9.3.x: Timelines- Added all the parameters available from the Timeline Endpoints in Tweetinvi. - This is available for HomeTimeline, UserTimeline, MentionsTimeline // Simple query var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(); // Create a parameter for queries with specific parameters var timelineParameter = Timeline.CreateHomeTimelineRequestParameter(); timelineParameter.ExcludeReplies = true; timelineParameter.TrimUser = true; var tweets = Timeline.GetHomeTimeline(timelineParameter); Tweetinvi 0.9.3.1...Sandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...Image View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: 1.5.6.0: V1.5.6.0 - 2014.5.30New feature: support quick-cocos2d-x project now; support text search in scripts folder now, you can use this function in Search Result Window;Credit Component: Credit Component: This is a sample release of Credit Component that has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. To try and use it, you need .NET framework 4.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or newer as a minimum requirement in this download you will get media player as a sample application that use this component credit component as a main component media player source code as source code and sample usage of credit component credit component source code as source code of credit component important...New ProjectsBack Up Your SharePoint: SPSBackUp is a PowerShell script tool to Backup your SharePoint environment. It's compatible with SharePoint 2010 & 2013.ChoMy: mrkidconsoledemo: a basic app about the knowledge in c# domainDecision Architect Server Client in C#: This project is a client for Decision Architect Server API.InnVIDEO365 Agile SharePoint-Kaltura App: InnVIDEO365 Agile SharePoint - Kaltura App for SharePoint Online is a complete video content solution for Microsoft SharePoint Online.JacOS: JacOS is an open-source operating system created with COSMOSKISS Workflow Foundation: This project was born from the idea that everyone should be able to use Workflow Foundation in best conditions. It contain sample to take WF jump start!Media Player (Technology Area): A now simple, yet somehow complex music, photo viewer I have some plans for the best tools for the player in the futureMetalurgicaInstitucional: MetalurgicaInstitucionalmoodlin8: Moodlin8 try to exploit significant parts of Moodle, the popular LMS, in a mobile or fixed environment based on the Modern Interface of Windows 8.1.NewsletterSystem: This is a test projectpesho2: Ala bala portokalaProyecto web Lab4 Gioia lucas: proyecto para lab4 utn pachecoRallyRacer: TSD Rally Compute helperVideo-JS Webpart for Sharepoint: Video-JS Webpart for SharepointYanZhiwei_CSharp_UtilHelp: ??C#???????????API: ????? Web API

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Creating your first sealed document

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g indexThe previous articles in this guide have detailed how to install, configure and secure your Oracle IRM 11g service. This article walks you through the process of now creating your first context and securing a document against it. I should mention that it would be worth reviewing the following to ensure your installation is ready for that all important first document. Ensure you have correctly configured the keystore for the IRM wrapper keys. If this is not correctly configured, creating the context below will fail. Make sure the IRM server URL correctly resolves and uses the right protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) ContentsCreate the first contextInstall the Oracle IRM Desktop Seal your first document Create the first contextIn Oracle 11g there is a built in classification and rights system called the "standard rights model" which is based on 10 years of customer use cases and innovation. It is a system which enables IRM to scale massively whilst retaining the ability to balance security and usability and also separate duties by allowing contacts in the business to own classifications. The final article in this guide goes into detail on this inbuilt classification model, but for the purposes of this current article all we need to do is create at least one context to test our system out.With a new IRM server there are a set of predefined context templates and roles which again are setup in a way which reflects the most common use we've learned from our customers. We will use these out of the box configurations as they are to create the first context against which we will seal some content.First login to your Oracle IRM Management Website located at https://irm.company.com/irm_rights/. Currently the system is only configured to use the built in LDAP for users, so use the only account we have at the moment, which by default is weblogic. Once logged in switch to the Contexts tab. Click on the New Context icon () in the menu bar on the left. In the resulting dialog select the Standard context template and enter in a name for the context. Then just hit finish, the weblogic account will automatically be made the manager. You'll now see your brand new context ready for users to be assigned. Now click on the Assign Role icon () in the menu bar and in the resulting dialog search for your only user account, weblogic, and add to the list on the right. Now select a role for this user. Because we need to create a document with this user we must select contributor, as this is the only role which allows for the ability to seal. Finally hit next and then finish. We now have a context with a user that has the rights to create a document. The next step is to configure the IRM Desktop to get these rights from the server. Install the Oracle IRM Desktop Before we can seal a document we need the client software installed. Oracle IRM has a very small, lightweight client called the Oracle IRM Desktop which can be freely downloaded in 27 languages from here. Double click on the installer and click on next... Next again... And finally on install... Very easy. You may get a warning about closing Outlook, Word or another application and most of the time no reboots are required. Once it is installed you will see the IRM Desktop icon running in your tool tray, bottom right of the desktop. Seal your first document Finally the prize is within reach, creating your first sealed document. The server is running, we've got a context ready, a user assigned a role in the context but there is the simple and obvious hoop left to jump through. To seal a document we need to have the users rights cached to the local machine. For this to take place, the IRM Desktop needs to know where the Oracle IRM server is on the network so we can synchronize these rights and then be able to seal a document. The usual way for the IRM Desktop to know about the IRM server is it learns automatically when you open an existing piece of content that someone has sent you... ack. Bit of a chicken or the egg dilemma. The solution is to manually tell the IRM Desktop the location of the IRM Server and then force a synchronization of rights. Right click on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray and select Options.... Then switch to the Servers tab in the resulting dialog. There are no servers in the list because you've never opened any content. This list is usually populated automatically but we are going to add a server manually, so click on New.... Into the dialog enter in the full URL to the IRM server. Note that this time you use the path /irm_desktop/ and not /irm_rights/. You can see an example from the image below. Click on the validate button and you'll be asked to authenticate. Enter in your weblogic username and password and also check the Remember my password check box. Click OK and the IRM Desktop will confirm a successful connection to the server. OK all the dialogs and we are ready to Synchronize this users rights to the desktop. Right click once more on the Oracle IRM Desktop icon in the system tray. Now the Synchronize menu option is available. Select this and the IRM Desktop will now talk to the IRM server, authenticate using your weblogic account and get your rights to the context we created. Because this is the first time this users has communicated with the IRM server the IRM Desktop presents a privacy policy dialog. This is a chance for the business to ask users to agree to any policy about the use of IRM before opening secured documents. In our guide we've not bothered to setup this URL so just click on the check box and hit Accept. The IRM Desktop will then talk to the server, get your rights and display a success dialog. Lets protect a documentNow we are ready to seal a piece of content. In my guide i'm going to protect a Microsoft Word document. This mean's I have to have copy of Office installed, in this guide i'm using Microsoft Office 2007. You could also seal a PDF document, you'll need to download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader. A very simple test could be to seal a GIF/JPG/PNG or piece of HTML because this is rendered using Internet Explorer. But as I say, i'm going to protect a Word document. The following example demonstrates choosing a file in Windows Explorer, there are many ways to seal a file and you can watch a few in this video.Open a copy of Windows Explorer and locate the file you wish to seal. Right click on the document and select Seal To -> Context You are now presented with the Select Context dialog. You'll now have a sealed copy of the document sat in the same location. Double click on this document and it will open, again using the credentials you've already provided. That is it, now you just need to add more users, more documents, more classifications and start exploring the different roles and experiment with different offline periods etc. You may wish to setup the server against an existing LDAP or Active Directory environment instead of using the built in WebLogic LDAP store. You can read how to use your corporate directory here. But before we finish this guide, there is one more article and arguably the most important article of all. Next I discuss the all important decision making surrounding the actually implementation of Oracle IRM inside your business. Who has rights to what? How do you map contexts to your existing business practices? It is the next article which actually ensures you deploy a successful IRM solution by looking at the business and understanding how they use your sensitive information and then configuring Oracle IRM to reflect their use.

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• "Randomly" occurring errors...

  - by ClarkeyBoy

  Hi, My website has a setup whereby when the application starts a module called SiteContent is "created". This runs a clearup function which basically deletes any irrelevant data from the database, in case any has been left in there from previously run functions. The module has instances of Manager classes - namely RangeManager, CollectionManager, DesignManager. There are others but I will just use these as an example. Each Manager class contains an array of items - items may be of type Range, Collection or Design, whichever one is relevant. Data for each range is then read into an instance of Range, Collection or Design. I know this is basically duplicating data - not very efficient but its my final year project at the moment so I can always change it to use Linq or something similar later, when I am not pressured by the one month deadline. I have a form which, on clicking the Save button, saves data by calling SiteContent.RangeManager.Create(vars) or SiteContent.RangeManager.Update(Range As Range, vars) (or the equivalent for other manager classes, whichever one happens to be relevant). These functions call a stored procedure to insert or update in the relevant table. Classes Range, Collection and Design all have attributes such as Name, Description, Display and several others. When the Create or Update function is called, the Manager loops through all the other items to check if an item with the same name already exists. The Update function ensures that it does not compare the item being updated to itself. A custom exception (ItemAlreadyExistsException) is thrown if another item with the same name is found. For some weird reason, if I go into a Range, Collection or Design in edit mode, change something and try to update it, it occasionally doesnt update the item. When I say occasionally I mean every 3 - 4 page loads, sometimes more. I see absolutely no pattern in when or why it occurs. I have a try-catch statement which catches ItemAlreadyExistsException, and outputs "An item with this name already exists" when caught. Occasionally it will output this; other times it will not. Does anyone have any idea why this could happen? Maybe a mistake which someone has made and solved before? I used to have regular expressions in place that the names were compared to - I believe it was [a-zA-Z]{1, 100} (between 1 and 100 lower- or upper-case characters). For some reason the customer who I am developing the site for used to get errors saying its not in the correct format. Yet he could try the same text 5 minutes later and it would work fine. I am thinking this could well be the same problem, since both problems occur at random. Many thanks in advance. Regards, Richard Clarke Edit: After much time spent narrowing down the code, I have decided to wait till my brother, who has been a programmer for at least 8 years more than I have, to come down over Easter and get him to have a look at it. If he cant solve it then I will zip the files up and put them somewhere for people to access and have a go at. I narrowed it down literally to the minimum number of files possible, and it still occurs. It seems to be about every 10th time. Having said that, I force the manager classes to refresh every 10 page loads or 5 minutes (whichever one is sooner). I may look into this - this could be causing a problem. Basically each Manager contains an array of an object. This array is populated using data from the database. The Update function takes an instance of the item and the new values to be set for the object. If it happens to be a page load where the array is reset (ie the data is loaded freshly from the database) then the object instance with the same ID wont be the same instance as the one being passed in. This explains the fact that it throws an ItemAlreadyExistsException now and then. It all makes sense now the more I think about it. If I were to pass in the ID of the object to be altered, rather than the object itself, then it should work perfectly. I will answer the question if I solve it..

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• Complex sound handling (I.E. pitch change while looping)

  - by Matthew

  Hi everyone I've been meaning to learn Java for a while now (I usually keep myself in languages like C and Lua) but buying an android phone seems like an excellent time to start. now after going through the lovely set of tutorials and a while spent buried in source code I'm beginning to get the feel for it so what's my next step? well to dive in with a fully featured application with graphics, sound, sensor use, touch response and a full menu. hmm now there's a slight conundrum since i can continue to use cryptic references to my project or risk telling you what the application is but at the same time its going to make me look like a raving sci-fi nerd so bare with me for the brief... A semi-working sonic screwdriver (oh yes!) my grand idea was to make an animated screwdriver where sliding the controls up and down modulate the frequency and that frequency dictates the sensor data it returns. now I have a semi-working sound system but its pretty poor for what its designed to represent and I just wouldn't be happy producing a sub-par end product whether its my first or not. the problem : sound must begin looping when the user presses down on the control the sound must stop when the user releases the control when moving the control up or down the sound effect must change pitch accordingly if the user doesn't remove there finger before backing out of the application it must plate the casing of there device with gold (Easter egg ;P) now I'm aware of how monolithic the first 3 look and that's why I would really appreciate any help I can get. sorry for how bad this code looks but my general plan is to create the functional components then refine the code later, no good painting the walls if the roofs not finished. here's my user input, he set slide stuff is used in the graphics for the control @Override public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { //motion event for the screwdriver view if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) { //make sure the users at least trying to touch the slider if (event.getY() > SonicSlideYTop && event.getY() < SonicSlideYBottom) { //power setup, im using 1.5 to help out the rate on soundpool since it likes 0.5 to 1.5 SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); //just goes into a method which sets a private variable in my sound pool class thing mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); //this handles the slides graphics setSlideY ( (int) event.getY() ); @Override public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { //motion event for the screwdriver view if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) { //make sure the users at least trying to touch the slider if (event.getY() > SonicSlideYTop && event.getY() < SonicSlideYBottom) { //power setup, im using 1.5 to help out the rate on soundpool since it likes 0.5 to 1.5 SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); //just goes into a method which sets a private variable in my sound pool class thing mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); //this handles the slides graphics setSlideY ( (int) event.getY() ); //this is from my latest attempt at loop pitch change, look for this in my soundPool class mSonicAudio.startLoopedSound(); } } if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE) { if (event.getY() > SonicSlideYTop && event.getY() < SonicSlideYBottom) { SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); setSlideY ( (int) event.getY() ); } } if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP) { mSonicAudio.stopLoopedSound(); SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); } return true; } and here's where those methods end up in my sound pool class its horribly messy but that's because I've been trying a ton of variants to get this to work, you will also notice that I begin to hard code the index, again I was trying to get the methods to work before making them work well. package com.mattster.sonicscrewdriver; import java.util.HashMap; import android.content.Context; import android.media.AudioManager; import android.media.SoundPool; public class SoundManager { private float mPowerLvl = 1f; private SoundPool mSoundPool; private HashMap mSoundPoolMap; private AudioManager mAudioManager; private Context mContext; private int streamVolume; private int LoopState; private long mLastTime; public SoundManager() { } public void initSounds(Context theContext) { mContext = theContext; mSoundPool = new SoundPool(2, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 0); mSoundPoolMap = new HashMap<Integer, Integer>(); mAudioManager = (AudioManager)mContext.getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE); streamVolume = mAudioManager.getStreamVolume(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC); } public void addSound(int index,int SoundID) { mSoundPoolMap.put(1, mSoundPool.load(mContext, SoundID, 1)); } public void playUpdate(int index) { if( LoopState == 1) { long now = System.currentTimeMillis(); if (now > mLastTime) { mSoundPool.play(mSoundPoolMap.get(1), streamVolume, streamVolume, 1, 0, mPowerLvl); mLastTime = System.currentTimeMillis() + 250; } } } public void stopLoopedSound() { LoopState = 0; mSoundPool.setVolume(mSoundPoolMap.get(1), 0, 0); mSoundPool.stop(mSoundPoolMap.get(1)); } public void startLoopedSound() { LoopState = 1; } public void setPower(int index, float mPower) { mPowerLvl = mPower; mSoundPool.setRate(mSoundPoolMap.get(1), mPowerLvl); } } ah ha! I almost forgot, that looks pretty ineffective but I omitted my thread which actuality updates it, nothing fancy it just calls : mSonicAudio.playUpdate(1); thanks in advance, Matthew

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• Using VLOOKUP in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  VLOOKUP is one of Excel’s most useful functions, and it’s also one of the least understood.  In this article, we demystify VLOOKUP by way of a real-life example.  We’ll create a usable Invoice Template for a fictitious company. So what is VLOOKUP?  Well, of course it’s an Excel function.  This article will assume that the reader already has a passing understanding of Excel functions, and can use basic functions such as SUM, AVERAGE, and TODAY.  In its most common usage, VLOOKUP is a database function, meaning that it works with database tables – or more simply, lists of things in an Excel worksheet.  What sort of things?   Well, any sort of thing.  You may have a worksheet that contains a list of employees, or products, or customers, or CDs in your CD collection, or stars in the night sky.  It doesn’t really matter. Here’s an example of a list, or database.  In this case it’s a list of products that our fictitious company sells: Usually lists like this have some sort of unique identifier for each item in the list.  In this case, the unique identifier is in the “Item Code” column.  Note:  For the VLOOKUP function to work with a database/list, that list must have a column containing the unique identifier (or “key”, or “ID”), and that column must be the first column in the table.  Our sample database above satisfies this criterion. The hardest part of using VLOOKUP is understanding exactly what it’s for.  So let’s see if we can get that clear first: VLOOKUP retrieves information from a database/list based on a supplied instance of the unique identifier. Put another way, if you put the VLOOKUP function into a cell and pass it one of the unique identifiers from your database, it will return you one of the pieces of information associated with that unique identifier.  In the example above, you would pass VLOOKUP an item code, and it would return to you either the corresponding item’s description, its price, or its availability (its “In stock” quantity).  Which of these pieces of information will it pass you back?  Well, you get to decide this when you’re creating the formula. If all you need is one piece of information from the database, it would be a lot of trouble to go to to construct a formula with a VLOOKUP function in it.  Typically you would use this sort of functionality in a reusable spreadsheet, such as a template.  Each time someone enters a valid item code, the system would retrieve all the necessary information about the corresponding item. Let’s create an example of this:  An Invoice Template that we can reuse over and over in our fictitious company. First we start Excel… …and we create ourselves a blank invoice: This is how it’s going to work:  The person using the invoice template will fill in a series of item codes in column “A”, and the system will retrieve each item’s description and price, which will be used to calculate the line total for each item (assuming we enter a valid quantity). For the purposes of keeping this example simple, we will locate the product database on a separate sheet in the same workbook: In reality, it’s more likely that the product database would be located in a separate workbook.  It makes little difference to the VLOOKUP function, which doesn’t really care if the database is located on the same sheet, a different sheet, or a completely different workbook. In order to test the VLOOKUP formula we’re about to write, we first enter a valid item code into cell A11: Next, we move the active cell to the cell in which we want information retrieved from the database by VLOOKUP to be stored.  Interestingly, this is the step that most people get wrong.  To explain further:  We are about to create a VLOOKUP formula that will retrieve the description that corresponds to the item code in cell A11.  Where do we want this description put when we get it?  In cell B11, of course.  So that’s where we write the VLOOKUP formula – in cell B11. Select cell B11: We need to locate the list of all available functions that Excel has to offer, so that we can choose VLOOKUP and get some assistance in completing the formula.  This is found by first clicking the Formulas tab, and then clicking Insert Function:   A box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel.  To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function).  The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel.  VLOOKUP is the second one in the list.  Select it an click OK… The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function.  You can think of this box as the function is asking us the following questions: What unique identifier are you looking up in the database? Where is the database? Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you? The first three arguments are shown in bold, indicating that they are mandatory arguments (the VLOOKUP function is incomplete without them and will not return a valid value).  The fourth argument is not bold, meaning that it’s optional:   We will complete the arguments in order, top to bottom. The first argument we need to complete is the Lookup_value argument.  The function needs us to tell it where to find the unique identifier (the item code in this case) that it should be retuning the description of.  We must select the item code we entered earlier (in A11). Click on the selector icon to the right of the first argument: Then click once on the cell containing the item code (A11), and press Enter: The value of “A11” is inserted into the first argument. Now we need to enter a value for the Table_array argument.  In other words, we need to tell VLOOKUP where to find the database/list.  Click on the selector icon next to the second argument: Now locate the database/list and select the entire list – not including the header line.  The database is located on a separate worksheet, so we first click on that worksheet tab: Next we select the entire database, not including the header line: …and press Enter.  The range of cells that represents the database (in this case “’Product Database’!A2:D7”) is entered automatically for us into the second argument. Now we need to enter the third argument, Col_index_num.  We use this argument to specify to VLOOKUP which piece of information from the database, associate with our item code in A11, we wish to have returned to us.  In this particular example, we wish to have the item’s description returned to us.  If you look on the database worksheet, you’ll notice that the “Description” column is the second column in the database.  This means that we must enter a value of “2” into the Col_index_num box: It is important to note that that we are not entering a “2” here because the “Description” column is in the B column on that worksheet.  If the database happened to start in column K of the worksheet, we would still enter a “2” in this field. Finally, we need to decide whether to enter a value into the final VLOOKUP argument, Range_lookup.  This argument requires either a true or false value, or it should be left blank.  When using VLOOKUP with databases (as is true 90% of the time), then the way to decide what to put in this argument can be thought of as follows: If the first column of the database (the column that contains the unique identifiers) is sorted alphabetically/numerically in ascending order, then it’s possible to enter a value of true into this argument, or leave it blank. If the first column of the database is not sorted, or it’s sorted in descending order, then you must enter a value of false into this argument As the first column of our database is not sorted, we enter false into this argument: That’s it!  We’ve entered all the information required for VLOOKUP to return the value we need.  Click the OK button and notice that the description corresponding to item code “R99245” has been correctly entered into cell B11: The formula that was created for us looks like this: If we enter a different item code into cell A11, we will begin to see the power of the VLOOKUP function:  The description cell changes to match the new item code: We can perform a similar set of steps to get the item’s price returned into cell E11.  Note that the new formula must be created in cell E11.  The result will look like this: …and the formula will look like this: Note that the only difference between the two formulae is the third argument (Col_index_num) has changed from a “2” to a “3” (because we want data retrieved from the 3rd column in the database). If we decided to buy 2 of these items, we would enter a “2” into cell D11.  We would then enter a simple formula into cell F11 to get the line total: =D11*E11 …which looks like this… Completing the Invoice Template We’ve learned a lot about VLOOKUP so far.  In fact, we’ve learned all we’re going to learn in this article.  It’s important to note that VLOOKUP can be used in other circumstances besides databases.  This is less common, and may be covered in future How-To Geek articles. Our invoice template is not yet complete.  In order to complete it, we would do the following: We would remove the sample item code from cell A11 and the “2” from cell D11.  This will cause our newly created VLOOKUP formulae to display error messages: We can remedy this by judicious use of Excel’s IF() and ISBLANK() functions.  We change our formula from this…       =VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) We would copy the formulas in cells B11, E11 and F11 down to the remainder of the item rows of the invoice.  Note that if we do this, the resulting formulas will no longer correctly refer to the database table.  We could fix this by changing the cell references for the database to absolute cell references.  Alternatively – and even better – we could create a range name for the entire product database (such as “Products”), and use this range name instead of the cell references.  The formula would change from this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,Products,2,FALSE)) …and then copy the formulas down to the rest of the invoice item rows. We would probably “lock” the cells that contain our formulae (or rather unlock the other cells), and then protect the worksheet, in order to ensure that our carefully constructed formulae are not accidentally overwritten when someone comes to fill in the invoice. We would save the file as a template, so that it could be reused by everyone in our company If we were feeling really clever, we would create a database of all our customers in another worksheet, and then use the customer ID entered in cell F5 to automatically fill in the customer’s name and address in cells B6, B7 and B8. If you would like to practice with VLOOKUP, or simply see our resulting Invoice Template, it can be downloaded from here. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatImport Microsoft Access Data Into ExcelChange the Default Font in Excel 2007 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 Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data

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• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 10, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 10, 2011Popular ReleasesTweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Beta ChangesAdded user streams support Serialization is not attempted for Twitter 5xx errors Fixes based on feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.2.0: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comSharePoint Field Groups To Users: GroupsToUsers Release 1.0: SharePoint "Groups to Users" is a custom field that displays two separate drop-down lists. The first drop-down populates with all SharePoint Groups from the current web. By selecting a particular group the second drop-down list gets populated with all Users within the selected SharePoint group.DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 (RC2): More fixes and improvements. Note for multiplayer - you may need to set r_waterwarp to 0 or 2 before connecting to a server, otherwise you will get a "Mod_PointInLeaf: bad model" error and not be able to connect. You can set it back to 1 after you connect, of course. This only came to light after releasing, and will be fixed in the next one.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-03-09: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008Office Web.UI: Version 2.4: After having lost all modifications done for 2.3. I finally did it again... Have a look at http://www.officewebui.com/change-log Also, the documentation continues to grow... http://www.officewebui.com/category/kb ThanksmyCollections: Version 1.3: New in version 1.3 : Added Editor management for Books Added Amazon API for Books Us, Fr, De Added Amazon Us, Fr, De for Movies Added The MovieDB for Fr and De Added Author for Books Added Editor and Platform for Games Added Amazon Us, De for Games Added Studio for XXX Added Background for XXX Bug fixing with Softonic API Bug fixing with IMDB UI improvement Removed GraceNote Added Amazon Us,Fr, De for Series Added TVDB Fr and De for Series Added Tracks for Musi...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.1: Version 1.1 (8 Mar 2011)new Dialog class for redirecting users to Facebook dialogs new Async publishing methods new Check for Extended Permissions option fixed bug: inappropiate condition of redirecting to login in Api class fixed bug: IframeRedirect method not workingpatterns & practices : Composite Services: Composite Services Guidance - CTP2: This is the second CTP of the p&p Composite Service Guidance.Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.0 Beta 1: Beta 1You can't install IronPython Tools for Visual Studio side-by-side with Python Tools for Visual Studio. A race condition sometimes causes local MPI debugging to miss breakpoints. When MPI jobs on a cluster fail they don’t get cleaned up correctly, which can cause debugging to stall because the associated MPI job is stuck in the queue. The "Threads" view has a race condition which can cause it not to display properly at times. VS2010 shortcuts that are pinned to the taskbar are so...DotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 2: What is new in DotNetAge 2.0 ? Completely update DJME to DJME2, enhance user experience ,more beautiful and more interactively visit DJME project home to lean more about DJME http://www.dotnetage.com/sites/home/djme.html A new widget engine has came! Faster and easiler. Runtime performance enhanced. SEO enhanced. UI Designer enhanced. A new web resources explorer. Page manager enhanced. BlogML supports added that allows you import/export your blog data to/from dotnetage publishi...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 Beta: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB and MongoDB. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder t...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added fullscreen for the popup and popupformIronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 2: On behalf of the IronPython team, I am pleased to announce IronPython 2.7 Release Candidate 2. The releases contains a few minor bug fixes, including a working webbrowser module. Please see the release notes for 61395 for what was fixed in previous releases.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.20: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.3.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. This release uses the Sandcastle Guided Installation package used by Sandcastle Styles. Download and extract to a folder and then run SandcastleI...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...New ProjectsAll2Iso: Convert any disk image format to ISO. Actually it can only convert from BIN. Any help is appreciated.Asset Management by Joko for GENCPROS: This is my initial test project using codeplex storageAxvius: Axvius' core C# API library. Includes, Now, a class for overriding the system clock; especially useful for unit tests.Collision Avoidance Simulator: The vertex buffer, in conjunction with the spatial conguration of human models, a particle system and a reduced set of rules are processed in order to obtain a dynamic knowledge base for collision avoidance calculations. Developed in C++.Configuring role link in Biztalk 2009: Configuring role link in Biztalk 2009CrazySnake: Crazy Snake é o famoso jogo da cobra, esse em sua versão tanto para windows, quanto para windows phone 7dIRca WP7 IRC Client: IRC client with possible SL/WPF ports. Utilizes native tcp sockets until the communication layer from MS solidifies. Basically put, this project would not exist without the work of some wp7 hackers. Pip pip old boys.DoanVienProject: Ðây là porject qu?n lý doàn viênDynamics AX Build Scripts: Sharing build scripts for Dynamics AX integration with source control, focused on Team Foundation Server (TFS)EPiServer CMS ElencySolutions.MultipleProperty: The MultipleProperty classes are for use in EPiServer CMS 6 and provide an easy way for developers to build complex custom properties that comprise of other EPiServer custom properties. Feriados Móveis Brasil: This project aim to calculate the holidays in Brazil who is based on catholic dates. The main holiday is the Easter Sunday and the other holidays are calculated based on that date. Cálculo de feriados móveis para o Brasil baseados nas datas festivas católicas.flyskynet: myselft projectGriffTom: GriffTomImage Resizer (????????): ??????????????????，????????????????。?????jpg??。 ??????，????????????。iPray: Islamic Prayer Software.Japanese Learners & Enthusiasts Kanji Project: Help create games, puzzles, and exercises to assist learners of Japanese to master Kanji comprehension. Games/etc. will be written in C#, jQuery and/or Silverlight for ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor. Initial goal is for a user of the site to master grade level 1 Kanji (first 80 Kanji).MailChimp Amazon Simple Email Service .NET Wrapper: A .NET 4 wrapper for MailChimp's Amazon Simple Email Service. It's developed in C# using Hammock.NGuice: .NET????Guice???????????。???.NET?????????，?Guice?.NET??????????。???????：http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/Rubrica Persone: Libreria che contiene gli oggetti e le form per la gestione di una rubrica di persone, facilmente integrabile in altre applicazioni.SCCM Client Center Integration Pack for Opalis: "SCCM Client Center Integration Pack for Opalis" is an System Center Opalis Integration Pack to manage and orchestrate System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 Agents from Opalis workflows.Sugar-free programming: I like to think about breadth or depth developer, or Mort, Elvis, or Einstein developer stereotypes, as roles we could play accordingly to the task at hand…see more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/marcod/archive/2011/03/01/sugarfreecs1.aspxTest Project 1: This is test project siteTestZoner: TestZoneTextBookReader: ???????????????????????，??????????，??????！ ??.net 2.0uSiteBuilder: uSiteBuilder is a framework made for .NET developers to simplify, speedup and take Umbraco development to next level. Aim of this framework is to reduce developer interaction with Umbraco back-end (browser based development), to create Umbraco websites in a more .NET way...VinculacionMicrosoft: Vinculacion Microsoft is a project for distributing Dreamsparks and Faculty Connection codes to students and professors. It is developed in ASP .Net and designed for Universities in Mexico interested in the different benefits that Microsoft has for them. Vio: Vio is an application for Sharetronix Based websites. Allowing users to connect to their community via their Windows Desktop.whatsnew.exe a command line utility to find new files: whatsnew.exe is a command line utility that lists the files created (new files) in a given number of days. whatsnew.exe 's syntax is very simple: whatsnew path numberofdays Also whatsnew supports other options like HTML or XML output, hyperlinked outputs and more.

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• installed openstack using devstack install shell script but getting 500 error when i try opening dashboard

  - by Arvind

  I followed the instructions at http://devstack.org/guides/single-machine.html to install OpenStack. I first installed Ubuntu on my Windows 7 PC using the officially supported Windows installer for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. And after that I followed the instructions at above page to install OpenStack. As per instructions, I should be able to access the dashboard aka Horizon, at http://192.168.1.4/ (thats the IP of the PC on which I installed Ubuntu-OpenStack). However I am getting a 500 error web page when I open that. How do I resolve this error? I want to set up a dev environment for OpenStack. For your ref, the whole error message is given now-- FilterError at / /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory Request Method: GET Request URL: http://192.168.1.4/ Django Version: 1.4.2 Exception Type: FilterError Exception Value: /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory Exception Location: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/filters/base.py in input, line 133 Python Executable: /usr/bin/python Python Version: 2.7.3 Python Path: ['/opt/stack/horizon/openstack_dashboard/wsgi/../..', '/opt/stack/python-keystoneclient', '/opt/stack/python-novaclient', '/opt/stack/python-openstackclient', '/opt/stack/keystone', '/opt/stack/glance', '/opt/stack/python-glanceclient/setuptools_git-0.4.2-py2.7.egg', '/opt/stack/python-glanceclient', '/opt/stack/nova', '/opt/stack/horizon', '/opt/stack/cinder', '/opt/stack/python-cinderclient', '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.7', '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old', '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gst-0.10', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0', '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntu-sso-client', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-client', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-control-panel', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-couch', '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ubuntuone-storage-protocol', '/opt/stack/horizon/openstack_dashboard'] Server time: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 08:43:29 +0000 Error during template rendering In template /opt/stack/horizon/openstack_dashboard/templates/_stylesheets.html, error at line 3 /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory 1 {% load compress %} 2 3 {% compress css %} 4 <link href='{{ STATIC_URL }}dashboard/less/horizon.less' type='text/less' media='screen' rel='stylesheet' /> 5 {% endcompress %} 6 7 <link rel="shortcut icon" href="{{ STATIC_URL }}dashboard/img/favicon.ico"/> 8 Also, the traceback is now given below-- Environment: Request Method: GET Request URL: http://192.168.1.4/ Django Version: 1.4.2 Python Version: 2.7.3 Installed Applications: ('openstack_dashboard', 'django.contrib.contenttypes', 'django.contrib.auth', 'django.contrib.sessions', 'django.contrib.messages', 'django.contrib.staticfiles', 'django.contrib.humanize', 'compressor', 'horizon', 'openstack_dashboard.dashboards.project', 'openstack_dashboard.dashboards.admin', 'openstack_dashboard.dashboards.settings', 'openstack_auth') Installed Middleware: ('django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware', 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware', 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware', 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware', 'horizon.middleware.HorizonMiddleware', 'django.middleware.doc.XViewMiddleware', 'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware') Template error: In template /opt/stack/horizon/openstack_dashboard/templates/_stylesheets.html, error at line 3 /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory 1 : {% load compress %} 2 : 3 : {% compress css %} 4 : <link href='{{ STATIC_URL }}dashboard/less/horizon.less' type='text/less' media='screen' rel='stylesheet' /> 5 : {% endcompress %} 6 : 7 : <link rel="shortcut icon" href="{{ STATIC_URL }}dashboard/img/favicon.ico"/> 8 : Traceback: File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py" in get_response 111. response = callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/views/decorators/vary.py" in inner_func 36. response = func(*args, **kwargs) File "/opt/stack/horizon/openstack_dashboard/wsgi/../../openstack_dashboard/views.py" in splash 38. return shortcuts.render(request, 'splash.html', {'form': form}) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/shortcuts/__init__.py" in render 44. return HttpResponse(loader.render_to_string(*args, **kwargs), File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/loader.py" in render_to_string 176. return t.render(context_instance) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/base.py" in render 140. return self._render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/base.py" in _render 134. return self.nodelist.render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/base.py" in render 823. bit = self.render_node(node, context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/debug.py" in render_node 74. return node.render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/loader_tags.py" in render 155. return self.render_template(self.template, context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/loader_tags.py" in render_template 137. output = template.render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/base.py" in render 140. return self._render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/base.py" in _render 134. return self.nodelist.render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/base.py" in render 823. bit = self.render_node(node, context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django/template/debug.py" in render_node 74. return node.render(context) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/templatetags/compress.py" in render 147. return self.render_compressed(context, self.kind, self.mode, forced=forced) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/templatetags/compress.py" in render_compressed 107. rendered_output = self.render_output(compressor, mode, forced=forced) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/templatetags/compress.py" in render_output 119. return compressor.output(mode, forced=forced) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/css.py" in output 51. ret.append(subnode.output(*args, **kwargs)) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/css.py" in output 53. return super(CssCompressor, self).output(*args, **kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/base.py" in output 230. content = self.filter_input(forced) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/base.py" in filter_input 192. for hunk in self.hunks(forced): File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/base.py" in hunks 167. precompiled, value = self.precompile(value, **options) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/base.py" in precompile 210. command=command, filename=filename).input(**kwargs) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/compressor/filters/base.py" in input 133. raise FilterError(err) Exception Type: FilterError at / Exception Value: /usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

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• Ingredient Substitutes while Baking

  - by Rekha

  In our normal cooking, we substitute the vegetables for the gravies we prepare. When we start baking, we look for a good recipe. At least one or two ingredient will be missing. We do not know where to substitute what to bring same output. So we finally drop the plan of baking. Again after a month, we get the interest in baking. Again one or two lack of ingredient and that’s it. We keep on doing this for months. When I was going through the cooking blogs, I came across a site with the Ingredient Substitutes for Baking: (*) is to indicate that this substitution is ideal from personal experience. Flour Substitutes ( For 1 cup of Flour) All Purpose Flour 1/2 cup white cake flour plus 1/2 cup whole wheat flour 1 cup self-rising flour (omit using salt and baking powder if the recipe calls for it since self raising flour has it already) 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons cake flour 1/2 cup (75 grams) whole wheat flour 7/8 cup (130 grams) rice flour (starch) (do not replace all of the flour with the rice flour) 7/8 cup whole wheat Bread Flour 1 cup all purpose flour 1 cup all purpose flour plus 1 teaspoon wheat gluten (*) Cake Flour Place 2 tbsp cornstarch in 1 cup and fill the rest up with All Purpose flour (*) 1 cup all purpose flour minus 2 tablespoons Pastry flour Place 2 tbsp cornstarch in 1 cup and fill the rest up with All Purpose flour Equal parts of All purpose flour plus cake flour (*) Self-rising Flour 1½ teaspoons of baking powder plus ½ teaspoon of salt plus 1 cup of all-purpose flour. Cornstarch (1 tbsp) 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon arrowroot 4 teaspoons quick-cooking tapioca 1 tablespoon potato starch or rice starch or flour Tapioca (1 tbsp) 1 – 1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour Cornmeal (stone ground) polenta OR corn flour (gives baked goods a lighter texture) if using cornmeal for breading,crush corn chips in a blender until they have the consistency of cornmeal. maize meal Corn grits Sweeteners ( for Every 1 cup ) * * (HV) denotes Healthy Version for low fat or fat free substitution in Baking Light Brown Sugar 2 tablespoons molasses plus 1 cup of white sugar Dark Brown Sugar 3 tablespoons molasses plus 1 cup of white sugar Confectioner’s/Powdered Sugar Process 1 cup sugar plus 1 tablespoon cornstarch Corn Syrup 1 cup sugar plus 1/4 cup water 1 cup Golden Syrup 1 cup honey (may be little sweeter) 1 cup molasses Golden Syrup Combine two parts light corn syrup plus one part molasses 1/2 cup honey plus 1/2 cup corn syrup 1 cup maple syrup 1 cup corn syrup Honey 1- 1/4 cups sugar plus 1/4 cup water 3/4 cup maple syrup plus 1/2 cup granulated sugar 3/4 cup corn syrup plus 1/2 cup granulated sugar 3/4 cup light molasses plus 1/2 cup granulated white sugar 1 1/4 cups granulated white or brown sugar plus 1/4 cup additional liquid in recipe plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar Maple Syrup 1 cup honey,thinned with water or fruit juice like apple 3/4 cup corn syrup plus 1/4 cup butter 1 cup Brown Rice Syrup 1 cup Brown sugar (in case of cereals) 1 cup light molasses (on pancakes, cereals etc) 1 cup granulated sugar for every 3/4 cup of maple syrup and increase liquid in the recipe by 3 tbsp for every cup of sugar.If baking soda is used, decrease the amount by 1/4 teaspoon per cup of sugar substituted, since sugar is less acidic than maple syrup Molasses 1 cup honey 1 cup dark corn syrup 1 cup maple syrup 3/4 cup brown sugar warmed and dissolved in 1/4 cup of liquid ( use this if taste of molasses is important in the baked good) Cocoa Powder (Natural, Unsweetened) 3 tablespoons (20 grams) Dutch-processed cocoa plus 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar, lemon juice or white vinegar 1 ounce (30 grams) unsweetened chocolate (reduce fat in recipe by 1 tablespoon) 3 tablespoons (20 grams) carob powder Semisweet baking chocolate (1 oz) 1 oz unsweetened baking chocolate plus 1 Tbsp sugar Unsweetened baking chocolate (1 oz ) 3 Tbsp baking cocoa plus 1 Tbsp vegetable oil or melted shortening or margarine Semisweet chocolate chips (1 cup) 6 oz semisweet baking chocolate, chopped (Alternatively) For 1 cup of Semi sweet chocolate chips you can use : 6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, 7 tablespoons sugar ,1/4 cup fat (butter or oil) Leaveners and Diary * * (HV) denotes Healthy Version for low fat or fat free substitution in Baking Compressed Yeast (1 cake) 1 envelope or 2 teaspoons active dry yeast 1 packet (1/4 ounce) Active Dry yeast 1 cake fresh compressed yeast 1 tablespoon fast-rising active yeast Baking Powder (1 tsp) 1/3 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/2 cup buttermilk or plain yogurt 1/4 teaspoon baking soda plus 1/3 cup molasses. When using the substitutions that include liquid, reduce other liquid in recipe accordingly Baking Soda(1 tsp) 3 tsp Baking Powder ( and reduce the acidic ingredients in the recipe. Ex Instead of buttermilk add milk) 1 tsp potassium bicarbonate Ideal substitution – 2 tsp Baking powder and omit salt in recipe Cream of tartar (1 tsp) 1 teaspoon white vinegar 1 tsp lemon juice Notes from What’s Cooking America – If cream of tartar is used along with baking soda in a cake or cookie recipe, omit both and use baking powder instead. If it calls for baking soda and cream of tarter, just use baking powder.Normally, when cream of tartar is used in a cookie, it is used together with baking soda. The two of them combined work like double-acting baking powder. When substituting for cream of tartar, you must also substitute for the baking soda. If your recipe calls for baking soda and cream of tarter, just use baking powder. One teaspoon baking powder is equivalent to 1/4 teaspoon baking soda plus 5/8 teaspoon cream of tartar. If there is additional baking soda that does not fit into the equation, simply add it to the batter. Buttermilk (1 cup) 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar (white or cider) plus enough milk to make 1 cup (let stand 5-10 minutes) 1 cup plain or low fat yogurt 1 cup sour cream 1 cup water plus 1/4 cup buttermilk powder 1 cup milk plus 1 1/2 – 1 3/4 teaspoons cream of tartar Plain Yogurt (1 cup) 1 cup sour cream 1 cup buttermilk 1 cup crème fraiche 1 cup heavy whipping cream (35% butterfat) plus 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice Whole Milk (1 cup) 1 cup fat free milk plus 1 tbsp unsaturated Oil like canola (HV) 1 cup low fat milk (HV) Heavy Cream (1 cup) 3/4 cup milk plus 1/3 cup melted butter.(whipping wont work) Sour Cream (1 cup) (pls refer also Substitutes for Fats in Baking below) 7/8 cup buttermilk or sour milk plus 3 tablespoons butter. 1 cup thickened yogurt plus 1 teaspoon baking soda. 3/4 cup sour milk plus 1/3 cup butter. 3/4 cup buttermilk plus 1/3 cup butter. Cooked sauces: 1 cup yogurt plus 1 tablespoon flour plus 2 teaspoons water. Cooked sauces: 1 cup evaporated milk plus 1 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice. Let stand 5 minutes to thicken. Dips: 1 cup yogurt (drain through a cheesecloth-lined sieve for 30 minutes in the refrigerator for a thicker texture). Dips: 1 cup cottage cheese plus 1/4 cup yogurt or buttermilk, briefly whirled in a blender. Dips: 6 ounces cream cheese plus 3 tablespoons milk,briefly whirled in a blender. Lower fat: 1 cup low-fat cottage cheese plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice plus 2 tablespoons skim milk, whipped until smooth in a blender. Lower fat: 1 can chilled evaporated milk whipped with 1 teaspoon lemon juice. 1 cup plain yogurt plus 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 cup plain nonfat yogurt Substitutes for Fats in Baking * * (HV) denoted Healthy Version for low fat or fat free substitution in Baking Butter (1 cup) 1 cup trans-free vegetable shortening 3/4 cups of vegetable oil (example. Canola oil) Fruit purees (example- applesauce, pureed prunes, baby-food fruits). Add it along with some vegetable oil and reduce any other sweeteners needed in the recipe since fruit purees are already sweet. 1 cup polyunsaturated margarine (HV) 3/4 cup polyunsaturated oil like safflower oil (HV) 1 cup mild olive oil (not extra virgin)(HV) Note: Butter creates the flakiness and the richness which an oil/purees cant provide. If you don’t want to compromise that much to taste, replace half the butter with the substitutions. Shortening(1 cup) 1 cup polyunsaturated margarine like Earth Balance or Smart Balance(HV) 1 cup + 2tbsp Butter ( better tasting than shortening but more expensive and has cholesterol and a higher level of saturated fat; makes cookies less crunchy, bread crusts more crispy) 1 cup + 2 tbsp Margarine (better tasting than shortening but more expensive; makes cookies less crunchy, bread crusts tougher) 1 Cup – 2tbsp Lard (Has cholesterol and a higher level of saturated fat) Oil equal amount of apple sauce stiffly beaten egg whites into batter equal parts mashed banana equal parts yogurt prune puree grated raw zucchini or seeds removed if cooked. Works well in quick breads/muffins/coffee cakes and does not alter taste pumpkin puree (if the recipe can handle the taste change) Low fat cottage cheese (use only half of the required fat in the recipe). Can give rubbery texture to the end result Silken Tofu – (use only half of the required fat in the recipe). Can give rubbery texture to the end result Equal parts of fruit juice Note: Fruit purees can alter the taste of the final product is used in large quantities. Cream Cheese (1 cup) 4 tbsps. margarine plus 1 cup low-fat cottage cheese – blended. Add few teaspoons of fat-free milk if needed (HV) Heavy Cream (1 cup) 1 cup evaporated skim milk (or full fat milk) 1/2 cup low fat Yogurt plus 1/2 low fat Cottage Cheese (HV) 1/2 cup Yogurt plus 1/2 Cottage Cheese Sour Cream (1 cup) 1 cup plain yogurt (HV) 3/4 cup buttermilk or plain yogurt plus 1/3 cup melted butter 1 cup crème fraiche 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar plus enough whole milk to fill 1 cup (let stand 5-10 minutes) 1/2 cup low-fat cottage cheese plus 1/2 cup low-fat or nonfat yogurt (HV) 1 cup fat-free sour cream (HV) Note: How to Make Maple Syrup Substitute at home For 1 Cup Maple Syrup 1/2 cup granulated sugar 1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed 1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon butter 1 teaspoon maple extract or vanilla extract Method In a heavy saucepan, place the granulated sugar and keep stirring until it melts and turns slightly brown. Alternatively in another pan, place brown sugar and water and bring to a boil without stirring. Now mix both the sugars and simmer in low heat until they come together as one thick syrup. Remove from heat, add butter and the extract. Use this in place of maple syrup. Store it in a fridge in an air tight container. Even though this was posted in their site long back, I found it helpful. So posting it for you. via chefinyou . cc image credit: flickr/zetrules

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 26, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 26, 2013Popular ReleasesNaked Objects: Naked Objects Release 5.5.0: This release includes a number of significant improvements to the usability of the UI, some of which involve new programming conventions or attributes: Action dialogs now appear as pop-up modal dialogs instead of as a new page; query-only actions have an Apply as well as an OK button. See https://nakedobjects.codeplex.com/workitem/175 When a reference object is expanded in-line there is a button to jump straight to an Edit view of that object see https://nakedobjects.codeplex.com/workitem/1...VeraCrypt: VeraCrypt version 1.0b: Changes since version 1.0a :Enhance RIPEMD160 implementation in BootLoaded by using the compiler uint32 type Don't position legacy flag in volume header for newer VeraCrypt releasesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for WAMS. Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expecting only finite values. (...SSIS DQS Matching Transformation: SSIS DQS Matching Transformation 1.0: Initial release of the SSIS DQS Matching Component.AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...Compare .NET Objects: Version 1.7.2.0: If you like it, please rate it. :) Performance Improvements Fix for deleted row in a data table Added ability to ignore the collection order Fix for Ignoring by AttributesMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.95: update parser to allow for CSS3 calc( function to nest. add recognition of -pponly (Preprocess-Only) switch in AjaxMinManifestTask build task. Fix crashing bug in EXE when processing a manifest file using the -xml switch and an error message needs to be displayed (like a missing input file). Create separate Clean and Bundle build tasks for working with manifest files (AjaxMinManifestCleanTask and AjaxMinBundleTask). Removed the IsCleanOperation from AjaxMinManifestTask -- use AjaxMinMan...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.44: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImgChili.net" links FIXED: Auto UpdaterDocument.Editor: 2013.25: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.25: Improved Spell Check support Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsStyleMVVM: 3.0.2: This is a minor feature and bug fix release Features: ExportWhenDebuggerIsAttacedAttribute - new attribute that marks an attribute to only be exported when the debugger is attahced InjectedFilterAttributeFilterProvider - new Attribute Filter provider for MVC that injects the attributes Performance Improvements - minor speed improvements all over, and Import collections is now 50% faster Bug Fixes: Open Generic Constraints are now respected when finding exports Fix for fluent registrat...WPF Composites: Version 4.3.0: In this Beta release, I broke my code out into two separate projects. There is a core FasterWPF.dll with the minimal required functionality. This can run with only the Aero.dll and the Rx .dll's. Then, I have a FasterWPFExtras .dll that requires and supports the Extended WPF Toolkit™ Community Edition V 1.9.0 (including Xceed DataGrid) and the Thriple .dll. This is for developers who want more . . . Finally, you may notice the other OPTIONAL .dll's available in the download such as the Dyn...Channel9's Absolute Beginner Series: Windows Phone 8: Entire source code for the Channel 9 series, Windows Phone 8 Development for Absolute Beginners.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v13: ImportantThis release does not support Visual Studio 2010. The latest stable release for VS 2010 is v12.1. Version History Changed in v13 Added page width guide lines Added guide highlighting options Fixed guides appearing over collapsed blocks Fixed guides not appearing in newly opened files Fixed some potential crashes Fixed lines going through pragma statements Various updates for VS 2012 and VS 2013 Removed VS 2010 support Changed in v12.1: Fixed crash when unable to start...Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 2.1.0 - Prerelease d: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 2.1.0 - Prerelease d(supports .NET 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5) Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) Showcase Application Samples (not for .NET 3.5) Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextual Tabs, Quick Access Toolbar, Backstage) Resizing (ribbon reducing & enlarging principles) Galleries (Gallery in ContextMenu, InRibbonGallery) MVVM (shows how to use this library with Model-View-ViewModel pattern) KeyTips ScreenTips Toolbars ColorGallery *Walkthrough (do...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.5.1001: Magick.NET compiled against ImageMagick 6.8.5.10. Breaking changes: - MagickNET.Initialize has been made obsolete because the ImageMagick files in the directory are no longer necessary. - MagickGeometry is no longer IDisposable. - Renamed dll's so they include the platform name. - Image profiles can now only be accessed and modified with ImageProfile classes. - Renamed DrawableBase to Drawable. - Removed Args part of PathArc/PathCurvetoArgs/PathQuadraticCurvetoArgs classes. The...Keyboard Image Viewer: 1.5.4: Upgraded folder picker dialog to better version on Win7+ Fixed bug that stopped slideshow from looping back to the start of the list. Added crash dialog that allows you to see and copy exception stack traces for fixing.DependencyAnalysis (Egg and Gherkin): 0.9.4: - Create Visual Studio 2012 Addin for ad-hoc analysis of your project - Display metrics in a grid - Adequate performing serialization between Addin (Visual Studio process) and AnalysisHost process - Display dependencies as graph (proximity graph) - Create a logo for the project - Constructors of anonymous types no longer hide constructors of the declaring type during "build dependencies" phase - Type descriptors were added multiple times to SubmoduleDescriptor. Types collection, same instanc...Bloomberg API Emulator: Bloomberg API Emulator (v 1.0.5): This version contains the full Java port of my original C# code. I just finished the MarketDataSubscription request type. I will start working on a C++ port of my C# code.Three-Dimensional Maneuver Gear for Minecraft: TDMG 1.1.0.0 for 1.5.2: CodePlex???(????????) ?????????(???1/4) ??????????? ?????????? ???????????(??????????) ??????????????????????? ↑????、?????????????????????(???????) ???、??????????、?????????????????????、????????1.5?????????? Shift+W(????)??????????????????10°、?10°(?????????)???Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012: HyperVMPE2012 (v1.0.1.126): Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012 Beta ReleaseNew Projects.Net Encryption App: This is a C#.Net desktop application that will let users encrypt and de-crypt files with the algorithm of their choosing.AutoSPDocumenter: AutoSPDocumenter utilises PowerShell to document SharePoint farms and provide output in usable formats.Azure Storage Redirector: Azure Storage Redirector. Redirects requests to Global Azure Storage to China Azure Storage. ?????Azure Storage?request??????Azure storagebrownbag: Simple project to show branching, merging, and shelvingChannel9's Absolute Beginner Series: Channel 9's absolute beginner series source code. From Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, Windows Store applications, one stop area for all the seriesFAST for Sharepoint 2010 Query Tool (.NET 3.5): .NET 3.5 version of the FAST Search for SharePoint MOSS 2010 Query Tool (https://fastforsharepoint.codeplex.com/). For environments without .NET 4.0HAOest Framework: HAOest????ListManager: ListManager????? by HADB of HAOestMyPS: mypsNNRel: NNRelO - BV - 2: TestOpen XML SDK for JavaScript: Small JavaScript library that enables you to implement Open XML functionality anywhere you can use JavaScript.Orchard Prefix free: Provides a script manifest for the Prefix free script libraries.PVDesktop: PVDesktop is an application for designing and analyzing specific solar energy sites.Red the sound TowePlay: School project at ISEN Lille. Creation of a collaborative music creation software in C# using.NETScience Kits for Kids: This project is the service for Childhood Education which aged 4 - 8.SharePoint ULS for PowerShell: Allows PowerShell to log to the SharePoint ULS.SSIS DQS Matching Transformation: The SSIS DQS Matching Transformation uses Data Quality Services (DQS) to find duplicate data within the SSIS data flow.TARVOS Computer Networks Simulator: Discrete event-based network simulator, supports simulating MPLS architecture, several RSVP-TE protocol functionalities and fast recovery.Web API Explorer 4 DNN: Web API Explorer for DNN(R) aids module development allowing you to examine the Routing Table entries for a DotNetNuke(R) portal.

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• Plone: Creating new Page fails "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'dates'"

  - by paskster

  I just installed Plone on my Centos 5.5. I was able login via the admin-account and create new users. But when I try to create a new page I get the following error message: Traceback (innermost last): Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 127, in publish Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 47, in call_object Module Products.CMFPlone.FactoryTool, line 446, in __call__ Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 47, in call_object Module Products.CMFFormController.FSControllerPageTemplate, line 91, in __call__ Module Products.CMFFormController.BaseControllerPageTemplate, line 31, in _call Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 324, in __call__ Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 361, in _bindAndExec Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 240, in _exec Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 180, in pt_render Module Products.PageTemplates.PageTemplate, line 80, in pt_render Module zope.pagetemplate.pagetemplate, line 113, in pt_render Warning: Macro expansion failed Warning: <type 'exceptions.KeyError'>: 'macro' Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 271, in __call__ Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 888, in do_useMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 888, in do_useMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 954, in do_defineSlot Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 858, in do_defineMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 954, in do_defineSlot Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 946, in do_defineSlot Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 858, in do_defineMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 888, in do_useMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 852, in do_condition Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 954, in do_defineSlot Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 852, in do_condition Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 821, in do_loop_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 522, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 821, in do_loop_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 888, in do_useMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 888, in do_useMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 852, in do_condition Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 852, in do_condition Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 946, in do_defineSlot Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 533, in do_optTag_tal Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 518, in do_optTag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 513, in no_tag Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 888, in do_useMacro Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 343, in interpret Module zope.tal.talinterpreter, line 583, in do_setLocal_tal Module zope.tales.tales, line 696, in evaluate URL: file:/usr/local/Plone/buildout-cache/eggs/Plone-4.0.2-py2.6.egg/Products/CMFPlone/skins/plone_templates/calendar_macros.pt Line 12, Column 4 Expression: <PythonExpr date_components_support_view.result(inputvalue, 0, starting_year, ending_year, future_years)> Names: {'container': <PloneSite at /reeple>, 'context': <ATDocument at /reeple/portal_factory/Document/document.2010-12-24.9331499294 used for /reeple>, 'default': <object object at 0x2ad1b9a18ae0>, 'here': <ATDocument at /reeple/portal_factory/Document/document.2010-12-24.9331499294 used for /reeple>, 'loop': {u'field': <Products.PageTemplates.Expressions.PathIterator object at 0x1bc9b9d0>, u'fieldset': <Products.PageTemplates.Expressions.PathIterator object at 0x1d396c90>}, 'nothing': None, 'options': {'args': (), 'state': <Products.CMFFormController.ControllerState.ControllerState object at 0x1ccdb2d0>}, 'repeat': <Products.PageTemplates.Expressions.SafeMapping object at 0x1d452ec0>, 'request': <HTTPRequest, URL=http://82.165.145.121:8081/reeple/portal_factory/Document/document.2010-12-24.9331499294/atct_edit>, 'root': <Application at >, 'template': <FSControllerPageTemplate at /reeple/atct_edit used for /reeple/portal_factory/Document/document.2010-12-24.9331499294>, 'traverse_subpath': [], 'user': <PloneUser 'pascalklein'>} Module Products.PageTemplates.ZRPythonExpr, line 49, in __call__ __traceback_info__: date_components_support_view.result(inputvalue, 0, starting_year, ending_year, future_years) Module PythonExpr, line 1, in <expression> Module plone.app.form.widgets.datecomponents, line 50, in result AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'dates' Any suggestions? CentOS 5.5 has the Python Version 2.4. So I'm not sure if that causes the issue.

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• PHP: How to automate building a 100 <UL>/<LI> menuitems, while keeping the Menu Structure File Flat / Simply Managable?

  - by Sam

  Above: current "stupid" menu. (entire ul/li menu for javascript menu system) + (some li lines as page-specific submenu) Hi folks! With passion for automation and elegancy, but limited knowledge/knowhow, im stuck with "my hands in my hair" as we Dutch say, for my current menu system works perfectly, but is a pain in the a*s to update! So, i would appreciate it greatly, if you can suggest how to automate this in php: how to let the php generate the html menu code basing on a flat menu input file with TABS indented. OLD SITUATION <ul> <!-- about 100 of these <li>....</li> lines --> <li><a href="carrot.php"><p class="mnu" style="background-position:0 -820px"><? echo __("carrot juice") ?></p></a></li> <!-- lots of data, with only little bit thats really the menu itself--> </ul a javascript file reads a ul/li structure as input to build menu of format in that ul/li, the items with a hyperlink and sprite-bg position represent webpages, (inside LI) while items without hyperlink and sprite-bg are just headers of that menusection, (inside H6) to highlight the current page in the menu, the javascript menumaker uses an id number. this number corresponds to the consequtive li that is a webpage, skips h6 headers correctly. these h6 headers are only there for when importing sections of the same menu as submenu. non-li headers are not shown in menu, nore counted by the javascript menu for their ID. to know which page should be shown, i have to count from ID 0, the li items till finding the current webpage in the li structure and then manually put it in each webpage! BUT: changing an item in li order, means stupidly re-counting their entire li again! each webpage has an icon (= sprite bg-position numer), which is also used in the webpage. INTENDED RESULT I dream of, once setting what the current webpage is (e.g carrot.php) the menu system automatically "finds" and "counts" the li's and returns the id nr (for proper highlight of main menu); generates the entire menu html, and depending on which headings are set for submenu, (e.g. meals, drinks) generates those submenu (entire section below each given header); ginally adds h5 highlight inside the li of that submenu item. For the menu, i wish an easily readable, simple plain txt menu that is indented with tabs, (each tab is one depth for example) and further tabs follow for url and sprite position of icon. MY DREAM MENU-MANAGEMENT FILE |>TAB SEPARATED/INDENTED FLATMENU FILE |MUST BE CALCULATED BY PHP: |>MENUTEXT============URL=============SPRITE=====|ID===TAG================== |>about "#" -520 |00 li |> INFORMATION |—— h6 |> physical state "physical.php" -920 |01 li |> mental health "mental.php" -10 |02 li |> |>apetite "#" -1290 |03 li |> meals "#" -600 |04 li |> COLD MEAL |—— h6 |> egg salade "salad.php" -1040 |05 li |> salmon fish "salmon.php" -540 |06 li |> HOT MEAL |—— h6 |> spare ribs "spareribs.php" -120 |07 li |> di macaroni "macaroni.php" -870 |08 li |> |> drinks "#" -230 |09 li |> JUCY DRINK |—— h6 |> carrot juice "carrot.php" -820 |10 li |> mango hive "mango.php" -270 |11 li DESIRED CHRONOLOGY php outputs the entire ul/li html so the javascript can show the menu: webpage items go inside li tags, and header items go inside h6 tags, e.g. <h6>JUCY DRINK</h6> Each website page has a url filename [eg: salad.php]. Based on this given fact, the php menu generator detects the pagename, gives the IDnr of the position of that page according to the li-item nr and sets variable for javascript to highlight current menu item. the menu items below the specified headers are loaded as submenu in which the current page.php is wrapped inside h5 to highlight current page in submenu: e.g. (<li><h5><a href="carrot.php"><p>..etc..</p></h5></li> Question Which methods / steps / (chronological)ways are there for doing this? I am no good in php programming, but am learning it so please dont write any code without a line of comment why I should use that method etc. Where do I start? If I am unclear in my question, please ask. Thanks. Much appreciated!! Concrete Task List from the provided Comments/Answers, sofar: (RobertB) First, get some PHP code working that can read through a tab-delimited file and put the data into an appropriate data structure. NOW WORKING AT THIS

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• The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

  - by Rick Strahl

  High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Much Ado About Nothing: Stub Objects

  - by user9154181

  The Solaris 11 link-editor (ld) contains support for a new type of object that we call a stub object. A stub object is a shared object, built entirely from mapfiles, that supplies the same linking interface as the real object, while containing no code or data. Stub objects cannot be executed — the runtime linker will kill any process that attempts to load one. However, you can link to a stub object as a dependency, allowing the stub to act as a proxy for the real version of the object. You may well wonder if there is a point to producing an object that contains nothing but linking interface. As it turns out, stub objects are very useful for building large bodies of code such as Solaris. In the last year, we've had considerable success in applying them to one of our oldest and thorniest build problems. In this discussion, I will describe how we came to invent these objects, and how we apply them to building Solaris. This posting explains where the idea for stub objects came from, and details our long and twisty journey from hallway idea to standard link-editor feature. I expect that these details are mainly of interest to those who work on Solaris and its makefiles, those who have done so in the past, and those who work with other similar bodies of code. A subsequent posting will omit the history and background details, and instead discuss how to build and use stub objects. If you are mainly interested in what stub objects are, and don't care about the underlying software war stories, I encourage you to skip ahead. The Long Road To Stubs This all started for me with an email discussion in May of 2008, regarding a change request that was filed in 2002, entitled: 4631488 lib/Makefile is too patient: .WAITs should be reduced This CR encapsulates a number of cronic issues with Solaris builds: We build Solaris with a parallel make (dmake) that tries to build as much of the code base in parallel as possible. There is a lot of code to build, and we've long made use of parallelized builds to get the job done quicker. This is even more important in today's world of massively multicore hardware. Solaris contains a large number of executables and shared objects. Executables depend on shared objects, and shared objects can depend on each other. Before you can build an object, you need to ensure that the objects it needs have been built. This implies a need for serialization, which is in direct opposition to the desire to build everying in parallel. To accurately build objects in the right order requires an accurate set of make rules defining the things that depend on each other. This sounds simple, but the reality is quite complex. In practice, having programmers explicitly specify these dependencies is a losing strategy: It's really hard to get right. It's really easy to get it wrong and never know it because things build anyway. Even if you get it right, it won't stay that way, because dependencies between objects can change over time, and make cannot help you detect such drifing. You won't know that you got it wrong until the builds break. That can be a long time after the change that triggered the breakage happened, making it hard to connect the cause and the effect. Usually this happens just before a release, when the pressure is on, its hard to think calmly, and there is no time for deep fixes. As a poor compromise, the libraries in core Solaris were built using a set of grossly incomplete hand written rules, supplemented with a number of dmake .WAIT directives used to group the libraries into sets of non-interacting groups that can be built in parallel because we think they don't depend on each other. From time to time, someone will suggest that we could analyze the built objects themselves to determine their dependencies and then generate make rules based on those relationships. This is possible, but but there are complications that limit the usefulness of that approach: To analyze an object, you have to build it first. This is a classic chicken and egg scenario. You could analyze the results of a previous build, but then you're not necessarily going to get accurate rules for the current code. It should be possible to build the code without having a built workspace available. The analysis will take time, and remember that we're constantly trying to make builds faster, not slower. By definition, such an approach will always be approximate, and therefore only incremantally more accurate than the hand written rules described above. The hand written rules are fast and cheap, while this idea is slow and complex, so we stayed with the hand written approach. Solaris was built that way, essentially forever, because these are genuinely difficult problems that had no easy answer. The makefiles were full of build races in which the right outcomes happened reliably for years until a new machine or a change in build server workload upset the accidental balance of things. After figuring out what had happened, you'd mutter "How did that ever work?", add another incomplete and soon to be inaccurate make dependency rule to the system, and move on. This was not a satisfying solution, as we tend to be perfectionists in the Solaris group, but we didn't have a better answer. It worked well enough, approximately. And so it went for years. We needed a different approach — a new idea to cut the Gordian Knot. In that discussion from May 2008, my fellow linker-alien Rod Evans had the initial spark that lead us to a game changing series of realizations: The link-editor is used to link objects together, but it only uses the ELF metadata in the object, consisting of symbol tables, ELF versioning sections, and similar data. Notably, it does not look at, or understand, the machine code that makes an object useful at runtime. If you had an object that only contained the ELF metadata for a dependency, but not the code or data, the link-editor would find it equally useful for linking, and would never know the difference. Call it a stub object. In the core Solaris OS, we require all objects to be built with a link-editor mapfile that describes all of its publically available functions and data. Could we build a stub object using the mapfile for the real object? It ought to be very fast to build stub objects, as there are no input objects to process. Unlike the real object, stub objects would not actually require any dependencies, and so, all of the stubs for the entire system could be built in parallel. When building the real objects, one could link against the stub objects instead of the real dependencies. This means that all the real objects can be built built in parallel too, without any serialization. We could replace a system that requires perfect makefile rules with a system that requires no ordering rules whatsoever. The results would be considerably more robust. We immediately realized that this idea had potential, but also that there were many details to sort out, lots of work to do, and that perhaps it wouldn't really pan out. As is often the case, it would be necessary to do the work and see how it turned out. Following that conversation, I set about trying to build a stub object. We determined that a faithful stub has to do the following: Present the same set of global symbols, with the same ELF versioning, as the real object. Functions are simple — it suffices to have a symbol of the right type, possibly, but not necessarily, referencing a null function in its text segment. Copy relocations make data more complicated to stub. The possibility of a copy relocation means that when you create a stub, the data symbols must have the actual size of the real data. Any error in this will go uncaught at link time, and will cause tragic failures at runtime that are very hard to diagnose. For reasons too obscure to go into here, involving tentative symbols, it is also important that the data reside in bss, or not, matching its placement in the real object. If the real object has more than one symbol pointing at the same data item, we call these aliased symbols. All data symbols in the stub object must exhibit the same aliasing as the real object. We imagined the stub library feature working as follows: A command line option to ld tells it to produce a stub rather than a real object. In this mode, only mapfiles are examined, and any object or shared libraries on the command line are are ignored. The extra information needed (function or data, size, and bss details) would be added to the mapfile. When building the real object instead of the stub, the extra information for building stubs would be validated against the resulting object to ensure that they match. In exploring these ideas, I immediately run headfirst into the reality of the original mapfile syntax, a subject that I would later write about as The Problem(s) With Solaris SVR4 Link-Editor Mapfiles. The idea of extending that poor language was a non-starter. Until a better mapfile syntax became available, which seemed unlikely in 2008, the solution could not involve extentions to the mapfile syntax. Instead, we cooked up the idea (hack) of augmenting mapfiles with stylized comments that would carry the necessary information. A typical definition might look like: # DATA(i386) __iob 0x3c0 # DATA(amd64,sparcv9) __iob 0xa00 # DATA(sparc) __iob 0x140 iob; A further problem then became clear: If we can't extend the mapfile syntax, then there's no good way to extend ld with an option to produce stub objects, and to validate them against the real objects. The idea of having ld read comments in a mapfile and parse them for content is an unacceptable hack. The entire point of comments is that they are strictly for the human reader, and explicitly ignored by the tool. Taking all of these speed bumps into account, I made a new plan: A perl script reads the mapfiles, generates some small C glue code to produce empty functions and data definitions, compiles and links the stub object from the generated glue code, and then deletes the generated glue code. Another perl script used after both objects have been built, to compare the real and stub objects, using data from elfdump, and validate that they present the same linking interface. By June 2008, I had written the above, and generated a stub object for libc. It was a useful prototype process to go through, and it allowed me to explore the ideas at a deep level. Ultimately though, the result was unsatisfactory as a basis for real product. There were so many issues: The use of stylized comments were fine for a prototype, but not close to professional enough for shipping product. The idea of having to document and support it was a large concern. The ideal solution for stub objects really does involve having the link-editor accept the same arguments used to build the real object, augmented with a single extra command line option. Any other solution, such as our prototype script, will require makefiles to be modified in deeper ways to support building stubs, and so, will raise barriers to converting existing code. A validation script that rederives what the linker knew when it built an object will always be at a disadvantage relative to the actual linker that did the work. A stub object should be identifyable as such. In the prototype, there was no tag or other metadata that would let you know that they weren't real objects. Being able to identify a stub object in this way means that the file command can tell you what it is, and that the runtime linker can refuse to try and run a program that loads one. At that point, we needed to apply this prototype to building Solaris. As you might imagine, the task of modifying all the makefiles in the core Solaris code base in order to do this is a massive task, and not something you'd enter into lightly. The quality of the prototype just wasn't good enough to justify that sort of time commitment, so I tabled the project, putting it on my list of long term things to think about, and moved on to other work. It would sit there for a couple of years. Semi-coincidentally, one of the projects I tacked after that was to create a new mapfile syntax for the Solaris link-editor. We had wanted to do something about the old mapfile syntax for many years. Others before me had done some paper designs, and a great deal of thought had already gone into the features it should, and should not have, but for various reasons things had never moved beyond the idea stage. When I joined Sun in late 2005, I got involved in reviewing those things and thinking about the problem. Now in 2008, fresh from relearning for the Nth time why the old mapfile syntax was a huge impediment to linker progress, it seemed like the right time to tackle the mapfile issue. Paving the way for proper stub object support was not the driving force behind that effort, but I certainly had them in mind as I moved forward. The new mapfile syntax, which we call version 2, integrated into Nevada build snv_135 in in February 2010: 6916788 ld version 2 mapfile syntax PSARC/2009/688 Human readable and extensible ld mapfile syntax In order to prove that the new mapfile syntax was adequate for general purpose use, I had also done an overhaul of the ON consolidation to convert all mapfiles to use the new syntax, and put checks in place that would ensure that no use of the old syntax would creep back in. That work went back into snv_144 in June 2010: 6916796 OSnet mapfiles should use version 2 link-editor syntax That was a big putback, modifying 517 files, adding 18 new files, and removing 110 old ones. I would have done this putback anyway, as the work was already done, and the benefits of human readable syntax are obvious. However, among the justifications listed in CR 6916796 was this We anticipate adding additional features to the new mapfile language that will be applicable to ON, and which will require all sharable object mapfiles to use the new syntax. I never explained what those additional features were, and no one asked. It was premature to say so, but this was a reference to stub objects. By that point, I had already put together a working prototype link-editor with the necessary support for stub objects. I was pleased to find that building stubs was indeed very fast. On my desktop system (Ultra 24), an amd64 stub for libc can can be built in a fraction of a second: % ptime ld -64 -z stub -o stubs/libc.so.1 -G -hlibc.so.1 \ -ztext -zdefs -Bdirect ... real 0.019708910 user 0.010101680 sys 0.008528431 In order to go from prototype to integrated link-editor feature, I knew that I would need to prove that stub objects were valuable. And to do that, I knew that I'd have to switch the Solaris ON consolidation to use stub objects and evaluate the outcome. And in order to do that experiment, ON would first need to be converted to version 2 mapfiles. Sub-mission accomplished. Normally when you design a new feature, you can devise reasonably small tests to show it works, and then deploy it incrementally, letting it prove its value as it goes. The entire point of stub objects however was to demonstrate that they could be successfully applied to an extremely large and complex code base, and specifically to solve the Solaris build issues detailed above. There was no way to finesse the matter — in order to move ahead, I would have to successfully use stub objects to build the entire ON consolidation and demonstrate their value. In software, the need to boil the ocean can often be a warning sign that things are trending in the wrong direction. Conversely, sometimes progress demands that you build something large and new all at once. A big win, or a big loss — sometimes all you can do is try it and see what happens. And so, I spent some time staring at ON makefiles trying to get a handle on how things work, and how they'd have to change. It's a big and messy world, full of complex interactions, unspecified dependencies, special cases, and knowledge of arcane makefile features... ...and so, I backed away, put it down for a few months and did other work... ...until the fall, when I felt like it was time to stop thinking and pondering (some would say stalling) and get on with it. Without stubs, the following gives a simplified high level view of how Solaris is built: An initially empty directory known as the proto, and referenced via the ROOT makefile macro is established to receive the files that make up the Solaris distribution. A top level setup rule creates the proto area, and performs operations needed to initialize the workspace so that the main build operations can be launched, such as copying needed header files into the proto area. Parallel builds are launched to build the kernel (usr/src/uts), libraries (usr/src/lib), and commands. The install makefile target builds each item and delivers a copy to the proto area. All libraries and executables link against the objects previously installed in the proto, implying the need to synchronize the order in which things are built. Subsequent passes run lint, and do packaging. Given this structure, the additions to use stub objects are: A new second proto area is established, known as the stub proto and referenced via the STUBROOT makefile macro. The stub proto has the same structure as the real proto, but is used to hold stub objects. All files in the real proto are delivered as part of the Solaris product. In contrast, the stub proto is used to build the product, and then thrown away. A new target is added to library Makefiles called stub. This rule builds the stub objects. The ld command is designed so that you can build a stub object using the same ld command line you'd use to build the real object, with the addition of a single -z stub option. This means that the makefile rules for building the stub objects are very similar to those used to build the real objects, and many existing makefile definitions can be shared between them. A new target is added to the Makefiles called stubinstall which delivers the stub objects built by the stub rule into the stub proto. These rules reuse much of existing plumbing used by the existing install rule. The setup rule runs stubinstall over the entire lib subtree as part of its initialization. All libraries and executables link against the objects in the stub proto rather than the main proto, and can therefore be built in parallel without any synchronization. There was no small way to try this that would yield meaningful results. I would have to take a leap of faith and edit approximately 1850 makefiles and 300 mapfiles first, trusting that it would all work out. Once the editing was done, I'd type make and see what happened. This took about 6 weeks to do, and there were many dark days when I'd question the entire project, or struggle to understand some of the many twisted and complex situations I'd uncover in the makefiles. I even found a couple of new issues that required changes to the new stub object related code I'd added to ld. With a substantial amount of encouragement and help from some key people in the Solaris group, I eventually got the editing done and stub objects for the entire workspace built. I found that my desktop system could build all the stub objects in the workspace in roughly a minute. This was great news, as it meant that use of the feature is effectively free — no one was likely to notice or care about the cost of building them. After another week of typing make, fixing whatever failed, and doing it again, I succeeded in getting a complete build! The next step was to remove all of the make rules and .WAIT statements dedicated to controlling the order in which libraries under usr/src/lib are built. This came together pretty quickly, and after a few more speed bumps, I had a workspace that built cleanly and looked like something you might actually be able to integrate someday. This was a significant milestone, but there was still much left to do. I turned to doing full nightly builds. Every type of build (open, closed, OpenSolaris, export, domestic) had to be tried. Each type failed in a new and unique way, requiring some thinking and rework. As things came together, I became aware of things that could have been done better, simpler, or cleaner, and those things also required some rethinking, the seeking of wisdom from others, and some rework. After another couple of weeks, it was in close to final form. My focus turned towards the end game and integration. This was a huge workspace, and needed to go back soon, before changes in the gate would made merging increasingly difficult. At this point, I knew that the stub objects had greatly simplified the makefile logic and uncovered a number of race conditions, some of which had been there for years. I assumed that the builds were faster too, so I did some builds intended to quantify the speedup in build time that resulted from this approach. It had never occurred to me that there might not be one. And so, I was very surprised to find that the wall clock build times for a stock ON workspace were essentially identical to the times for my stub library enabled version! This is why it is important to always measure, and not just to assume. One can tell from first principles, based on all those removed dependency rules in the library makefile, that the stub object version of ON gives dmake considerably more opportunities to overlap library construction. Some hypothesis were proposed, and shot down: Could we have disabled dmakes parallel feature? No, a quick check showed things being build in parallel. It was suggested that we might be I/O bound, and so, the threads would be mostly idle. That's a plausible explanation, but system stats didn't really support it. Plus, the timing between the stub and non-stub cases were just too suspiciously identical. Are our machines already handling as much parallelism as they are capable of, and unable to exploit these additional opportunities? Once again, we didn't see the evidence to back this up. Eventually, a more plausible and obvious reason emerged: We build the libraries and commands (usr/src/lib, usr/src/cmd) in parallel with the kernel (usr/src/uts). The kernel is the long leg in that race, and so, wall clock measurements of build time are essentially showing how long it takes to build uts. Although it would have been nice to post a huge speedup immediately, we can take solace in knowing that stub objects simplify the makefiles and reduce the possibility of race conditions. The next step in reducing build time should be to find ways to reduce or overlap the uts part of the builds. When that leg of the build becomes shorter, then the increased parallelism in the libs and commands will pay additional dividends. Until then, we'll just have to settle for simpler and more robust. And so, I integrated the link-editor support for creating stub objects into snv_153 (November 2010) with 6993877 ld should produce stub objects PSARC/2010/397 ELF Stub Objects followed by the work to convert the ON consolidation in snv_161 (February 2011) with 7009826 OSnet should use stub objects 4631488 lib/Makefile is too patient: .WAITs should be reduced This was a huge putback, with 2108 modified files, 8 new files, and 2 removed files. Due to the size, I was allowed a window after snv_160 closed in which to do the putback. It went pretty smoothly for something this big, a few more preexisting race conditions would be discovered and addressed over the next few weeks, and things have been quiet since then. Conclusions and Looking Forward Solaris has been built with stub objects since February. The fact that developers no longer specify the order in which libraries are built has been a big success, and we've eliminated an entire class of build error. That's not to say that there are no build races left in the ON makefiles, but we've taken a substantial bite out of the problem while generally simplifying and improving things. The introduction of a stub proto area has also opened some interesting new possibilities for other build improvements. As this article has become quite long, and as those uses do not involve stub objects, I will defer that discussion to a future article.

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• Generating a drop down list of timezones with PHP

  - by Xeoncross

  Most sites need some way to show the dates on the site in the users preferred timezone. Below are two lists that I found and then one method using the built in PHP DateTime class in PHP 5. I need help knowing which of these would be the best to attempt to use when trying to get the UTC offset from the user on register. One: <option value="-12">[UTC - 12] Baker Island Time</option> <option value="-11">[UTC - 11] Niue Time, Samoa Standard Time</option> <option value="-10">[UTC - 10] Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, Cook Island Time</option> <option value="-9.5">[UTC - 9:30] Marquesas Islands Time</option> <option value="-9">[UTC - 9] Alaska Standard Time, Gambier Island Time</option> <option value="-8">[UTC - 8] Pacific Standard Time</option> <option value="-7">[UTC - 7] Mountain Standard Time</option> <option value="-6">[UTC - 6] Central Standard Time</option> <option value="-5">[UTC - 5] Eastern Standard Time</option> <option value="-4.5">[UTC - 4:30] Venezuelan Standard Time</option> <option value="-4">[UTC - 4] Atlantic Standard Time</option> <option value="-3.5">[UTC - 3:30] Newfoundland Standard Time</option> <option value="-3">[UTC - 3] Amazon Standard Time, Central Greenland Time</option> <option value="-2">[UTC - 2] Fernando de Noronha Time, South Georgia &amp; the South Sandwich Islands Time</option> <option value="-1">[UTC - 1] Azores Standard Time, Cape Verde Time, Eastern Greenland Time</option> <option value="0" selected="selected">[UTC] Western European Time, Greenwich Mean Time</option> <option value="1">[UTC + 1] Central European Time, West African Time</option> <option value="2">[UTC + 2] Eastern European Time, Central African Time</option> <option value="3">[UTC + 3] Moscow Standard Time, Eastern African Time</option> <option value="3.5">[UTC + 3:30] Iran Standard Time</option> <option value="4">[UTC + 4] Gulf Standard Time, Samara Standard Time</option> <option value="4.5">[UTC + 4:30] Afghanistan Time</option> <option value="5">[UTC + 5] Pakistan Standard Time, Yekaterinburg Standard Time</option> <option value="5.5">[UTC + 5:30] Indian Standard Time, Sri Lanka Time</option> <option value="5.75">[UTC + 5:45] Nepal Time</option> <option value="6">[UTC + 6] Bangladesh Time, Bhutan Time, Novosibirsk Standard Time</option> <option value="6.5">[UTC + 6:30] Cocos Islands Time, Myanmar Time</option> <option value="7">[UTC + 7] Indochina Time, Krasnoyarsk Standard Time</option> <option value="8">[UTC + 8] Chinese Standard Time, Australian Western Standard Time, Irkutsk Standard Time</option> <option value="8.75">[UTC + 8:45] Southeastern Western Australia Standard Time</option> <option value="9">[UTC + 9] Japan Standard Time, Korea Standard Time, Chita Standard Time</option> <option value="9.5">[UTC + 9:30] Australian Central Standard Time</option> <option value="10">[UTC + 10] Australian Eastern Standard Time, Vladivostok Standard Time</option> <option value="10.5">[UTC + 10:30] Lord Howe Standard Time</option> <option value="11">[UTC + 11] Solomon Island Time, Magadan Standard Time</option> <option value="11.5">[UTC + 11:30] Norfolk Island Time</option> <option value="12">[UTC + 12] New Zealand Time, Fiji Time, Kamchatka Standard Time</option> <option value="12.75">[UTC + 12:45] Chatham Islands Time</option> <option value="13">[UTC + 13] Tonga Time, Phoenix Islands Time</option> <option value="14">[UTC + 14] Line Island Time</option> Or using PHP friendly values: <option value="Pacific/Midway">(GMT-11:00) Midway Island, Samoa</option> <option value="America/Adak">(GMT-10:00) Hawaii-Aleutian</option> <option value="Etc/GMT+10">(GMT-10:00) Hawaii</option> <option value="Pacific/Marquesas">(GMT-09:30) Marquesas Islands</option> <option value="Pacific/Gambier">(GMT-09:00) Gambier Islands</option> <option value="America/Anchorage">(GMT-09:00) Alaska</option> <option value="America/Ensenada">(GMT-08:00) Tijuana, Baja California</option> <option value="Etc/GMT+8">(GMT-08:00) Pitcairn Islands</option> <option value="America/Los_Angeles">(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)</option> <option value="America/Denver">(GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada)</option> <option value="America/Chihuahua">(GMT-07:00) Chihuahua, La Paz, Mazatlan</option> <option value="America/Dawson_Creek">(GMT-07:00) Arizona</option> <option value="America/Belize">(GMT-06:00) Saskatchewan, Central America</option> <option value="America/Cancun">(GMT-06:00) Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey</option> <option value="Chile/EasterIsland">(GMT-06:00) Easter Island</option> <option value="America/Chicago">(GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada)</option> <option value="America/New_York">(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)</option> <option value="America/Havana">(GMT-05:00) Cuba</option> <option value="America/Bogota">(GMT-05:00) Bogota, Lima, Quito, Rio Branco</option> <option value="America/Caracas">(GMT-04:30) Caracas</option> <option value="America/Santiago">(GMT-04:00) Santiago</option> <option value="America/La_Paz">(GMT-04:00) La Paz</option> <option value="Atlantic/Stanley">(GMT-04:00) Faukland Islands</option> <option value="America/Campo_Grande">(GMT-04:00) Brazil</option> <option value="America/Goose_Bay">(GMT-04:00) Atlantic Time (Goose Bay)</option> <option value="America/Glace_Bay">(GMT-04:00) Atlantic Time (Canada)</option> <option value="America/St_Johns">(GMT-03:30) Newfoundland</option> <option value="America/Araguaina">(GMT-03:00) UTC-3</option> <option value="America/Montevideo">(GMT-03:00) Montevideo</option> <option value="America/Miquelon">(GMT-03:00) Miquelon, St. Pierre</option> <option value="America/Godthab">(GMT-03:00) Greenland</option> <option value="America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires">(GMT-03:00) Buenos Aires</option> <option value="America/Sao_Paulo">(GMT-03:00) Brasilia</option> <option value="America/Noronha">(GMT-02:00) Mid-Atlantic</option> <option value="Atlantic/Cape_Verde">(GMT-01:00) Cape Verde Is.</option> <option value="Atlantic/Azores">(GMT-01:00) Azores</option> <option value="Europe/Belfast">(GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Belfast</option> <option value="Europe/Dublin">(GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin</option> <option value="Europe/Lisbon">(GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Lisbon</option> <option value="Europe/London">(GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : London</option> <option value="Africa/Abidjan">(GMT) Monrovia, Reykjavik</option> <option value="Europe/Amsterdam">(GMT+01:00) Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna</option> <option value="Europe/Belgrade">(GMT+01:00) Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague</option> <option value="Europe/Brussels">(GMT+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris</option> <option value="Africa/Algiers">(GMT+01:00) West Central Africa</option> <option value="Africa/Windhoek">(GMT+01:00) Windhoek</option> <option value="Asia/Beirut">(GMT+02:00) Beirut</option> <option value="Africa/Cairo">(GMT+02:00) Cairo</option> <option value="Asia/Gaza">(GMT+02:00) Gaza</option> <option value="Africa/Blantyre">(GMT+02:00) Harare, Pretoria</option> <option value="Asia/Jerusalem">(GMT+02:00) Jerusalem</option> <option value="Europe/Minsk">(GMT+02:00) Minsk</option> <option value="Asia/Damascus">(GMT+02:00) Syria</option> <option value="Europe/Moscow">(GMT+03:00) Moscow, St. Petersburg, Volgograd</option> <option value="Africa/Addis_Ababa">(GMT+03:00) Nairobi</option> <option value="Asia/Tehran">(GMT+03:30) Tehran</option> <option value="Asia/Dubai">(GMT+04:00) Abu Dhabi, Muscat</option> <option value="Asia/Yerevan">(GMT+04:00) Yerevan</option> <option value="Asia/Kabul">(GMT+04:30) Kabul</option> <option value="Asia/Yekaterinburg">(GMT+05:00) Ekaterinburg</option> <option value="Asia/Tashkent">(GMT+05:00) Tashkent</option> <option value="Asia/Kolkata">(GMT+05:30) Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi</option> <option value="Asia/Katmandu">(GMT+05:45) Kathmandu</option> <option value="Asia/Dhaka">(GMT+06:00) Astana, Dhaka</option> <option value="Asia/Novosibirsk">(GMT+06:00) Novosibirsk</option> <option value="Asia/Rangoon">(GMT+06:30) Yangon (Rangoon)</option> <option value="Asia/Bangkok">(GMT+07:00) Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta</option> <option value="Asia/Krasnoyarsk">(GMT+07:00) Krasnoyarsk</option> <option value="Asia/Hong_Kong">(GMT+08:00) Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi</option> <option value="Asia/Irkutsk">(GMT+08:00) Irkutsk, Ulaan Bataar</option> <option value="Australia/Perth">(GMT+08:00) Perth</option> <option value="Australia/Eucla">(GMT+08:45) Eucla</option> <option value="Asia/Tokyo">(GMT+09:00) Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo</option> <option value="Asia/Seoul">(GMT+09:00) Seoul</option> <option value="Asia/Yakutsk">(GMT+09:00) Yakutsk</option> <option value="Australia/Adelaide">(GMT+09:30) Adelaide</option> <option value="Australia/Darwin">(GMT+09:30) Darwin</option> <option value="Australia/Brisbane">(GMT+10:00) Brisbane</option> <option value="Australia/Hobart">(GMT+10:00) Hobart</option> <option value="Asia/Vladivostok">(GMT+10:00) Vladivostok</option> <option value="Australia/Lord_Howe">(GMT+10:30) Lord Howe Island</option> <option value="Etc/GMT-11">(GMT+11:00) Solomon Is., New Caledonia</option> <option value="Asia/Magadan">(GMT+11:00) Magadan</option> <option value="Pacific/Norfolk">(GMT+11:30) Norfolk Island</option> <option value="Asia/Anadyr">(GMT+12:00) Anadyr, Kamchatka</option> <option value="Pacific/Auckland">(GMT+12:00) Auckland, Wellington</option> <option value="Etc/GMT-12">(GMT+12:00) Fiji, Kamchatka, Marshall Is.</option> <option value="Pacific/Chatham">(GMT+12:45) Chatham Islands</option> <option value="Pacific/Tongatapu">(GMT+13:00) Nuku'alofa</option> <option value="Pacific/Kiritimati">(GMT+14:00) Kiritimati</option> Or just using PHP it's self $timezones = DateTimeZone::listAbbreviations(); $cities = array(); foreach( $timezones as $key => $zones ) { foreach( $zones as $id => $zone ) { /** * Only get timezones explicitely not part of "Others". * @see http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.others.php */ if ( preg_match( '/^(America|Antartica|Arctic|Asia|Atlantic|Europe|Indian|Pacific)\//', $zone['timezone_id'] ) && $zone['timezone_id']) { $cities[$zone['timezone_id']][] = $key; } } } // For each city, have a comma separated list of all possible timezones for that city. foreach( $cities as $key => $value ) $cities[$key] = join( ', ', $value); // Only keep one city (the first and also most important) for each set of possibilities. $cities = array_unique( $cities ); // Sort by area/city name. ksort( $cities ); It seems like the last one would be the safest as it would grow with the PHP release being used. You could also flip that array around when needed to tie timezones to city names.

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