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• Can a second stored procedure doing the same thing finish before first one?

  - by evanmortland

  Hello, I have an audit record table that I am writing to. I am connecting to MyDb, which has a stored procedure called 'CreateAudit', which is a passthrough stored procedure to another database on the same machine called 'CreatedAudit' as well. I call the CreateAudit stored procedure from my application, using subsonic as the DAL. The first time I call it, I call it with the following (pseudocode): Result = CreateAudit(recordId, "Opened") Right after that, I call: Result2 = CreateAudit(recordId, "Closed") In my second stored procedure it is supposed to mark the record that was created by the CreateAudit(recordId, "Opened") with a status of closed. It works great if I run them independently of one another, but when they run in sequence in the application, the record is not marked as "Closed". When I run SQL profiler I see that both queries ran, and if I copy the queries out and run them from query analyzer the record gets marked as closed 100% of the time! When I run it from the application, about once every 20 times or so, the record is successfully marked closed - the other 19 times nothing happens, but I do not get an error! Is it possible for the .NET app to skip over the ouput from the first stored procedure and start executing the second stored procedure before the record in the first is created? When I add a "WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:00:003'" to the top of my stored procedure, the record is also closed 100% of the time. My head is spinning, any ideas why this is happening! Thanks for any responses, very interested in hearing how this can happen.

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• Pushing or serving real-time data to an excel spreadsheet

  - by evan_irl

  I am running some test automation on a networked computer resource (remote). The remote computer running the test automation generates some output, which I can customize however I wish - probably a text or excel file. I would like to create an excel spreadsheet which, from my local machine, monitors this output and provides real-time analytics. Later I would make the networked computer visible to more people, and they can use the same spreadsheet to monitor this output. My problem is that this networked computer is located on the other side of the earth, and so using any kind of polling in excel VBA to PULL the data from the networked computer results in a very long wait with the pinwheel spinning, making the sheet clumsy and less useful. The same thing happens when I use excel's built in function for linking to "external resources" Is there any way to PUSH data to the excel spreadsheet from the networked computer? Something that is easy to set up would be ideal, the latency does not have to be low, so long as there is no awkward "busy wait" while the sheet updates. If that is not possible, is there any way of using PULL from the excel sheet that avoids the same busy wait?

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• Changing direction of rotation Pygame

  - by czl

  How would you change the direction of a rotating image/rect in Pygame? Applying positive and negative degree values works but it seems to only be able to rotate one direction throughout my window. Is there a way to ensure a change in direction of rotation? Perhaps change up rotation of a spinning image every 5 seconds, or if able to change the direction of the spin when hitting a X or Y axis. I've added some code below. It seems like switching movement directions is easy with rect.move_ip as long as I specify a speed and have location clause, it does what I want. Unfortunately rotation is't like that. Here I'l adding angles to make sure it spins, but no matter what I try, I'm unable to negate the rotation. def rotate_image(self): #rotate image orig_rect = self.image.get_rect() rot_image = pygame.transform.rotate(self.image, self.angle) rot_rect = orig_rect.copy() rot_rect.center = rot_image.get_rect().center rot_image = rot_image.subsurface(rot_rect).copy() return rot_image def render(self): self.screen.fill(self.bg_color) self.rect.move_ip(0,5) #Y axis movement at 5 px per frame self.angle += 5 #add 5 anglewhen the rect has not hit one of the window self.angle %= 360 if self.rect.left < 0 or self.rect.right > self.width: self.speed[0] = -self.speed[0] self.angle = -self.angle #tried to invert the angle self.angle -= 5 #trying to negate the angle rotation self.angle %= 360 self.screen.blit(self.rotate_image(),self.rect) pygame.display.flip() I would really like to know how to invert rotation of a image. You may provide your own examples.

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• Search for values in nested array

  - by dardub

  I have an array as follows array(2) { ["operator"] => array(2) { ["qty"] => int(2) ["id"] => int(251) } ["accessory209"] => array(2) { ["qty"] => int(1) ["id"] => int(209) } ["accessory211"] => array(2) { ["qty"] => int(1) ["id"] => int(211) } } I'm trying to find a way to verify an id value exists within the array and return bool. I'm trying to figure out a quick way that doesn't require creating a loop. Using the in_array function did not work, and I also read that it is quite slow. In the php manual someone recommended using flip_array() and then isset(), but I can't get it to work for a 2-d array. doing something like if($array['accessory']['id'] == 211) would also work for me, but I need to match all keys containing accessory -- not sure how to do that Anyways, I'm spinning in circles, and could use some help. This seems like it should be easy. Thanks.

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• .htaccess redirect noticably increasing load time

  - by GTCrais

  I set up a SEF link via .htaccess RewriteRule to one of the articles on my website just to see how that works, and it does work but it considerably increases the load time of that particular page. On average the articles (including the one I'm talking about, when not using the rewrite rule) load in about 1.3 seconds. With the rewrite rule, the load time is 3.3 seconds on average until the page displays, and the loader thingy in the firefox tab keeps spinning for another 2 seconds. I have WAMP setup on my computer, and the website is being accessed through no-ip.com. Here is the .htaccess config (very simple, as you can see): Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^o-sw-liji /NewSWL/o-nama.php?body=o-sw-liji In httpd.conf I have this (somewhere I read this might affect the load time for some reason - searching for files through all the directories or something, I don't remember exactly what I read): <Directory /> Options None AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all </Directory> DocumentRoot "Z:/Program Files (x86)/wamp/www/" <Directory "Z:/Program Files (x86)/wamp/www/"> Options None AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> Any ideas why .htaccess redirect increases the load time by so much? UPDATE: so I put a session based counter in the "o-nama.php" script. Apparently when I access the web via the 'normal' link i.e. 'o-nama.php?body=o-sw-liji', the counter increases by one, as it should - it's one page load. But when the page is accessed through the redirected link, i.e. 'o-nama/o-sharewood-liji' the counter increases by 6-8, which naturally makes the load time a lot longer, since it's loading the same page for 6-8 times. I have no idea why this is happening. Any help is appreciated.

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• Built in background-scheduling system in .NET?

  - by Lasse V. Karlsen

  I ask though I doubt there is any such system. Basically I need to schedule tasks to execute at some point in the future (usually no more than a few seconds or possibly minutes from now), and have some way of cancelling that request unless too late. Ie. code that would look like this: var x = Scheduler.Schedule(() => SomethingSomething(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5)); ... x.Dispose(); // cancels the request Is there any such system in .NET? Is there anything in TPL that can help me? I need to run such future-actions from various instances in a system here, and would rather avoid each such class instance to have its own thread and deal with this. Also note that I don't want this (or similar, for instance through Tasks): new Thread(new ThreadStart(() => { Thread.Sleep(5000); SomethingSomething(); })).Start(); There will potentially be a few such tasks to execute, they don't need to be executed in any particular order, except for close to their deadline, and it isn't vital that they have anything like a realtime performance concept. I just want to avoid spinning up a separate thread for each such action.

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• Shell halts while looping and 'transforming' values in dictionary (Python 2.7.5)

  - by Gus

  I'm building a program that will sum digits in a given list in a recursive way. Say, if the source list has 10 elements, the second list will have 9, the third 8 and so on until the last list that will have only one element. This is done by adding the first element to the second, then the second to the third and so on. I'm stuck without feedback from the shell. It halts without throwing any errors, then in a couple of seconds the fan is spinning like crazy. I've read quite a few posts here and changed my approach, but I'm not sure that what have so far can produce the results I'm looking for. Thanks in advance: #--------------------------------------------------- #functions #--------------------------------------------------- #sum up pairs in a list def reduce(inputList): i = 0 while (i < len(inputList)): #ref to current and next item j = i + 1 #don't go for the last item if j != len(inputList): #new number eq current + next number newNumber = inputList[i] + inputList[j] if newNumber >= 10: #reduce newNumber to single digit newNumber = sum(map(int, str(newNumber))) #collect into temp list outputList.append(newNumber) i = i + 1 return outputList; #--------------------------------------------------- #program starts here #--------------------------------------------------- outputList = [] sourceList = [7, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, 6] counter = len(sourceList) dict = {} dict[0] = sourceList print '-------------' print 'Level 0:', dict[0] for i in range(counter): j = i + 1 if j != counter: baseList = dict.get(i) #check function to understand what it does newList = reduce(baseList) #new key and value from previous/transformed value dict[j] = newList print 'Level %d: %s' % (j, dict[j])

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• Why is Excel 2010/2013 taking 10 seconds open any file?

  - by jbkly

  I have a fast Windows 7 PC with two SSDs and 16GB of RAM, so I'm used to programs loading very fast. But recently, for no reason I can figure out, Excel has started taking way too long to open Excel files (of any size--even blank files). This is occurring with Excel 2010 and with Excel 2013 after I upgraded, hoping to solve the problem. Here a couple scenarios: If I start Excel directly, it opens almost instantly. No problem there. If I start Excel directly, and then open any Excel file (.xls or .xlsx), it loads almost instantly. Still no problem BUT if I attempt to open any Excel file directly, with Excel not running, it consistently takes 10-11 seconds for Excel to start. I get no error messages, just a spinning cursor for 10-11 seconds, and then the file opens. During the delay while Excel is trying to start, I'm not really seeing any discernible spike in CPU or memory usage, other than explorer.exe. This problem is only occurring with Excel, not Word or any other program I'm aware of. I've searched around quite a bit on this question and found various others who have experienced it, but the solutions that worked for them are not working for me. For a few people it was a problem with scanning network drives, but my problem is purely with local files; I have no network drives, and the problem persists even with all network connections disabled. Some people suggested worksheets with corrupted formulas or links, but I'm experiencing this with ANY Excel file: even blank worksheets. Others thought it was a problem with add-ins, but I have all Excel add-ins disabled (as far as I can tell). One person solved it by disabling a "clipboard manager" process that was running in the background, but I don't have that. I've disabled as many startup and background processes as I can, but the problem persists. I've run malware scans, disk cleanup, CCleaner, and installed Excel 2013. I've deleted temporary files, enabled SuperFetch, and edited registry keys. Still can't get rid of the problem. Any ideas? My system details: Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit, Excel 2013 32-bit, 16GB RAM, all programs installed on SSD.

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• Adaptec 5805 after reboot don't starting

  - by Rakedko ShotGuns

  After rebooting the system, the controller is not included. It only works if the computer is shut down and turn off. Late i update firmware "Adaptec RAID 5805 Firmware Build 18948" How to fix the problem? add Log Configuration summary Server name.....................raid_test Adaptec Storage Manager agent...7.31.00 (18856) Adaptec Storage Manager console.7.31.00 (18856) Number of controllers...........1 Operating system................Windows Configuration information for controller 1 ------------------------------------------------------- Type............................Controller Model...........................Adaptec 5805 Controller number...............1 Physical slot...................2 Installed memory size...........512 MB Serial number...................8C4510C6C9E Boot ROM........................5.2-0 (18948) Firmware........................5.2-0 (18948) Device driver...................5.2-0 (16119) Controller status...............Optimal Battery status..................Charging Battery temperature.............Normal Battery charge amount (%).......37 Estimated charge remaining......0 days, 16 hours, 12 minutes Background consistency check....Disabled Copy back.......................Disabled Controller temperature..........Normal (40C / 104F) Default logical drive task priorityHigh Performance mode................Dynamic Number of logical devices.......1 Number of hot-spare drives......0 Number of ready drives..........0 Number of drive(s) assigned to MaxCache cache0 Maximum drives allowed for MaxCache cache8 MaxCache Read Cache Pool Size...0 GB NCQ status......................Enabled Stay awake status...............Disabled Internal drive spinup limit.....0 External drive spinup limit.....0 Phy 0...........................No device attached Phy 1...........................No device attached Phy 2...........................No device attached Phy 3...........................1.50 Gb/s Phy 4...........................No device attached Phy 5...........................No device attached Phy 6...........................No device attached Phy 7...........................No device attached Statistics version..............2.0 SSD Cache size..................0 Pages on fetch list.............0 Fetch list candidates...........0 Candidate replacements..........0 69319...........................31293 Logical device..................0 Logical device name............. RAID level......................Simple volume Data space......................148,916 GB Date created....................09/19/2012 Interface type..................Serial ATA State...........................Optimal Read-cache mode.................Enabled Preferred MaxCache read cache settingEnabled Actual MaxCache read cache setting Disabled Write-cache mode................Enabled (write-back) Write-cache setting.............Enabled (write-back) Partitioned.....................Yes Protected by hot spare..........No Bootable........................Yes Bad stripes.....................No Power Status....................Disabled Power State.....................Active Reduce RPM timer................Never Power off timer.................Never Verify timer....................Never Segment 0.......................Present: controller 1, connector 0, device 0, S/N 9RX3KZMT Overall host IOs................99075 Overall MB......................4411203 DRAM cache hits.................71929 SSD cache hits..................0 Uncached IOs....................29239 Overall disk failures...........0 DRAM cache full hits............71929 DRAM cache fetch / flush wait...0 DRAM cache hybrid reads.........3476 DRAM cache flushes..............-- Read hits.......................0 Write hits......................0 Valid Pages.....................0 Updates on writes...............0 Invalidations by large writes...0 Invalidations by R/W balance....0 Invalidations by replacement....0 Invalidations by other..........0 Page Fetches....................0 0...............................0 73..............................10822 8...............................3 46138...........................4916 27184...........................15226 20875...........................323 16982...........................1771 1563............................5317 1948............................2969 Serial attached SCSI ----------------------- Type............................Disk drive Vendor..........................Unknown Model...........................ST3160815AS Serial Number...................9RX3KZMT Firmware level..................3.AAD Reported channel................0 Reported SCSI device ID.........0 Interface type..................Serial ATA Size............................149,05 GB Negotiated transfer speed.......1.50 Gb/s State...........................Optimal S.M.A.R.T. error................No Write-cache mode................Write back Hardware errors.................0 Medium errors...................0 Parity errors...................0 Link failures...................0 Aborted commands................0 S.M.A.R.T. warnings.............0 Solid-state disk (non-spinning).false MaxCache cache capable..........false MaxCache cache assigned.........false NCQ status......................Enabled Phy 0...........................1.50 Gb/s Power State.....................Full rpm Supported power states..........Full rpm, Powered off 0x01............................113 0x03............................98 0x04............................99 0x05............................100 0x07............................83 0x09............................75 0x0A............................100 0x0C............................99 0xBB............................100 0xBD............................100 0xBE............................61 0xC2............................39 0xC3............................69 0xC5............................100 0xC6............................100 0xC7............................200 0xC8............................100 0xCA............................100 Aborted commands................0 Link failures...................0 Medium errors...................0 Parity errors...................0 Hardware errors.................0 SMART errors....................0 End of the configuration information for controller 1 List item

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• Gateway GT5220 Boot/POST Failure

  - by John Rudy

  I have a Gateway GT5220 I'm troubleshooting. It is, in fact, the machine I just gave my father for his birthday a couple months ago. (Prior to that, it was my home PC. My home PC is now the MacBook on which I'm writing this.) Before going any further, I suspect that the answer will be, "It's worse than that, it's dead, Jim, it's dead, Jim, it's dead, Jim." At least, mobo and/or CPU. The initial symptoms were as follows: Turn on power All fans fire up (thus making it so I can't hear if the hard drive is spinning or not, nor are my hands sensitive enough anymore to feel it) No LEDs remained lit on the front panel. (Initially, the hard drive indicator flashed briefly.) No beep, no video, no nothing. Following some advice I found here, I tried to "drain the stored power." After following those steps, the new symptoms were: Turn on power All fans fire up The front panel LEDs remained lit! After about 20, maybe 30 seconds, we had video! Sort of. We got to the Gateway splash/POST screen, which appeared thoroughly corrupted. How corrupted? Well, I imagine it's what a POST screen would look like after reading the wrong passage out of the Necronomicon: It stayed there. I gave it at least 5, maybe 6 minutes, and it didn't move. So I shut her down, started her up again, and now (this is where we currently stand, symptomatically) we have this: Turn on power All fans fire up The front panel LEDs remain lit No video, no beep, no nothing. I'm a software guy; haven't done real hardware troubleshooting in years. My gut tells me that the mobo and/or CPU is fried, and unfortunately my gut didn't get to be as big as it is being wrong all the time. :( In addition to the link above, I have read all of the following (trying to save you some LMGTFY trouble): Gateway Support POST Error Messages and Handling About a zillion (useless) POST beep code sites A kioskea.net post indicating that most likely we're at what I consider "total loss" (mobo and/or CPU) My questions: Are there any conditions other than mobo/CPU that could cause symptoms like these? Is it worth my time to try the next hardware troubleshooting step?(IE, remove all non-critical hardware from the machine, try to boot, systematically replace one by one until we find the failing component) Which mobos will fit in the Gateway GT5220 case (with rear ports correctly aligned)? (Why this is not a dupe: I wouldn't have posted this question if it hadn't been for the funkadelic possessed video display on the one occasion we got video out. I think that justified this not being an exact dupe. Of course, if the community overrules, I will understand.)

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• DVD Drive Failing on Windows 7

  - by Seth Spearman

  Hello, I have x64 Windows 7 running on an ASUS M50VM. The DVD drive works completely unreliably if not at all. But the story is not that simple so bear with me...here are the gory details. When I first got the machine it came with Windows XP and I upgraded it to Windows Vista X64 and the DVD worked fine. When Windows 7 RC2 came out I tried it on a Virtual Machine and I liked it so much that I upgraded the machine to Win7 RC1. The DVD worked fine. Of course, RC1 was going to start spontaneously rebooting, so when Windows 7 was released I DID A CLEAN INSTALL of Windows 7. Just to clarify...by clean install I mean I did a FORMAT of the HARD DRIVE and INSTALLED it from scratch. EVER since then the DVD mostly doesn't work. I can sometime read from disk but that will often hang. (Please see my description below of HANG for details.) CD or DVD writes ALWAYS fail with a HANG (I have done a successful write only one time.) Here is what I mean by HANG... *Explorer Window is unresponsive. *Any software accessing the DVD drive is unresponsive. *The DVD tray will not eject. *Using a paper clip will eject but the disk is usually spinning real hard. *Attempting to shut down windows will fail. I have waited as long as ten minutes but the whole OS seems to hang. I do a hard shutdown. *Sometimes accessing the DVD (when it does not cause a HANG) will still fail and the device will actually seem to disappear from the system until I reboot. A couple of other things. It is NOT a hardware failure. It is the Windows OS. I know this because I swapped out my DVD drive with a friend with the same model...his machine is fine (he is still running Vista X64) and my machine still fails. For what it is worth. I swapped out my primary disk with the INTEL 160GB SSD. EDIT Here is what System Information shows about my DVD drive Drive D: Description CD-ROM Drive Media Loaded No Media Type DVD Writer Name HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N ATA Device Manufacturer (Standard CD-ROM drives) Status OK Transfer Rate -1.00 kbytes/sec SCSI Target ID 0 PNP Device ID IDE\CDROMHL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GSA-T50N________________RR04____\5&2B5B7F1D&0&1.0.0 Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\cdrom.sys (6.1.7600.16385, 144.00 KB (147,456 bytes), 7/13/2009 7:19 PM) Any ideas? HELP! Seth B Spearman

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• DVD Drive Failing on Windows 7

  - by Seth Spearman

  I have x64 Windows 7 running on an ASUS M50VM. The DVD drive works completely unreliably if not at all. But the story is not that simple so bear with me...here are the gory details. When I first got the machine it came with Windows XP and I upgraded it to Windows Vista X64 and the DVD worked fine. When Windows 7 RC2 came out I tried it on a Virtual Machine and I liked it so much that I upgraded the machine to Win7 RC1. The DVD worked fine. Of course, RC1 was going to start spontaneously rebooting, so when Windows 7 was released I DID A CLEAN INSTALL of Windows 7. Just to clarify...by clean install I mean I did a FORMAT of the HARD DRIVE and INSTALLED it from scratch. EVER since then the DVD mostly doesn't work. I can sometime read from disk but that will often hang. (Please see my description below of HANG for details.) CD or DVD writes ALWAYS fail with a HANG (I have done a successful write only one time.) Here is what I mean by HANG... *Explorer Window is unresponsive. *Any software accessing the DVD drive is unresponsive. *The DVD tray will not eject. *Using a paper clip will eject but the disk is usually spinning real hard. *Attempting to shut down windows will fail. I have waited as long as ten minutes but the whole OS seems to hang. I do a hard shutdown. *Sometimes accessing the DVD (when it does not cause a HANG) will still fail and the device will actually seem to disappear from the system until I reboot. A couple of other things. It is NOT a hardware failure. It is the Windows OS. I know this because I swapped out my DVD drive with a friend with the same model...his machine is fine (he is still running Vista X64) and my machine still fails. For what it is worth. I swapped out my primary disk with the INTEL 160GB SSD. EDIT Here is what System Information shows about my DVD drive Drive D: Description CD-ROM Drive Media Loaded No Media Type DVD Writer Name HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N ATA Device Manufacturer (Standard CD-ROM drives) Status OK Transfer Rate -1.00 kbytes/sec SCSI Target ID 0 PNP Device ID IDE\CDROMHL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GSA-T50N________________RR04____\5&2B5B7F1D&0&1.0.0 Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\cdrom.sys (6.1.7600.16385, 144.00 KB (147,456 bytes), 7/13/2009 7:19 PM) Any ideas? HELP! Seth B Spearman

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• Flickering issue in external monitor when used with Acer Aspire One D260 netbook (Intel GMA 3150)

  - by seyenne

  I recently purchased a Acer netbook, Aspire One D260. It runs flawlessly. Yesterday I bought a Samsung 23" TFT with a native resolution of 1920x1080. According to the information found in the internet and my local computer dealer, the Intel chipset can handle the native resolution of the monitor. However, this is only partly the case. I use the VGA cable to connect, the monitor instantly switches to the native resolution and now the problem: Occasionally, especially the first 2 hours after booting up, I have a flickering all over the screen, sometimes the entire screen is shaking and spinning around like crazy. I figured out that lowering the resolution avoids the flicker but this helps only for some time. I can rule out that it's the monitor's problem since I found no issues with another notebook. Right now, I have no problems with the netbook, for about 30 minutes I didn't experience any issues... But I don't know for how long, it occurs without warning :-) I'm worried that if I would bring the netbook back to the dealer and explain my problem, after testing it on an external screen in the local shop, everything works just fine... And I won't get helped with the problem because I can't prove it. (I'm currently in Thailand and over here, customer service is nothing like back home in Germany) What can I do? Is this a driver related issue? (I installed the latest GPU driver) Is it because of the VGA cable? (But why does it work sometimes without any problems and with no issues on the other notebook) I monitored the GPU/CPU temperature, nothing changes really over time.. Can it simply be a faulty GPU and is a replacement justifiable? I'm really stressed now because for the time I'm writing, the flickering didn't occur... but for sure, soon or later it will happen again.. I forgot to mention, the problem also happens if the netbook runs on battery, unplugged. So the only hardware that is plugged is the TFT screen. ...........and here it comes again, flickering has just begun. NEED HELP! Thank you all for reading through this and giving any suggestions if possible. Cheers

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• Backing Up vs. Redundancy

  - by TK Kocheran

  I'm currently in stage 2 of 3 of building my home workstation. What this means is that my RAID-0 array of solid state disks will be backed up nightly to a RAID-5 or RAID-6 array of traditional spinning hard disks. However, it recently dawned on me that redundancy is not backup. The main reason for setting up a RAID array with redundancy was to protect myself in the event of a drive failure to serve as an effective backup solution. Wait. What if a bolt of lightning finds a way to travel into my house, through my surge-protector, into my power supply and physically destroys all of my hard disks and SSDs? Well, in that case, I guess I'd be fine because I generally keep most important files (music, pictures, videos) stored in multiple places like on my laptop, my wife's laptop, and an encrypted USB hard drive. Wait. What if a giant hedgehog meteor attacks my house from space traveling at mach 3 and all machines and hard disks are blown to smithereens. Well, I guess I could find a way to do ridiculously slow and cumbersome rsyncs or backups to Amazon's Glacier. Wait. What if there's a nuclear apocalypse... and at this point I start laughing hysterically. At what point does backing up become irrelevant? I completely understand situation one (mechanical drive failure), situation two (workstation compromised or destroyed somehow), possibly even situation three (all machines and disks destroyed), but situation four? There's no questioning the need for backups. None. However, there are three questions I'd really like addressed: To what level should one backup? I definitely understand the merits of physical disk redundancy. I also believe in keeping important files on multiple machines and thinning out the possibility of losing all of my files. Online backups make sense, but they beg the following question. What should I be backing up remotely and how often? It's no problem storage-wise to back up important files (music, pictures, videos) and even configuration and temporal data for all of the machines in my network (all Linux based)... albeit locally. Transferring to the cloud is another story. Worst-case scenario, if I lost all of my configuration for my individual computers, the reality is that I probably lost the machines too. The cloud is a long way away from here; I can run backups over CAT-6 here and see 100MB/s easily, but I'm afraid that I'm only going to see 2MB/s at best when transferring up to the cloud.

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• Adaptec 5805 not recognized after reboot

  - by Rakedko ShotGuns

  After rebooting the system, the controller is not recognized. It only works if the computer is shut down and turned off. I have recently updated the firmware to "Adaptec RAID 5805 Firmware Build 18948". How do I fix the problem? Configuration summary --------------------------- 1. Server name.....................raid_test Adaptec Storage Manager agent...7.31.00 (18856) Adaptec Storage Manager console.7.31.00 (18856) Number of controllers...........1 Operating system................Windows Configuration information for controller 1 ------------------------------------------------------- Type............................Controller Model...........................Adaptec 5805 Controller number...............1 Physical slot...................2 Installed memory size...........512 MB Serial number...................8C4510C6C9E Boot ROM........................5.2-0 (18948) Firmware........................5.2-0 (18948) Device driver...................5.2-0 (16119) Controller status...............Optimal Battery status..................Charging Battery temperature.............Normal Battery charge amount (%).......37 Estimated charge remaining......0 days, 16 hours, 12 minutes Background consistency check....Disabled Copy back.......................Disabled Controller temperature..........Normal (40C / 104F) Default logical drive task priority High Performance mode................Dynamic Number of logical devices.......1 Number of hot-spare drives......0 Number of ready drives..........0 Number of drive(s) assigned to MaxCache cache0 Maximum drives allowed for MaxCache cache8 MaxCache Read Cache Pool Size...0 GB NCQ status......................Enabled Stay awake status...............Disabled Internal drive spinup limit.....0 External drive spinup limit.....0 Phy 0...........................No device attached Phy 1...........................No device attached Phy 2...........................No device attached Phy 3...........................1.50 Gb/s Phy 4...........................No device attached Phy 5...........................No device attached Phy 6...........................No device attached Phy 7...........................No device attached Statistics version..............2.0 SSD Cache size..................0 Pages on fetch list.............0 Fetch list candidates...........0 Candidate replacements..........0 69319...........................31293 Logical device..................0 Logical device name............. RAID level......................Simple volume Data space......................148,916 GB Date created....................09/19/2012 Interface type..................Serial ATA State...........................Optimal Read-cache mode.................Enabled Preferred MaxCache read cache settingEnabled Actual MaxCache read cache setting Disabled Write-cache mode................Enabled (write-back) Write-cache setting.............Enabled (write-back) Partitioned.....................Yes Protected by hot spare..........No Bootable........................Yes Bad stripes.....................No Power Status....................Disabled Power State.....................Active Reduce RPM timer................Never Power off timer.................Never Verify timer....................Never Segment 0.......................Present: controller 1, connector 0, device 0, S/N 9RX3KZMT Overall host IOs................99075 Overall MB......................4411203 DRAM cache hits.................71929 SSD cache hits..................0 Uncached IOs....................29239 Overall disk failures...........0 DRAM cache full hits............71929 DRAM cache fetch / flush wait...0 DRAM cache hybrid reads.........3476 DRAM cache flushes..............-- Read hits.......................0 Write hits......................0 Valid Pages.....................0 Updates on writes...............0 Invalidations by large writes...0 Invalidations by R/W balance....0 Invalidations by replacement....0 Invalidations by other..........0 Page Fetches....................0 0...............................0 73..............................10822 8...............................3 46138...........................4916 27184...........................15226 20875...........................323 16982...........................1771 1563............................5317 1948............................2969 Serial attached SCSI ----------------------- Type............................Disk drive Vendor..........................Unknown Model...........................ST3160815AS Serial Number...................9RX3KZMT Firmware level..................3.AAD Reported channel................0 Reported SCSI device ID.........0 Interface type..................Serial ATA Size............................149,05 GB Negotiated transfer speed.......1.50 Gb/s State...........................Optimal S.M.A.R.T. error................No Write-cache mode................Write back Hardware errors.................0 Medium errors...................0 Parity errors...................0 Link failures...................0 Aborted commands................0 S.M.A.R.T. warnings.............0 Solid-state disk (non-spinning).false MaxCache cache capable..........false MaxCache cache assigned.........false NCQ status......................Enabled Phy 0...........................1.50 Gb/s Power State.....................Full rpm Supported power states..........Full rpm, Powered off 0x01............................113 0x03............................98 0x04............................99 0x05............................100 0x07............................83 0x09............................75 0x0A............................100 0x0C............................99 0xBB............................100 0xBD............................100 0xBE............................61 0xC2............................39 0xC3............................69 0xC5............................100 0xC6............................100 0xC7............................200 0xC8............................100 0xCA............................100 Aborted commands................0 Link failures...................0 Medium errors...................0 Parity errors...................0 Hardware errors.................0 SMART errors....................0 End of the configuration information for controller 1

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• Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 CD 1 cannot boot: freeze at No Emulation

  - by TGP1994

  Hi everyone. I've been interested in the Windows Server line of OSes, so since I apply for DreamSpark, I thought I'd go download it and try it. I just so happened to have an old desktop that I was using awhile ago for Windows XP, so I imaged the drive in preparation for it to be overwritten with the new OS. (This system has an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ processor, and 1GB of RAM.) I tried burning the first disk image on my newer desktop computer, running Windows XP, although the CD burner consistently failed at a particular track area from cd to cd, so it seemed like the burner was toast there. Fortunately, I had a laptop, so I transferred the images over to that, then burned the first disc there. First time around went great, and the burning program reported no errors. I then took the CD over to the computer that I was intending to install Server onto, set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive, then I booted it up. Like normal, after the POST, it printed "Boot from ATAPI CD-Rom: No Emulation", which I was used to seeing with bootable cds. I waited for the "Press any key to continue..." message that I had become so familiar with in windows discs, although I saw none. The computer sat there for about 5 seconds with the cd spinning, then it spun down like it was done reading it. Nothing else happened. No response from the keyboard. I tried again, same result. I then downloaded IMGBurn, and I put the burned cd into the laptop that burned it originally. I also downloaded a fresh image from the dreamspark site. I ran a verify session, and everything checked out. I later tried getting various DOS startup discs, then I tried booting the winnt binary, which supposedly initiates the installation process. Either the shells reported that not enough memory was available (since they would be running in low memory mode), or FreeDOS in particular would report Illegal instructions right away. Is the image corrupt at dreamspark, or am I doing something wrong?

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• Reliable access to Internet but not local network (not DNS or proxy issues)

  - by Ian Goldby

  I'm looking for help with a Vista Home Premium laptop that has trouble accessing any resource on our home network, but accesses the Internet just fine. The set-up is this: The Vista laptop and a MacBook Pro connect wirelessly to the router-modem. A Synology DS212j NAS drive has a wired connection to the router-modem. Devices on the local network are always referred to by IP address, so this cannot be a DNS issue. The MacBook Pro connects reliably to the NA via AFP (network shared folders), SMB (network shared folders) and HTTP. The Vista laptop connects to and browses sites on the Internet without any problems. It can log into the NAS via SMB and list the shared folders (so there is nothing wrong with the log-in credentials), but when it tries to open any of the folders Explorer just hangs with the spinning cursor for several minutes and then says "\192.168.1.64\shared\Photos is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The specified network name is no longer available." It can ping the NAS successfully. If I try to open the NAS drive's web interface, the browser just hangs. This is the same with IE, Firefox and Chrome. (There is no proxy.) I can log into the NAS drive with FTP and navigate directories, but when I try to list the contents of a directory with more than a handful of entries, the ftp client hangs. I set up a website on the MacBook. The Vista laptop was able to load some of the pages, but loading any of the images was very hit and miss. Images embedded in HTML pages never worked no matter how many times I reloaded the page, but when I linked directly to the image it did load (though several attempts were sometimes needed). I tried all of this with the Windows Firewall turned off, and with AVG turned off. That made no difference. I'd really appreciate any suggestions anyone can make. The fact that the Vista laptop has trouble with HTTP and FTP as well as SMB connections suggests to me that this is a problem at the TCP level or below. But don't forget it accesses sites outside the LAN with no problems.

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• How to tune system settings for mongoDB on Linux?

  - by jsh

  Trying to squeeze a lot out of one question here -- please bear with me. Although the MongoDB man pages make several useful recommendations about system settings like ulimit (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/ulimit/), and other production factors (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/administration/production-notes/) they seem mysteriously silent on things like virtual memory and swap settings. The closest we get to a hint is that "...the operating system’s virtual memory subsystem manages MongoDB’s memory..." (http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/fundamentals/#does-mongodb-require-a-lot-of-ram). Running the same job - high writes and high reads on about 10,000,000 records in a single collection -- on my 4-processor, 4GB RAM macbook and an 8-core ubuntu box with 64GB RAM I saw dramatically WORSE read performance on the linux box with factory settings, and could hear the disk constantly spinning, indicating high I/O and presumably swapping. Yes, other things were happening on the box, but there was plenty of free RAM, disk space, etc.; furthermore, I did not see evidence that Mongo was expanding to take advantage of all that free RAM as it is touted to do. Linux box default settings were as follows: vm.swappiness =60 vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10 vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs =3000 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=500 I hazarded some guesses looking at docs and blogs for other types of databases (Oracle, MYSQL, etc.), experimented, and adjusted as below. vm.swappiness=10 vm.dirty_background_ratio=5 vm.dirty_ratio=5 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs=250 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs=500 I saw some immediate apparent improvements in read time. However, when I ran my test jobs again, read performance continued to be painfully sluggish during heavy writes. Then, I REBUILT the collection from an available data source - and suddenly I can read at 1ms or less per record WHILE doing the write job! So the question is really two-fold: 1) What are appropriate VM settings for MongoDB on Linux? 2) (bonus) Does Mongo do some checking or optimization with the OS while data is being built? In other words, if I have built a large data set with suboptimal VM or I/O settings, does Mongo make assumptions during the memory-mapping process that will fail to take advantage of optimizations down the road? Obviously I don't fully grok memory mapping under the hood (I was hoping I wouldn't have to). Any help appreciated...thanks! -j

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• PC will POST whenever feels likes it

  - by kyrpas

  I'm really sick of my PC and I'd love to throw it off the 5th floor but unfortunately I don't have this luxury right now. The issues started when I moved to a new house about 2 months ago. I didn't have this problem before. Case: Arctic Cooling Silentium T1 with embedded Fusion 550 Eco 80 PSU. M/B: ASRock A790GMH/128M Gfx: ATI Radeon HD 5770 Here's what's happening almost on a daily basis: I wake up in the morning, switch on the PC and all the fans start spinning. 9/10 the graphics fan stays on 100% and I know it won't post. If I'm lucky, ATI's fan stays on full power for a second, then goes back to normal and I get a normal post but that doesn't happen often. No, instead it's just drives me crazy. When I get no POST I'm trying a lot of different things and what bothers me the most is that they all work. But not always. No... That way I could find out what the hell is going on and we don't want that.. right? So, sometimes it manages to POST if I: remove the keyboard remove the power cable for a few minutes remove the graphics card remove the HDD cables do nothing, just turn it on and off a few times Sometimes it doesn't POST even if I do all of the above. And I end up removing all power cables from the M/B, and connecting all the stuff one by one. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I just have to pray and wait. What the hell is that? I'm getting pissed of again just thinking about it. The only solution is to leave it on 24/7 but I don't want to do that. It should be able to turn on and off when I press the power button. I'm not asking much. I'm starting to think there's some weird electricity/power issue but I really don't understand what it is. There's no logical explanation about it. At least I can't find one. Any ideas?

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• netbook intel GMA 3150 external monitor 1920x1080 flicker problem

  - by seyenne

  Dear all, i recently purchased a acer netbook (apsire one d260). It runs flawlessly. Yesterday I bought a samsung 23" TFT with a native resolution of 1920x1080. According to the information found in the internet and my local computer dealer, the intel chipset can handle the native resolution of the monitor. However, this is only partly the case. I use the VGA cabel to connect, the monitor instantly switches to the native resolution and now the problem: Occasionaly, especially the first 2 hours after booting up, I have a flickering all over the screen, sometimes the entire screen is shaking and spinning around like crazy. I figured out, that lowering the resolution avoids the flicker but this helps only for some time. I can rule out that it's the monitor's problem since I found no issues with another notebook. Right now, I have no problems with the netbook, for about 30 minutes I didn't experience any issues... But I don't know for how long, it occurs without warning :-) I'm worried that if I would bring the netbook back to the dealer and explain my problem, after testing it on an external screen in the local shop, everything works just fine... And I won't get helped with the problem because I can't prove it. (I'm currently in Thailand and over here, customer service is nothing like back home in Germany) What can I do? Is this a driver related issue? (I installed the latest GPU driver) Is it because of the VGA cable? (But why does it work sometimes without any problems and with no issues on the other notebook) I monitored the GPU/CPU temperature, nothing changes really over time..Can it simply be a faulty GPU and is a replacement justifiable? I'm really stressed now because for the time I'm writing, the flickering didn't occur...but for sure, soon or later it will happen again.. I Forgot to mention, the problem also happens if the netbook runs on battery, unplugged. So the only hardware that is plugged is the TFT screen. ...........and here it comes again, flickering has just begun. NEED HELP! Thank you all for reading through this and giving any suggestions if possible. Cheers

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• Windows Update and IE fail to connect, but Chrome fine?

  - by I Gottlieb

  Out of ideas on this one. (Running Windows Vista.) I have a program that accesses the internet to retrieve financial market data. One day it tells me that it can't log in -- timeout error. I check the documentation and it says must have a working copy of IE browser installed. I check IE (have IE9) and sure enough -- it just spins. No error message, not timeout, no 'try later' -- just spins -- as far as I can tell, indefinitely. Any page, any address. Even access to a localhost site just spins. Chrome works fine. So does another program I have that fetches market data. Windows 'diagnose and repair' says my internet connection is working fine. I tried uninstall/re-install of IE. Same spinning. I tried to install Windows Updates, and guess what? I can't. I comes up with error 80072efd; checked documentation for the error and it says I should check firewall blockage. Thing is, the only firewall I have is Windows Firewall, and obviously it wouldn't be blocking Windows Update. In contrast, Windows 'Help' in all programs has no problem accessing the Internet. I had a filter on the internet connection, and this was updated just prior to first appearance of the problem. But I uninstalled the filter entirely (official, with passwd from the company's service rep) -- and no difference. I'm guessing that a high level Windows network service file is corrupted -- used only by MS programs and their ilk, but how do I find it? I'd like to avoid having to do a clean install of Windows. Much obliged for any insight. IG Ramhound -- Thanks for reply. I'm familiar with virtual machines as in e.g. JVM or an emulator for an alternative architecture or (theoretical) Turing Machine equivalence. But I'm not familiar with the way you're using the term. Please clarify -- what one needs for this VM 'test' and why you expect it will provide an advantage of insight into the problem. And what sort of 'configuration issue' are you referring to? IG

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• How to Animate Text and Objects in PowerPoint 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for an eye catching way to keep your audience interested in your PowerPoint presentations? Today we’ll take a look at how to add animation effects to objects in PowerPoint 2010. Select the object you wish to animate and then click the More button in the Animation group of the Animation tab.   Animations are grouped into four categories. Entrance effects, Exit effects, Emphasis effects, and Motion Paths. You can get a Live Preview of how the animation will look by hovering your mouse over an animation effect.   When you select a Motion Path, your object will move along the dashed path line as shown on the screen. (This path is not displayed in the final output) Certain aspects of the Motion Path effects are editable. When you apply a Motion Path animation to an object, you can select the path and drag the end to change the length or size of the path. The green marker along the motion path marks the beginning of the  path and the red marks the end. The effects can be rotated by clicking and the bar near the center of the effect.   You can display additional effects by choosing one of the options at the bottom. This will pop up a Change Effect window. If you have Preview Effect checked at the lower left you can preview the effects by single clicking.   Apply Multiple Animations to an Object Select the object and then click the Add Animation button to display the animation effects. Just as we did with the first effect, you can hover over to get a live preview. Click to apply the effect. The animation effects will happen in the order they are applied. Animation Pane You can view a list of the animations applied to a slide by opening the Animation Pane. Select the Animation Pane button from the Advanced Animation group to display the Animation Pane on the right. You’ll see that each animation effect in the animation pane has an assigned number to the left.    Timing Animation Effects You can change when your animation starts to play. By default it is On Click. To change it, select the effect in the Animation Pane and then choose one of the options from the Start dropdown list. With Previous starts at the same time as the previous animation and After Previous starts after the last animation. You can also edit the duration that the animations plays and also set a delay.   You can change the order in which the animation effects are applied by selecting the effect in the animation pane and clicking Move Earlier or Move Later from the Timing group on the Animation tab. Effect Options If the Effect Options button is available when your animation is selected, then that particular animation has some additional effect settings that can be configured. You can access the Effect Option by right-clicking on the the animation in the Animation Pane, or by selecting Effect Options on the ribbon.   The available options will vary by effect and not all animation effects will have Effect Options settings. In the example below, you can change the amount of spinning and whether the object will spin clockwise or counterclockwise.   Under Enhancements, you can add sound effects to your animation. When you’re finished click OK.   Animating Text Animating Text works the same as animating an object. Simply select your text box and choose an animation. Text does have some different Effect Options. By selecting a sequence, you decide whether the text appears as one object, all at once, or by paragraph. As is the case with objects, there will be different available Effect Options depending on the animation you choose. Some animations, such as the Fly In animation, will have directional options.   Testing Your Animations Click on the Preview button at any time to test how your animations look. You can also select the Play button on the Animation Pane. Conclusion Animation effects are a great way to focus audience attention on important points and hold viewers interest in your PowerPoint presentations. Another cool way to spice up your PPT 2010 presentations is to add video from the web. What tips do you guys have for making your PowerPoint presentations more interesting? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010Preview Before You Paste with Live Preview in Office 2010Embed True Type Fonts in Word and PowerPoint 2007 DocumentsHow to Add Video from the Web in PowerPoint 2010Add Artistic Effects to Your Pictures in Office 2010 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials

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• Happy 3rd Birthday SilverlightCream!

  - by Dave Campbell

  Happy 3rd Birthday!     Yesterday (May 16) was the 'Birthday' of SilverlightCream, which started just after MIX in 2007 with a post "Interesting Silverlight posts today: Silverlight Control & Silverlight Pad". Too many good posts flying around led me to want to archive them, particularly since I was being aggregated at a new site Silverlight.net, and I could give some of that 'reach' to the community. Saturday's post was number 862, and as of that post, there were 5697 blog posts archived in the database all tagged up and searchable at SilverlightCream.com using the search page. The search needs to be better, and that's another discussion, but it does work. The blog didn't begin life as the SilverlightCream blog, as is obvious from the name, but once I realized people were following it closely, I've tried to keep the signal-to-noise ratio very high. I even secured another blog for when I just want to rant about something to keep that stuff out of this one :) If you've been around since MIX07 days you've heard all this, but after talking to some people at MIX10 I realized not everyone knows all the ways the information is presented, so I figured doing a post like this once a year probably isn't a bad idea :) I scrounge through an ever-growing list of blogs (right now sitting at 505) looking for good stuff. I try to spin through the list every day, but with the list growing that large, it's getting tough. I usually use it as a background task while working or watching TV. If I just sit and go through the blogs it takes about an hour. The list is long enough now that from time to time, I'll only get partway through it and have 10 to 13 entries, so I'll just stop there and go on the next day... I don't like to have more than 15 in any single post. It's all pattern recognition as in "seen that", "seen that", "that's new", etc... so if you're a blogger, look at a heading below for some comments about blogging from my perspective. When I see something new, I make sure you're not pulling a 'Mike Taulty' on me and dumping 6 or 8 new posts in one day :), and I tag the ones I want to review. If there's not a lot going on, I may just push the posts as I come across them. Some days there may be 60 posts in that 'to review' list! Some are non-Silverlight, some are essentially duplicates of others, some are demos, ads, new releases of something, session materials, etc. I push lots of material into a database at WynApse.com, and the "Tagged Posts" menu on the left sidebar there takes you to a tag cloud of (at this very moment) "9224 articles tagged 13915 different ways using 459 unique tags". There are links in there on Gibson guitars, Jazz Guitar instructional stuff, Ford F-250 links, and tons of technical and non-technical stuff I've been aggregating for about 5 years now. So when I decide to blog (or shoutout) something, I first push it into the database at WynApse.com. Then I tag it all up and push it into the database at SilverlightCream.com. Then it gets pushed to @SilverlightNews. For a little over a year now, we're tracking unique IP hits on posts launched from either the blog post or from one of the SilverlightCream.com pages, and the posts with top hits from unique IP addresses in the last 7 days are displayed in a 'Skim' page at SilverlightCream... and that page needs work as well. The Skim page and tracking was the brainchild of my buddy Michael Washington. What I blog/shoutout After some time doing posts, I decided there were things that probably have no need to be searchable, but are good information, so I post those as 'Shoutouts'. Eventually I also decided the Shoutouts should get posted to @SilverlightNews, and that's now taking place. Notes to bloggers Remember I said spinning throught the Big List-o-BlogsTM is pattern recognition... that means I don't spend a lot of time on any individual blog deciding if it has new content. If you're familiar with the term 'Above the Fold', then you're probably ok. If I have to scroll the page to see if there's something new, or wade through some maze of menus, I'm probably going to miss new stuff. Likewise if you only show the latest on the front page and make it a puzzle to find the rest of them, or if you make the titles and initial graphics almost identical to the previous article, I'll miss it. Another thing is name/brand-recognition. Far be it for me (WynApse) to comment on someone blogging with a pseudonym, but if you want to get get some recognition, you are going to want your name to be available somewhere. I can think right off the top of my head of a couple good blogs that I have no idea of the individuals' real names. I can pull that off a bit because I've been around so long almost everyone knows who I am, but if you're new to the blog-o-sphere, being able to be name-recognized is as important as getting your brand out there. Kick my tires Finally, stuff happens... I may hit the wrong key and delete your blog, or a post might slip past me and I not realize it's new because of the naming, and never blog it. If you think I missed something, send me an email or use the submit page at SilverlightCream.com. Some bloggers have figured out that if they submit (one way or another) to me, their posts will go out next. I try to honor anyone that takes the time to submit with a quicker 'Cream posting. Thanks! Finally, thanks to everyone that contributes to the community as a whole... the blogs, the videos, and the presentations. A special thanks to everyone that reads SilverlightCream, or follows @WynApse or @SilverlightNews. Keep it all coming, and... Stay in the 'Light

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• Autoscaling in a modern world&hellip;. Part 2

  - by Steve Loethen

  When we last left off, we had a web application spinning away in the cloud, and a local console application watching it and reacting to changes in demand.  Reactions that were specified by a set of rules.  Let’s talk about those rules. Constraints.  The first set of rules this application answered to were the constraints. Here is what they looked like: <constraintRules> <rule name="default" enabled="true" rank="1" description="The default constraint rule"> <actions> <range min="1" max="4" target="AutoscalingApplicationRole"/> </actions> </rule> </constraintRules> Pretty basic.  We have one role, the “AutoscalingApplicationRole”, and we have decided to have it live within a range of 1 to 4.  This rule does not adjust, but instead, set’s limits on what other rules can do.  It has a rank, so you can have you can specify other sets of constraints, perhaps based on time or date, to allow for deviations from this set.  But for now, let’s keep it simple.  In the real world, you would probably use the minimum to set a lower end SLA.  A common value might be a 2, to prevent the reactive rules from ever taking you down to 1 role.  The maximum is often used to keep a rule from driving the cost up, setting an upper limit to prevent you waking up one morning and find a bill for hundreds of instances you didn’t expect.  So, here we have the range we want our application to live inside.  This is good for our investigation and testing.  Next, let’s take a look at the reactive rules.  These rules are what you use to react (hence reactive rules) to changing demands on your application.  The HOL has two simple rules.  One that looks at a queue depth, and one that looks at a performance counter that reports cpu utilization.  the XML in the rules file looks like this: <reactiveRules> <rule name="ScaleUp" rank="10" description="Scale Up the web role" enabled="true"> <when> <any> <greaterOrEqual operand="Length_05_holqueue" than="10"/> <greaterOrEqual operand="CPU_05_holwebrole" than="65"/> </any> </when> <actions> <scale target="AutoscalingApplicationRole" by="1"/> </actions> </rule> <rule name="ScaleDown" rank="10" description="Scale down the web role" enabled="true"> <when> <all> <less operand="Length_05_holqueue" than="5"/> <less operand="CPU_05_holwebrole" than="40"/> </all> </when> <actions> <scale target="AutoscalingApplicationRole" by="-1"/> </actions> </rule> </reactiveRules> <operands> <performanceCounter alias="CPU_05_holwebrole" performanceCounterName="\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time" source="AutoscalingApplicationRole" timespan="00:05:00" aggregate="Average" /> <queueLength alias="Length_05_holqueue" queue="hol-queue" timespan="00:05:00" aggregate="Average"/> </operands> These rules are currently contained in a file called rules.xml, that is in the root of the console application.  The console app, starts up, grabs the rules and starts watching the 2 operands.  When it detects a rule has been satisfied, it performs the desired action.  (here, scale up or down my 1). But I want to host the autoscaler  in the cloud.  For my first trick, I will move the rules (and another file called services.xml) to azure blob storage.  Look for part 3.

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• IBM Keynote: (hardware,software)–>{IBM.java.patterns}

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On Sunday evening, September 30, 2012, Jason McGee, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Cloud Computing, along with John Duimovich IBM Distinguished Engineer and Java CTO, gave an information- and idea-rich keynote that left Java developers with much to ponder.Their focus was on the challenges to make Java more efficient and productive given the hardware and software environments of 2012. “One idea that is very interesting is the idea of multi-tenancy,” said McGee, “and how we can move up the spectrum. In traditional systems, we ran applications on dedicated middleware, operating systems and hardware. A lot of customers still run that way. Now people introduce hardware virtualization and share the hardware. That is good but there is a lot more we can do. We can share middleware and the application itself.” McGee challenged developers to better enable the Java language to function in these higher density models. He spoke about the need to describe patterns that help us grasp the full environment that an application needs, whether it’s a web or full enterprise application. Developers need to understand the resources that an application interacts with in a way that is simple and straightforward. The task is to then automate that deployment so that the complexity of infrastructure can be by-passed and developers can live in a simpler world where the cloud can automatically configure the needed environment. McGee argued that the key, something IBM has been working on, is to use a simpler pattern that allows a cloud-based architecture to embrace the entire infrastructure required for an application and make it highly available, scalable and able to recover from failure. The cloud-based architecture would automate the complexity of setting up and managing the infrastructure. IBM has been trying to realize this vision for customers so they can describe their Java application environment simply and allow the cloud to automate the deployment and management of applications. “The point,” explained McGee, “is to package the executable used to describe applications, to drop it into a shared system and let that system provide some intelligence about how to deploy and manage those applications.”John Duimovich on Improvements in JavaMcGee then brought onstage IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Java, John Duimovich, who showed the audience ways to deploy Java applications more efficiently.Duimovich explained that, “When you run lots of copies of Java in the cloud or any hypervisor virtualized system, there are a lot of duplications of code and jar files. IBM has a facility called ‘shared classes’ where we put shared code, read only artefacts in a cache that is sharable across hypervisors.” By putting JIT code in ahead of time, he explained that the application server will use 20% less memory and operate 30% faster.  He described another example of how the JVM allows for the maximum amount of sharing that manages the tenants and file sockets and memory use through throttling and control. Duimovich touched on the “thin is in” model and IBM’s Liberty Profile and lightweight runtime for the cloud, which allows for greater efficiency in interacting with the cloud.Duimovich discussed the confusion Java developers experience when, for example, the hypervisor tells them that that they have 8 and then 4 and then 16 cores. “Because hypervisors are virtualized, they can change based on resource needs across the hypervisor layer. You may have 10 instances of an operation system and you may need to reallocate memory, " explained Duimovich.  He showed how to resize LPARs, reallocate CPUs and migrate applications as needed. He explained how application servers can resize thread pools and better use resources based on information from the hypervisors.Java Challenges in Hardware and SoftwareMcGee ended the keynote with a summary of upcoming hardware and software challenges for the Java platform. He noted that one reason developers love Java is it allows them to ignore differences in hardware. He stated that the most important things happening in hardware were in network and storage – in developments such as the speed of SSD, the exploitation of high-speed, low-latency networking, and recent developments such as storage-class memory, and non-volatile main memory. “So we are challenged to maintain the benefits of Java and the abstraction it provides from hardware while still exploiting the new innovations in hardware,” said McGee.McGee discussed transactional messaging applications where developers send messages transactionally persist a message to storage, something traditionally done by backing messages on spinning disks, something mostly outdated. “Now,” he pointed out, “we would use SSD and store it in Flash and get 70,000 messages a second. If we stored it using a PCI express-based flash memory device, it is still Flash but put on a PCI express bus on a card closer to the CPU. This way I get 300,000 messages a second and 25% improvement in latency.” McGee’s central point was that hardware has a huge impact on the performance and scalability of applications. New technologies are enabling developers to build classes of Java applications previously unheard of. “We need to be able to balance these things in Java – we need to maintain the abstraction but also be able to exploit the evolution of hardware technology,” said McGee. According to McGee, IBM's current focus is on systems wherein hardware and software are shipped together in what are called Expert Integrated Systems – systems that are pre-optimized, and pre-integrated together. McGee closed IBM’s engaging and thought-provoking keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers now must understand the strengths and weaknesses of such newcomers as applications increasingly involve a complex interconnection of languages.

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