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  • Handling Model Inheritance in ASP.NET MVC2

    - by enth
    I've gotten myself stuck on how to handle inheritance in my model when it comes to my controllers/views. Basic Model: public class Procedure : Entity { public Procedure() { } public int Id { get; set; } public DateTime ProcedureDate { get; set; } public ProcedureType Type { get; set; } } public ProcedureA : Procedure { public double VariableA { get; set; } public int VariableB { get; set; } public int Total { get; set; } } public ProcedureB : Procedure { public int Score { get; set; } } etc... many of different procedures eventually. So, I do things like list all the procedures: public class ProcedureController : Controller { public virtual ActionResult List() { IEnumerable<Procedure> procedures = _repository.GetAll(); return View(procedures); } } but now I'm kinda stuck. Basically, from the list page, I need to link to pages where the specific subclass details can be viewed/edited and I'm not sure what the best strategy is. I thought I could add an action on the ProcedureController that would conjure up the right subclass by dynamically figuring out what repository to use and loading the subclass to pass to the view. I had to store the class in the ProcedureType object. I had to create/implement a non-generic IRepository since I can't dynamically cast to a generic one. public virtual ActionResult Details(int procedureID) { Procedure procedure = _repository.GetById(procedureID, false); string className = procedure.Type.Class; Type type = Type.GetType(className, true); Type repositoryType = typeof (IRepository<>).MakeGenericType(type); var repository = (IRepository)DependencyRegistrar.Resolve(repositoryType); Entity procedure = repository.GetById(procedureID, false); return View(procedure); } I haven't even started sorting out how the view is going to determine which partial to load to display the subclass details. I'm wondering if this is a good approach? This makes determining the URL easy. It makes reusing the Procedure display code easy. Another approach is specific controllers for each subclass. It simplifies the controller code, but also means many simple controllers for the many procedure subclasses. Can work out the shared Procedure details with a partial view. How to get to construct the URL to get to the controller/action in the first place? Time to not think about it. Hopefully someone can show me the light. Thanks in advance.

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  • How to get ImageButton size within Android GridView?

    - by wufoo
    I'm subclassing ImageButton in order to draw lines on it and trying to figure out where the actual button coordinates are within my gridview. I am using onGlobalLayout to setup Top, Bottom, Right and Left, but these seem to be for the actual "square" within the grid, and not the actual button (see image). The purple lines are drawn in myImageButton.onDraw() using coords gathered from myImageButton.onGlobalLayout(). I thought these would be for the button, but they seem to be from something else. Not sure what. I'd like the purple lines to match the outline of the button so the lines I draw appear on the button and not just floating out in the LinearLayout somewhere. The light blue is the background color of the vertical LinearLayout holding the Textview (for the number) and myImageButton. Any way to get the actual button size? XML Layout: <FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/lay_cellframe" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" > <LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:gravity="fill_vertical|fill_horizontal" android:orientation="vertical" > <TextView android:id="@+id/tv_cell" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_margin="2dp" android:gravity="center" android:text="TextView" android:textSize="10sp" /> <com.example.icaltest2.myImageButton android:id="@+id/imageButton1" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_gravity="center" android:layout_margin="0dp" android:adjustViewBounds="false" android:background="@android:drawable/btn_default" android:scaleType="fitXY" android:src="@android:color/transparent" /> </LinearLayout> </FrameLayout> myImageButton.java public myImageButton (Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super (context, attrs); mBounds = new Rect(); ViewTreeObserver vto = this.getViewTreeObserver (); vto.addOnGlobalLayoutListener (ogl); Log.d (TAG, "myImageButton"); } ... OnGlobalLayoutListener ogl = new OnGlobalLayoutListener() { @Override public void onGlobalLayout () { Rect b = getDrawable ().getBounds (); mBtnTop = b.centerY () - (b.height () / 2); mBtnBot = b.centerY () + (b.height () / 2); mBtnLeft = b.centerX () - (b.width () / 2); mBtnRight = b.centerX () + (b.width () / 2); } }; ... @Override protected void onDraw (Canvas canvas) { super.onDraw (canvas); Paint p = new Paint (); p.setStyle (Paint.Style.STROKE); p.setStrokeWidth (1); p.setColor (Color.MAGENTA); canvas.drawCircle (mBtnLeft, mBtnTop, 2, p); canvas.drawCircle (mBtnLeft, mBtnBot, 2, p); canvas.drawCircle (mBtnRight, mBtnTop, 2, p); canvas.drawCircle (mBtnRight, mBtnBot, 2, p); canvas.drawRect (mBtnLeft, mBtnTop, mBtnRight, mBtnBot, p); }

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  • Unexpected output while using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (Express Edition) C++ Command Line Tool

    - by Sujith S Pillai
    One of my friends sent this code to me, saying it doesn't work as expected: #include<stdio.h> void main() { int a [10] ={23, 100, 20, 30, 25, 45, 40, 55, 43, 42}; int sizeOfInput = sizeof(a)/sizeof(int); int b, outer, inner, c; printf("Size is : %d \n", sizeOfInput); printf("Values before bubble sort are : \n"); for ( b = 0; b < sizeOfInput; b++) printf("%d\n", a[b]); printf("End of values before bubble sort... \n"); for ( outer = sizeOfInput; outer > 0; outer-- ) { for ( inner = 0 ; inner < outer ; inner++) { printf ( "Comparing positions: %d and %d\n",inner,inner+1); if ( a[inner] > a[inner + 1] ) { int tmp = a[inner]; a[inner] = a [inner+1]; a[inner+1] = tmp; } } printf ( "Bubble sort total array size after inner loop is %d :\n",sizeOfInput); printf ( "Bubble sort sizeOfInput after inner loop is %d :\n",sizeOfInput); } printf ( "Bubble sort total array size at the end is %d :\n",sizeOfInput); for ( c = 0 ; c < sizeOfInput; c++) printf("Element: %d\n", a[c]); } I am using Micosoft Visual Studio Command Line Tool for compiling this on a Windows XP machine. cl /EHsc bubblesort01.c My friend gets the correct output on a dinosaur machine (code is compiled using TCC there). My output is unexpected. The array mysteriously grows in size, in between. If you change the code so that the variable sizeOfInput is changed to sizeOfInputt, it gives the expected results! A search done at Microsoft Visual C++ Developer Center doesn't give any results for "sizeOfInput". I am not a C/C++ expert, and am curious to find out why this happens - any C/C++ experts who can "shed some light" on this? Unrelated note: I seriously thought of rewriting the whole code to use quicksort or merge sort before posting it here. But, after all, it is not Stooge sort...

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  • I know I'm doing something wrong with RaiseCanExecuteChanged and CanExecute

    - by Cowman
    Well after fiddling with MVVM light to get my button to enable and disable when I want it to... I sort of mashed things together until it worked. However, I just know I'm doing something wrong here. I have RaiseCanExecuteChanged and CanExecute in the same area being called. Surely this is not how it's done? Here's my xaml <Button Margin="10, 25, 10, 25" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Width="50" Height="50" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3" Content="Host"> <i:Interaction.Triggers> <i:EventTrigger EventName="Click"> <mvvmLight:EventToCommand Command="{Binding HostChat}" MustToggleIsEnabled="True" /> </i:EventTrigger> </i:Interaction.Triggers> </Button> And here's my code public override void InitializeViewAndViewModel() { view = UnityContainer.Resolve<LoginPromptView>(); viewModel = UnityContainer.Resolve<LoginPromptViewModel>(); view.DataContext = viewModel; InjectViewIntoRegion(RegionNames.PopUpRegion, view, true); viewModel.HostChat = new DelegateCommand(ExecuteHostChat, CanHostChat); viewModel.PropertyChanged += new System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventHandler(ViewModelPropertyChanged); } void ViewModelPropertyChanged(object sender, System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs e) { if (e.PropertyName == "Name" || e.PropertyName == "Port" || e.PropertyName == "Address") { (viewModel.HostChat as DelegateCommand).RaiseCanExecuteChanged(); (viewModel.HostChat as DelegateCommand).CanExecute(); } } public void ExecuteHostChat() { } public bool CanHostChat() { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(viewModel.Address) || String.IsNullOrEmpty(viewModel.Port) || String.IsNullOrEmpty(viewModel.Name)) { return false; } else return true; } See how these two are together? Surely that can't be right. I mean... it WORKS for me... but something seems wrong about it. Shouldn't RaiseCanExecuteChanged call CanExecute? It doesn't... and so if I don't have that CanExecute in there, my control never toggles its IsEnabled like I need it to. (viewModel.HostChat as DelegateCommand).RaiseCanExecuteChanged(); (viewModel.HostChat as DelegateCommand).CanExecute();

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  • Chrome is creating duplicate sessions with the same id

    - by dlwiest
    I encountered an issue while I was revising my session library today, and this might be the first time I've ever seen a browser-specific problem on a back end script. I hope somebody can shed some light. Basically how the session library works is: when instantiated, it checks for a cookie called 'id' (in the form of a uniqid result) on the client machine. If a cookie is found, the script checks that and a hashed copy of the user agent string against entries in a session table. If a matching entry is found, the script resumes the session. If no cookie named 'id' is found, or if no matching entry exists in the sessions table, the script creates both. Fairly standard, I think. Now here's the weird part: in Firefox, everything works as predicted. The user gets one session, which he'll always resume upon connection, as long as 24 hours of inactivity has not elapsed. But when I visit the page in Chrome, even though it looks the same and appears to be executing queries in the same order, I see two entries in the session table. The sessions share an agent string, but the ids are different, and timestamp logs indicate that the ghost session is being created shortly (within a second) after the one created for the user. For debugging purposes, I've been printing queries to the screen as they're executed, and this is an example of what I'm seeing when Chrome should be opening one session and is somehow opening two instead: // Attempting to resume a session SELECT id FROM sessions WHERE id = '4fd24a5cd8df12.62439982' AND agent = '9bcd5c6aac911f8bcd938a9563bc4eca' // No result, so it creates a new one INSERT INTO sessions (id, agent, start, last) VALUES ('4fd24ef0347f26.72354606', '9bcd5c6aac911f8bcd938a9563bc4eca', '1339182832', '1339182832') // Clear old sessions DELETE FROM sessions WHERE last < 1339096432 And here's what I'm seeing in the database afterward: id, agent, start, last 4fd24ef0347f26.72354606, 9bcd5c6aac911f8bcd938a9563bc4eca, 1339182832, 1339182832 4fd24ef0857f94.72251285, 9bcd5c6aac911f8bcd938a9563bc4eca, 1339182833, 1339182833 Am I missing something obvious? The only thing I can think of is that Chrome might be creating a hidden session in the background, possibly to crawl the page. If that's the case though, it could become a problem later, when I begin associating active sessions with entries in the users table. I've been looking for possible bugs in my script, but I haven't found anything so far, and everything works as expected in Firefox.

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  • WP7 Button inside ListBox only "clicks" every other press

    - by Zik
    I have a button defined inside of a DataTemplate for my list box. <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <DataTemplate x:Key="ListTemplate"> <Grid Margin="12,12,24,12"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button Grid.Column="0" Name="EnableDisableButton" Click="EnableDisableButton_Click" BorderBrush="Transparent"> <Grid> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Image Grid.Row="0" Source="\Images\img.dark.png" Width="48" Height="48" Visibility="{StaticResource PhoneDarkThemeVisibility}" /> <Image Grid.Row="0" Source="\Images\img.light.png" Width="48" Height="48" Visibility="{StaticResource PhoneLightThemeVisibility}" /> <Rectangle Grid.Row="1" Width="48" Height="8" Fill="{Binding CurrentColor}" RadiusX="4" RadiusY="4" /> </Grid> </Button> <Grid Grid.Column="1"> <... more stuff here ...> </Grid> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> What I'm seeing is that the first time I press the button, the Click event fires. The second time I press it, it does not fire. Third press, fires. Fourth press, does not fire. Etc. Originally I had it bound to a command but that was behaving the same way. (I put a Debug.WriteLine() in the event handler so I know when it fires.) Any ideas? It's really odd that the click event only fires every other time.

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  • unmet dependencies in Ubuntu 12.04

    - by lee.O
    I tried today to install a dvb-card on my Ubuntu 12.04 (Linux blauhai-linux 3.2.0-25-generic #40-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 23 20:30:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux ). The installation failed with an error. After that, i tried to install python (it was already installed but i got this error): linux:~$ sudo apt-get install git Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done git is already the newest version. You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: python-glade2:i386 : Depends: python:i386 (< 2.5) but it is not going to be installed Depends: python-support:i386 (= 0.3.4) but it is not installable Depends: python:i386 (= 2.4) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libglade2-0:i386 (= 1:2.5.1) but it is not going to be installed Depends: python-gtk2:i386 (= 2.8.6-8) but it is not going to be installed python-numeric:i386 : Depends: python:i386 (< 2.5) but it is not going to be installed Depends: python:i386 (= 2.3) but it is not going to be installed Depends: python-central:i386 (= 0.5.7) but it is not installable E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). well, i can read and tried the proposed command, but then i get this: linux:~$ sudo apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libopenal1:i386 libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386 libkrb5-3:i386 libgconf-2-4:i386 libsm-dev libatk1.0-0:i386 libk5crypto3:i386 libstdc++5:i386 libqt4-declarative:i386 libxcomposite1:i386 libice-dev libgail18:i386 libldap-2.4-2:i386 libao-common libv4l-0:i386 liblcms1:i386 libqt4-qt3support:i386 libroken18-heimdal:i386 libunistring0:i386 libcupsimage2:i386 libgphoto2-port0:i386 libidn11:i386 libnss3:i386 libcaca0:i386 gtk2-engines:i386 libgudev-1.0-0:i386 libjpeg-turbo8:i386 libpthread-stubs0 libcairo-gobject2:i386 libavc1394-0:i386 libjpeg8:i386 libotr2 libaio1:i386 libsane:i386 odbcinst1debian2 odbcinst1debian2:i386 libqt4-test:i386 libqt4-script:i386 libqt4-designer:i386 libsdl-mixer1.2:i386 libqt4-network:i386 libqt4-dbus:i386 libcap2:i386 libproxy1:i386 ibus-gtk:i386 libdbus-glib-1-2:i386 libtdb1:i386 libasn1-8-heimdal:i386 libspeex1:i386 libxslt1.1:i386 libgomp1:i386 libcapi20-3:i386 libibus-1.0-0:i386 libcairo2:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libopenal-data odbcinst libgssapi3-heimdal:i386 libcanberra0:i386 libtasn1-3:i386 libfreetype6:i386 x11proto-kb-dev gtk2-engines-murrine:i386 libwavpack1:i386 libqt4-opengl:i386 libsoup-gnome2.4-1:i386 libv4lconvert0:i386 gstreamer0.10-plugins-good:i386 libc6-i386 lib32gcc1 libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 librsvg2-common:i386 libdatrie1:i386 xtrans-dev libavahi-common-data:i386 libiec61883-0:i386 lib32asound2 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libsdl-image1.2:i386 libp11-kit0:i386 x11proto-input-dev libwind0-heimdal:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386 libsdl1.2debian:i386 libxaw7:i386 libgdbm3:i386 libcups2:i386 libcurl3:i386 libqtcore4:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libesd0:i386 libmikmod2:i386 libkrb5support0:i386 libxft2:i386 libxt-dev libcroco3:i386 libpulse-mainloop-glib0:i386 libice6:i386 libaa1:i386 libieee1284-3:i386 libgcrypt11:i386 libthai0:i386 libao4:i386 libkeyutils1:i386 libxmu6:i386 libcanberra-gtk0:i386 libvorbisfile3:i386 libqt4-sql:i386 esound-common libxpm4:i386 libqt4-svg:i386 libusb-0.1-4:i386 libgail-common:i386 libxrender1:i386 libhcrypto4-heimdal:i386 libraw1394-11:i386 libnspr4:i386 libshout3:i386 libdv4:i386 libhx509-5-heimdal:i386 libxau-dev libqt4-xml:i386 gstreamer0.10-x:i386 libgettextpo0:i386 libxss1:i386 libgd2-xpm:i386 libheimbase1-heimdal:i386 libtiff4:i386 libsdl-net1.2:i386 libjasper1:i386 libgnome-keyring0:i386 libxtst6:i386 gtk2-engines-pixbuf:i386 libqtgui4:i386 libtag1c2a:i386 librsvg2-2:i386 libavahi-client3:i386 libssl0.9.8:i386 libmpg123-0:i386 libmad0:i386 libsasl2-2:i386 xorg-sgml-doctools libgsoap1 gtk2-engines-oxygen:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 xaw3dg:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386 libsm6:i386 libx11-dev libheimntlm0-heimdal:i386 libpulsedsp:i386 lib32stdc++6 libx11-doc libqt4-sql-mysql:i386 libxcb-render0:i386 libodbc1:i386 libexif12:i386 libqt4-scripttools:i386 librtmp0:i386 libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 libxi6:i386 libqtwebkit4:i386 libxcb1-dev libxp6:i386 libaudio2:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxcb-shm0:i386 libxt6:i386 libxv1:i386 libsasl2-modules:i386 libavahi-common3:i386 libxrandr2:i386 x11proto-core-dev libsqlite3-0:i386 libmng1:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libxdmcp-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev libltdl7:i386 libkrb5-26-heimdal:i386 libssl1.0.0:i386 glib-networking:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libsoup2.4-1:i386 libgphoto2-2:i386 libtag1-vanilla:i386 libaudiofile1:i386 libglade2-0:i386 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: default-jre default-jre-headless icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm icedtea-netx icedtea-netx-common libglade2-0:i386 libpython3.2 openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib python3 python3-minimal python3-uno python3.2 python3.2-minimal Suggested packages: icedtea-plugin sun-java6-fonts fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-ipafont-mincho ttf-telugu-fonts ttf-oriya-fonts ttf-kannada-fonts ttf-bengali-fonts python3-doc python3-tk python3.2-doc binfmt-support The following packages will be REMOVED: activity-log-manager-control-center aisleriot alacarte apparmor apport apport-gtk apt-xapian-index aptdaemon apturl apturl-common bluez bluez-alsa bluez-alsa:i386 bluez-gstreamer checkbox checkbox-qt command-not-found compiz compiz-gnome compiz-plugins-main-default compizconfig-backend-gconf deja-dup duplicity eog evolution-data-server firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support foomatic-db-compressed-ppds gconf-editor gconf2 gdb gedit gir1.2-mutter-3.0 gir1.2-peas-1.0 gir1.2-rb-3.0 gir1.2-totem-1.0 gir1.2-ubuntuoneui-3.0 gksu gnome-applets gnome-applets-data gnome-bluetooth gnome-contacts gnome-control-center gnome-media gnome-menus gnome-orca gnome-panel gnome-panel-data gnome-session-fallback gnome-shell gnome-sudoku gnome-terminal gnome-terminal-data gnome-themes-standard gnome-tweak-tool gnome-user-share gstreamer0.10-gconf gwibber gwibber-service gwibber-service-facebook gwibber-service-identica gwibber-service-twitter hplip hplip-data ia32-libs ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 ibus ibus-pinyin ibus-table indicator-datetime indicator-power jockey-common jockey-gtk landscape-client-ui-install language-selector-common language-selector-gnome launchpad-integration libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 libcanberra-gtk3-module libcompizconfig0 libfolks-eds25 libgksu2-0 libgnome-media-profiles-3.0-0 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common libgnomevfs2-0 libgnomevfs2-common libgweather-3-0 libgweather-common libgwibber-gtk2 libgwibber2 libmetacity-private0 libmutter0 libpeas-1.0-0 libpurple-bin libpython2.7 libreoffice-gnome librhythmbox-core5 libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 libtotem0 libubuntuoneui-3.0-1 light-themes lsb-release metacity metacity-common mutter-common nautilus-dropbox nautilus-share network-manager-gnome nvidia-common nvidia-settings nvidia-settings-updates onboard oneconf openjdk-7-jdk openjdk-7-jre openprinting-ppds pidgin pidgin-libnotify pidgin-otr printer-driver-foo2zjs printer-driver-ptouch printer-driver-pxljr printer-driver-sag-gdi printer-driver-splix python python-appindicator python-apport python-apt python-apt-common python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets python-aptdaemon.pkcompat python-brlapi python-cairo python-central python-chardet python-configglue python-crypto python-cups python-cupshelpers python-dateutil python-dbus python-debian python-debtagshw python-defer python-dirspec python-egenix-mxdatetime python-egenix-mxtools python-gconf python-gdbm python-gi python-gi-cairo python-glade2:i386 python-gmenu python-gnomekeyring python-gnupginterface python-gobject python-gobject-2 python-gpgme python-gst0.10 python-gtk2 python-httplib2 python-ibus python-imaging python-keyring python-launchpadlib python-lazr.restfulclient python-lazr.uri python-libproxy python-libxml2 python-louis python-mako python-markupsafe python-minimal python-notify python-numeric:i386 python-oauth python-openssl python-packagekit python-pam python-pexpect python-piston-mini-client python-pkg-resources python-problem-report python-protobuf python-pyatspi2 python-pycurl python-pyinotify python-renderpm python-reportlab python-reportlab-accel python-serial python-simplejson python-smbc python-software-properties python-speechd python-twisted-bin python-twisted-core python-twisted-names python-twisted-web python-ubuntu-sso-client python-ubuntuone-client python-ubuntuone-control-panel python-ubuntuone-storageprotocol python-uno python-virtkey python-wadllib python-xapian python-xdg python-xkit python-zeitgeist python-zope.interface python2.7 python2.7-minimal rhythmbox rhythmbox-mozilla rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder rhythmbox-plugin-magnatune rhythmbox-plugin-zeitgeist rhythmbox-plugins rhythmbox-ubuntuone screen-resolution-extra sessioninstaller skype software-center software-center-aptdaemon-plugins software-properties-common software-properties-gtk system-config-printer-common system-config-printer-gnome system-config-printer-udev texlive-extra-utils totem totem-mozilla totem-plugins ubuntu-artwork ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-sso-client ubuntu-sso-client-gtk ubuntu-standard ubuntu-system-service ubuntuone-client ubuntuone-client-gnome ubuntuone-control-panel ubuntuone-couch ubuntuone-installer ufw unattended-upgrades unity unity-2d unity-common unity-lens-applications unity-lens-video unity-scope-musicstores unity-scope-video-remote update-manager update-manager-core update-notifier update-notifier-common usb-creator-common usb-creator-gtk virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-qt xdiagnose xul-ext-ubufox zeitgeist zeitgeist-core zeitgeist-datahub The following NEW packages will be installed: default-jre default-jre-headless icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm icedtea-netx icedtea-netx-common libglade2-0:i386 libpython3.2 openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib python3 python3-minimal python3-uno python3.2 python3.2-minimal WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing! python-minimal python2.7-minimal (due to python-minimal) 0 upgraded, 16 newly installed, 273 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 39.1 MB of archives. After this operation, 324 MB disk space will be freed. You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!' ?] Thats not good, is it?! Should i run this command or should i run another command to fix this problem? Would be great if somebody can help me. :) Thanks in advance. best regards

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

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

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  • Week in Geek: FBI Back Door in OpenBSD Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    This week we learned how to migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, fix annoying arrows, play old-school DOS games, schedule smart computer shutdowns, use breaks in Microsoft Word to better format documents, check the condition of hard-disks using Linux disk utilities, & what the Linux fstab is and how it works. Photo by Jameson42. Random Geek Links Another week with extra news link goodness to help keep you up to date. Photo by justmakeit. Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax. Fortinet: Job outlook improving for cybercrooks In an ironic twist in the job market, more positions will open up for developers who can write customized malware packers, people who can break CAPTCHA codes, and distributors who can spread malicious code, according to Fortinet. Enisa: Malware for smartphones is a ’serious risk’ Businesses and consumers are at risk of data breaches through smartphone use, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The trick with the f: Google and Microsoft web sites distribute malware Last week, Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform and Microsoft’s rad.msn.com online ad network briefly distributed malware to other web sites in the form of advertising banners. New scam tactic: Fake disk defraggers It would appear that scammers are trying out new programs to see which might best confuse potential victims and evade detection by legitimate antivirus software. Microsoft closes IE and Stuxnet holes As previously announced, Microsoft has released 17 security updates to close 40 security holes. All four Windows holes so far disclosed in connection with Stuxnet have now been closed. Microsoft Offers H.264 Support to Firefox on Windows via Add-On The new HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in add-on from Microsoft offers users that are running Firefox on Windows 7 H.264 support for HTML5 video playback. Google proclaims Chrome business-ready Google has announced that Chrome is ready for corporate use. Microsoft Tells Exchange Customers to Think Twice Before Opting for Google Message Continuity This week, Microsoft is telling companies still running Exchange 2010’s precursors that they should carefully consider the implications of embracing Google Message Continuity. Who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS users Steven Vaughan-Nichols explains why he feels that Chrome OS will be ideal for either office-workers or people who need a computer, but do not know the first thing about how to use one safely. Oracle takes office suite to the cloud Oracle has introduced Cloud Office 1.0, a cloud-based version of its office suite, which is aimed at web and mobile users. Mozilla pays premiums for reports of vulnerabilities The Mozilla Foundation has followed Google’s example by expanding its rewards program for reports of vulnerabilities in its Web applications. Who bought those 882 Novell patents? Not just Microsoft The mysterious CPTN Holdings — the organization that bought the 882 Novell patents as part of the terms of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell – has been unmasked (Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle). Appeals court: Feds need warrants for e-mail Police must obtain search warrants before perusing Internet users’ e-mail records, a federal appeals court ruled today in a landmark decision that struck down part of a 1986 law allowing warrantless access. Geek Video of the Week What happens when someone plays a wicked prank by shoveling crazy snow paths that lead to dead ends or turn back on themselves? Watch to find out! Photo by CollegeHumor. Janitor Snow Shoveling Prank Random TinyHacker Links The Oatmeal on Cat vs Internet What lengths will our poor neglected kitty hero have to go to in order to get some attention? Guide On Using JoliCloud With Windows JoliCloud is a nifty operating system that’s made for people who need a light-weight OS that’s mostly cloud based. Check this guide on using it with Windows. Use Cameyo to Easily Create Portable Programs Here’s a nifty tool to make portable apps out of programs in Windows. Check out the guide to do it. Better Family Tech Support A nice new site by Google to help members of family understand how computers work. Track Your Stolen Mobile Phone With F-Secure A useful anti-theft tool for your mobile phone. Super User Questions Another week with great answers to popular questions from Super User. What Chrome password manager fits my requirements? What’s the best way to be able to reimage windows computers? Could you suggest feature-rich disk-based personal backup program for linux (and I’ve seen a few)? What is IPv6 and why should I care? Is there any way to find out what programs are trying to connect to Internet on windows? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Here are our hottest articles full of geeky goodness from this past week at HTG. 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.? The Twelve Days of Geekmas One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through our latest batch of retro-geek goodness from one year ago. Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd How To Restore Windows 7 from a System Image How To Manage Hard Drive Space Used by Windows 7 Backup and Restore How To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week, so see you back here again after the holidays! Got a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by mitjamavsar. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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  • WatiN screenshot saver

    - by Brian Schroer
    In addition to my automated unit, system and integration tests for ASP.NET projects, I like to give my customers something pretty that they can look at and visually see that the web site is behaving properly. I use the Gallio test runner to produce a pretty HTML report, and WatiN (Web Application Testing In .NET) to test the UI and create screenshots. I have a couple of issues with WatiN’s “CaptureWebPageToFile” method, though: It blew up the first (and only) time I tried it, possibly because… It scrolls down to capture the entire web page (I tried it on a very long page), and I usually don’t need that Also, sometimes I don’t need a picture of the whole browser window - I just want a picture of the element that I'm testing (for example, proving that a button has the correct caption). I wrote a WatiN screenshot saver helper class with these methods: SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Watin.Core.IE ie)  / SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a screenshot of the browser window SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a screenshot of the browser window, with the specified element scrolled into view and highlighted SaveElementScreenshot(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a picture of only the specified element The element highlighting improves on the built-in WatiN method (which just gives the element a yellow background, and makes the element pretty much unreadable when you have a light foreground color) by adding the ability to specify a HighlightCssClassName that points to a style in your site’s stylesheet. This code is specifically for testing with Internet Explorer (‘cause that’s what I have to test with at work), but you’re welcome to take it and do with it what you want… using System; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Imaging; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Text; using System.Threading; using SHDocVw; using WatiN.Core; using mshtml; namespace BrianSchroer.TestHelpers { public static class WatinScreenshotSaver { public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight (Element element, string screenshotName) { HighlightElement(element, true); SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(element, screenshotName); HighlightElement(element, false); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight(Element element) { HighlightElement(element, true); SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(element); HighlightElement(element, false); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Element element, string screenshotName) { SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), screenshotName, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Element element) { SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), null, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(IE ie, string screenshotName) { SaveScreenshot(ie, screenshotName, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(IE ie) { SaveScreenshot(ie, null, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveElementScreenshot(Element element, string screenshotName) { // TODO: Figure out how to get browser window "chrome" size and not have to go to full screen: var iex = (InternetExplorerClass) GetIe(element).InternetExplorer; bool fullScreen = iex.FullScreen; if (!fullScreen) iex.FullScreen = true; ScrollIntoView(element); SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), screenshotName, args => SaveElementBitmapForCallbackArgs(element, args)); iex.FullScreen = fullScreen; } public static void SaveElementScreenshot(Element element) { SaveElementScreenshot(element, null); } private static void SaveScreenshot(IE browser, string screenshotName, Action<ScreenshotCallbackArgs> screenshotCallback) { string fileName = string.Format("{0:000}{1}{2}.jpg", ++_screenshotCount, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(screenshotName)) ? "" : " ", screenshotName); string path = Path.Combine(ScreenshotDirectoryName, fileName); Console.WriteLine(); // Gallio HTML-encodes the following display, but I have a utility program to // remove the "HTML===" and "===HTML" and un-encode the rest to show images in the Gallio report: Console.WriteLine("HTML===<div><b>{0}:</br></b><img src=\"{1}\" /></div>===HTML", screenshotName, new Uri(path).AbsoluteUri); MakeBrowserWindowTopmost(browser); try { var args = new ScreenshotCallbackArgs { InternetExplorerClass = (InternetExplorerClass)browser.InternetExplorer, ScreenshotPath = path }; Thread.Sleep(100); screenshotCallback(args); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } } public static void HighlightElement(Element element, bool doHighlight) { if (!element.Exists) return; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(HighlightCssClassName)) { element.Highlight(doHighlight); return; } string jsRef = element.GetJavascriptElementReference(); if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsRef)) return; var sb = new StringBuilder("try { "); sb.AppendFormat(" {0}.scrollIntoView(false);", jsRef); string format = (doHighlight) ? "{0}.className += ' {1}'" : "{0}.className = {0}.className.replace(' {1}', '')"; sb.AppendFormat(" " + format + ";", jsRef, HighlightCssClassName); sb.Append("} catch(e) {}"); string script = sb.ToString(); GetIe(element).RunScript(script); } public static void ScrollIntoView(Element element) { string jsRef = element.GetJavascriptElementReference(); if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsRef)) return; var sb = new StringBuilder("try { "); sb.AppendFormat(" {0}.scrollIntoView(false);", jsRef); sb.Append("} catch(e) {}"); string script = sb.ToString(); GetIe(element).RunScript(script); } public static void MakeBrowserWindowTopmost(IE ie) { ie.BringToFront(); SetWindowPos(ie.hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, TOPMOST_FLAGS); } public static string HighlightCssClassName { get; set; } private static int _screenshotCount; private static string _screenshotDirectoryName; public static string ScreenshotDirectoryName { get { if (_screenshotDirectoryName == null) { var asm = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(WatinScreenshotSaver)); var uri = new Uri(asm.CodeBase); var fileInfo = new FileInfo(uri.LocalPath); string directoryName = fileInfo.DirectoryName; _screenshotDirectoryName = Path.Combine( directoryName, string.Format("Screenshots_{0:yyyyMMddHHmm}", DateTime.Now)); Console.WriteLine("Screenshot folder: {0}", _screenshotDirectoryName); Directory.CreateDirectory(_screenshotDirectoryName); } return _screenshotDirectoryName; } set { _screenshotDirectoryName = value; _screenshotCount = 0; } } [DllImport("user32.dll")] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] private static extern bool SetWindowPos(IntPtr hWnd, IntPtr hWndInsertAfter, int X, int Y, int cx, int cy, uint uFlags); private static readonly IntPtr HWND_TOPMOST = new IntPtr(-1); private const UInt32 SWP_NOSIZE = 0x0001; private const UInt32 SWP_NOMOVE = 0x0002; private const UInt32 TOPMOST_FLAGS = SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE; private static IE GetIe(Element element) { if (element == null) return null; var container = element.DomContainer; while (container as IE == null) container = container.DomContainer; return (IE)container; } private static void SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs(ScreenshotCallbackArgs args) { InternetExplorerClass iex = args.InternetExplorerClass; SaveBitmap(args.ScreenshotPath, iex.Left, iex.Top, iex.Width, iex.Height); } private static void SaveElementBitmapForCallbackArgs(Element element, ScreenshotCallbackArgs args) { InternetExplorerClass iex = args.InternetExplorerClass; Rectangle bounds = GetElementBounds(element); SaveBitmap(args.ScreenshotPath, iex.Left + bounds.Left, iex.Top + bounds.Top, bounds.Width, bounds.Height); } /// <summary> /// This method is used instead of element.NativeElement.GetElementBounds because that /// method has a bug (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2994660&group_id=167632&atid=843727). /// </summary> private static Rectangle GetElementBounds(Element element) { var ieElem = element.NativeElement as WatiN.Core.Native.InternetExplorer.IEElement; IHTMLElement elem = ieElem.AsHtmlElement; int left = elem.offsetLeft; int top = elem.offsetTop; for (IHTMLElement parent = elem.offsetParent; parent != null; parent = parent.offsetParent) { left += parent.offsetLeft; top += parent.offsetTop; } return new Rectangle(left, top, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight); } private static void SaveBitmap(string path, int left, int top, int width, int height) { using (var bitmap = new Bitmap(width, height)) { using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap)) { g.CopyFromScreen( new Point(left, top), Point.Empty, new Size(width, height) ); } bitmap.Save(path, ImageFormat.Jpeg); } } private class ScreenshotCallbackArgs { public InternetExplorerClass InternetExplorerClass { get; set; } public string ScreenshotPath { get; set; } } } }

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  • Displaying an image on a LED matrix with a Netduino

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    In the previous post, we’ve been flipping bits manually on three ports of the Netduino to simulate the data, clock and latch pins that a shift register expected. We did all that in order to control one line of a LED matrix and create a simple Knight Rider effect. It was rightly pointed out in the comments that the Netduino has built-in knowledge of the sort of serial protocol that this shift register understands through a feature called SPI. That will of course make our code a whole lot simpler, but it will also make it a whole lot faster: writing to the Netduino ports is actually not that fast, whereas SPI is very, very fast. Unfortunately, the Netduino documentation for SPI is severely lacking. Instead, we’ve been reliably using the documentation for the Fez, another .NET microcontroller. To send data through SPI, we’ll just need  to move a few wires around and update the code. SPI uses pin D11 for writing, pin D12 for reading (which we won’t do) and pin D13 for the clock. The latch pin is a parameter that can be set by the user. This is very close to the wiring we had before (data on D11, clock on D12 and latch on D13). We just have to move the latch from D13 to D10, and the clock from D12 to D13. The code that controls the shift register has slimmed down considerably with that change. Here is the new version, which I invite you to compare with what we had before: public class ShiftRegister74HC595 { protected SPI Spi; public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin) : this(latchPin, SPI.SPI_module.SPI1) { } public ShiftRegister74HC595(Cpu.Pin latchPin, SPI.SPI_module spiModule) { var spiConfig = new SPI.Configuration( SPI_mod: spiModule, ChipSelect_Port: latchPin, ChipSelect_ActiveState: false, ChipSelect_SetupTime: 0, ChipSelect_HoldTime: 0, Clock_IdleState: false, Clock_Edge: true, Clock_RateKHz: 1000 ); Spi = new SPI(spiConfig); } public void Write(byte buffer) { Spi.Write(new[] {buffer}); } } All we have to do here is configure SPI. The write method couldn’t be any simpler. Everything is now handled in hardware by the Netduino. We set the frequency to 1MHz, which is largely sufficient for what we’ll be doing, but it could potentially go much higher. The shift register addresses the columns of the matrix. The rows are directly wired to ports D0 to D7 of the Netduino. The code writes to only one of those eight lines at a time, which will make it fast enough. The way an image is displayed is that we light the lines one after the other so fast that persistence of vision will give the illusion of a stable image: foreach (var bitmap in matrix.MatrixBitmap) { matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, true); matrix.OnRow(row, bitmap, false); row++; } Now there is a twist here: we need to run this code as fast as possible in order to display the image with as little flicker as possible, but we’ll eventually have other things to do. In other words, we need the code driving the display to run in the background, except when we want to change what’s being displayed. Fortunately, the .NET Micro Framework supports multithreading. In our implementation, we’ve added an Initialize method that spins a new thread that is tied to the specific instance of the matrix it’s being called on. public LedMatrix Initialize() { DisplayThread = new Thread(() => DoDisplay(this)); DisplayThread.Start(); return this; } I quite like this way to spin a thread. As you may know, there is another, built-in way to contextualize a thread by passing an object into the Start method. For the method to work, the thread must have been constructed with a ParameterizedThreadStart delegate, which takes one parameter of type object. I like to use object as little as possible, so instead I’m constructing a closure with a Lambda, currying it with the current instance. This way, everything remains strongly-typed and there’s no casting to do. Note that this method would extend perfectly to several parameters. Of note as well is the return value of Initialize, a common technique to add some fluency to the API and enabling the matrix to be instantiated and initialized in a single line: using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) The “using” in the previous line is because we have implemented IDisposable so that the matrix kills the thread and clears the display when the user code is done with it: public void Dispose() { Clear(); DisplayThread.Abort(); } Thanks to the multi-threaded version of the matrix driver class, we can treat the display as a simple bitmap with a very synchronous programming model: matrix.Set(someimage); while (button.Read()) { Thread.Sleep(10); } Here, the call into Set returns immediately and from the moment the bitmap is set, the background display thread will constantly continue refreshing no matter what happens in the main thread. That enables us to wait or read a button’s port on the main thread knowing that the current image will continue displaying unperturbed and without requiring manual refreshing. We’ve effectively hidden the implementation of the display behind a convenient, synchronous-looking API. Pretty neat, eh? Before I wrap up this post, I want to talk about one small caveat of using SPI rather than driving the shift register directly: when we got to the point where we could actually display images, we noticed that they were a mirror image of what we were sending in. Oh noes! Well, the reason for it is that SPI is sending the bits in a big-endian fashion, in other words backwards. Now sure you could fix that in software by writing some bit-level code to reverse the bits we’re sending in, but there is a far more efficient solution than that. We are doing hardware here, so we can simply reverse the order in which the outputs of the shift register are connected to the columns of the matrix. That’s switching 8 wires around once, as compared to doing bit operations every time we send a line to display. All right, so bringing it all together, here is the code we need to write to display two images in succession, separated by a press on the board’s button: var button = new InputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_SW1, false, Port.ResistorMode.Disabled); using (var matrix = new LedMS88SR74HC595().Initialize()) { // Oh, prototype is so sad! var sad = new byte[] { 0x66, 0x24, 0x00, 0x18, 0x00, 0x3C, 0x42, 0x81 }; DisplayAndWait(sad, matrix, button); // Let's make it smile! var smile = new byte[] { 0x42, 0x18, 0x18, 0x81, 0x7E, 0x3C, 0x18, 0x00 }; DisplayAndWait(smile, matrix, button); } And here is a video of the prototype running: The prototype in action I’ve added an artificial delay between the display of each row of the matrix to clearly show what’s otherwise happening very fast. This way, you can clearly see each of the two images being displayed line by line. Next time, we’ll do no hardware changes, focusing instead on building a nice programming model for the matrix, with sprites, text and hardware scrolling. Fun stuff. By the way, can any of my reader guess where we’re going with all that? The code for this prototype can be downloaded here: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/NetduinoLedMatrixDriver.zip

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  • Turn A Flash Drive Into a Portable Web Server

    - by Matthew Guay
    Portable applications are very useful for getting work done on the go, but how about portable servers?  Here’s how you can turn your flash drive into a portable web server. Getting Started To put a full web server on our flash drive, we’re going to use XAMPP Lite.  This lightweight, preconfigured server includes recent versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP so you can run most websites and webapps directly from it.  You could use the full XAMPP, which includes more features such as a FileZilla FTP server and OpenSSL, but for most purposes, the light version is plenty for a portable server. Download the latest version of XAMPP Lite (link below).  In this tutorial, we used the self-extracting EXE version; you could choose the ZIP file and extract the files yourself, but we found it easier to use the executable. Run the installer, and click Browse choose where to install your server. Select your flash drive, or a folder in it, and click Ok.  Make sure your flash drive has at least 250MB of available storage space.  XAMPP will create an xampplite folder and store all the files in it during the installation.   Click Install, and all of the files will be extracted to your flash drive.  This may take a few moments depending on your flash drive’s speed. When the extraction process is finished, a Command Prompt window will open to finish the installation.  The first prompt will ask if you want to add shortcuts to the start menu and desktop; enter “n” since we don’t want to create start menu links to our portable server. Now enter “y” to configure XAMPP’s directories automatically. Finally, enter “y” to make XAMPP fully portable.  It will set up the servers to run without specific drive letters so your server will run from any computer. XAMPP will finalize your changes; press Enter when everything is completed. Setup will automatically launch the command line version of XAMPP.  On first run, confirm that your time zone is correct. And that’s it!  You can now run XAMPP’s control panel by entering 1, or you can exit and run XAMPP from any other computer with your flash drive. To complete your portable webserver kit, you may want to install Portable Firefox or Iron Browser on your flash drive so you always have your favorite browser ready to use. Running your portable server Using your portable server is very simple.  Open the xampplite folder on your flash drive and launch xampp-control.exe. Click Start beside Apache and MySql to get your webserver running. Please note: Do not check the Svc box, as this will run the server as a Windows service.  To keep XAMPP portable, you do not want it running as a service! Windows Firewall may prompt you that it blocked the server; click Allow access to let your server run. Once they’re running, you can click Admin to open the default XAMPP admin page running from your local webserver.  Or, you can view it by browsing to http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in your browser. If everything is working correctly, you should see this page in your browser.  Choose your default language… And then you’ll see the default XAMPP admin page.   Click the Status link on the left sidebar to make sure everything is running correctly. If you click the Admin button for MySql in the XAMPP Control Panel, it will open phpMyAdmin in your default browser.  Alternately, you can open the MySql admin page by entering http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/ in your favorite browser. Now you can add your own webpages to your webserver.  Save all of your web files in the \xampplight\htdocs\ folder on your flash drive. Install WordPress in your portable server Since XAMPP Lite includes MySql and PHP, you can even run webapps such as WordPress, the popular CMS and blogging platform.  Download WordPress (link below), and extract the files to the \xampplite\htdocs folder on your flash drive. Now all of the WordPress files are stored in \xampplite\htdocs\wordpress on your flash drive. We still need to setup WordPress on our portable server.  Open your MySql admin page http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to create a new database for WordPress.  Enter a name for your database in the “Create new database” box, and click Create. Click the Privileges tab on the top, and the select “Add a new User”.   Enter a username and password for the database, and then click the Go button on the bottom of the page. Using WordPress Now, in your browser, enter http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.  Click Create a Configuration File to continue. Make sure you have your Database name, username, and password we created previously, and click “Let’s Go!” Enter your WordPress database name, username, and password, leave the other two entries as default, and click Submit. You should now have the database all ready to go.  Click “Run the install” to finish installing WordPress. Enter a title, username, and password for your test blog, as well as your email address, and then click “Install WordPress”. You now have a portable install of WordPress.  Click “Log In” to  access your WordPress admin page. Enter your username and password, and click Log In. Here you can add pages, posts, themes, extensions, and anything else just like you would on a normal WordPress site.  This is a great way to experiment with WordPress without messing up your real website. You can view your portable WordPress site by entering http://localhost/wordpress/ in your address bar. Closing your server When you’re done running your test server, click the Stop button on each of the services and then click the Exit button in the XAMPP control panel.  If you press the exit button on the top of the window, it will just minimize the control panel to the tray.   Alternately, you can shutdown your server by running xampp_stop.exe from your xampplite folder. Conclusion XAMPP Lite gives you a great way to run a full webserver directly from your flash drive.  Now, anywhere you go, you can test and tweak your webpages and webapps from any Windows computer.  Links Download XAMPP Lite Download WordPress Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7How To Use BitLocker on Drives without TPMSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostView and Manage Flash Cookies the Easy WayInstall and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 Player 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 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

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  • .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement for .NET 4.0

    - by Rick Strahl
    With the betas for .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 and Windows 8 shipping many people will be installing .NET 4.5 and hacking away on it. There are a number of great enhancements that are fairly transparent, but it's important to understand what .NET 4.5 actually is in terms of the CLR running on your machine. When .NET 4.5 is installed it effectively replaces .NET 4.0 on the machine. .NET 4.0 gets overwritten by a new version of .NET 4.5 which - according to Microsoft - is supposed to be 100% backwards compatible. While 100% backwards compatible sounds great, we all know that 100% is a hard number to hit, and even the aforementioned blog post at the Microsoft site acknowledges this. But there's so much more than backwards compatibility that makes this awkward at best and confusing at worst. What does ‘Replacement’ mean? When you install .NET 4.5 your .NET 4.0 assemblies in the \Windows\.NET Framework\V4.0.30319 are overwritten with a new set of assemblies. You end up with overwritten assemblies as well as a bunch of new ones (like the new System.Net.Http assemblies for example). The following screen shot demonstrates system.dll on my test machine (left) running .NET 4.5 on the right and my production laptop running stock .NET 4.0 (right):   Clearly they are different files with a difference in file sizes (interesting that the 4.5 version is actually smaller). That’s not all. If you actually query the runtime version when .NET 4.5 is installed with with Environment.Version you still get: 4.0.30319 If you open the properties of System.dll assembly in .NET 4.5 you'll also see: Notice that the file version is also left at 4.0.xxx. There are differences in build numbers: .NET 4.0 shows 261 and the current .NET 4.5 beta build is 17379. I suppose you can use assume a build number greater than 17000 is .NET 4.5, but that's pretty hokey to say the least. There’s no easy or obvious way to tell whether you are running on 4.0 or 4.5 – to the application they appear to be the same runtime version. And that is what Microsoft intends here. .NET 4.5 is intended as an in-place upgrade. Compile to 4.5 run on 4.0 – not quite! You can compile an application for .NET 4.5 and run it on the 4.0 runtime – that is until you hit a new feature that doesn’t exist on 4.0. At which point the app bombs at runtime. Say you write some code that is mostly .NET 4.0, but only has a few of the new features of .NET 4.5 like aync/await buried deep in the bowels of the application where it only fires occasionally. .NET will happily start your application and run everything 4.0 fine, until it hits that 4.5 code – and then crash unceremoniously at runtime. Oh joy! You can .NET 4.0 applications on .NET 4.5 of course and that should work without much fanfare. Different than .NET 3.0/3.5 Note that this in-place replacement is very different from the side by side installs of .NET 2.0 and 3.0/3.5 which all ran on the 2.0 version of the CLR. The two 3.x versions were basically library enhancements on top of the core .NET 2.0 runtime. Both versions ran under the .NET 2.0 runtime which wasn’t changed (other than for security patches and bug fixes) for the whole 3.x cycle. The 4.5 update instead completely replaces the .NET 4.0 runtime and leaves the actual version number set at v4.0.30319. When you build a new project with Visual Studio 2011, you can still target .NET 4.0 or you can target .NET 4.5. But you are in effect referencing the same set of assemblies for both regardless which version you use. What's different is the compiler used to compile and link your code so compiling with .NET 4.0 gives you just the subset of the functionality that is available in .NET 4.0, but when you use the 4.5 compiler you get the full functionality of what’s actually available in the assemblies and extra libraries. It doesn’t look like you will be able to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop .NET 4.5 applications. Good news – Bad news Microsoft is trying hard to experiment with every possible permutation of releasing new versions of the .NET framework apparently. No two updates have been the same. Clearly updating to a full new version of .NET (ie. .NET 2.0, 4.0 and at some point 5.0 runtimes) has its own set of challenges, but doing an in-place update of the runtime and then not even providing a good way to tell which version is installed is pretty whacky even by Microsoft’s standards. Especially given that .NET 4.5 includes a fairly significant update with all the aysnc functionality baked into the runtime. Most of the IO APIs have been updated to support task based async operation which significantly affects many existing APIs. To make things worse .NET 4.5 will be the initial version of .NET that ships with Windows 8 so it will be with us for a long time to come unless Microsoft finally decides to push .NET versions onto Windows machines as part of system upgrades (which currently doesn’t happen). This is the same story we had when Vista launched with .NET 3.0 which was a minor version that quickly was replaced by 3.5 which was more long lived and practical. People had enough problems dealing with the confusing versioning of the 3.x versions which ran on .NET 2.0. I can’t count the amount support calls and questions I’ve fielded because people couldn’t find a .NET 3.5 entry in the IIS version dialog. The same is likely to happen with .NET 4.5. It’s all well and good when we know that .NET 4.5 is an in-place replacement, but administrators and IT folks not intimately familiar with .NET are unlikely to understand this nuance and end up thoroughly confused which version is installed. It’s hard for me to see any upside to an in-place update and I haven’t really seen a good explanation of why this approach was decided on. Sure if the version stays the same existing assembly bindings don’t break so applications can stay running through an update. I suppose this is useful for some component vendors and strongly signed assemblies in corporate environments. But seriously, if you are going to throw .NET 4.5 into the mix, who won’t be recompiling all code and thoroughly test that code to work on .NET 4.5? A recompile requirement doesn’t seem that serious in light of a major version upgrade.  Resources http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2011/09/26/compatibility-of-net-framework-4-5.aspx http://www.devproconnections.com/article/net-framework/net-framework-45-versioning-faces-problems-141160© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET   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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  • Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad

    - by Maiko Rocha
    One of my WebCenter Portal customers was asking about adaptive design with ADF/WebCenter Portal and how they could go about creating an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application. They were looking not only for the out-of-the-box support for mobile Safari which is certified against PS5+ (11.1.1.6) for ADF/WebCenter - but also to create a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad. Seems like they wanted something in the lines of Yahoo! Mail provides for the iPad - so the example I will use is shamelessly inspired by Y! Mail's iPad UI.  But first, let's quickly understand how can we bake in some adaptive goodness into ADF Faces. First thing we need to understand is, yes, there are a couple of constraints that we will need to work around, namely, the use or layout managers and skins. Please also keep in mind that I'm not and I don't pretend to be a web designer, much less an UX specialist, so feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments section. Now, back to the limitations. Layout Managers ADF Faces layout managers create an abstraction on top of the generated HTML code for a page so a developer doesn't need to be worried about how to size and dimension the UI layout (eg, af:panelStretchLayout). Although layout managers are very helpful, in this specific situation we will need to know a little bit more of how the final HTML is being rendered so we can apply the CSS class accordingly and create transition containers where the media queries will be applied - now, if you're using 11gR2 (11.1.2.2.3) there's the new component af:panelGridLayout (here and here) that will greatly improve creating responsive templates and pages because it is based on the grid/fluid systems and will generate straight out to DIVs on your final page. For now, I'm limited to PS5 and the af:panelStretchLayout component as a starting point because that's the release my customer is on. Skins You won't be able to use media queries, or use anything with "@" notation on the skin CSS file - the skin pre-processor will remove all extraneous "@" from the CSS file. The solution is to split your CSS in two separate files: a skin CSS file and plain CSS where you will add the media queries. The issue here is that you won't be able to use media queries for any faces components. We can, though, still apply the media queries for the components like af:panelGroupLayout and af:panelBorderLayout through their styleClass property to enable these components to be responsive to to the iPad orientation, by changing its dimensions, font sizes, hide/show areas, etc. Difference between responsive and adaptive design The best definition of adaptive vs responsive web design I could find is this: “Responsive web design,” as coined by Ethan Marcotte, means “fluid grids, fluid images/media & media queries.” “Adaptive web design,” as I use it, is about creating interfaces that adapt to the user’s capabilities (in terms of both form and function). To me, “adaptive web design” is just another term for “progressive enhancement” of which responsive web design can (an often should) be an integral part, but is a more holistic approach to web design in that it also takes into account varying levels of markup, CSS, JavaScript and assistive technology support. Responsive/adapative web design is much more than slapping an HTML template with CSS around your content or application. The content and application themselves are part of your web design - in other words, a responsive template is just an afterthought if it is not originating from a responsive design the involves the whole web application/s. Tips on responsive / adapative design with ADF/WebCenter Some of the tips listed below were already mentioned in multiple blog posts about ADF layout and skinning, but it is still worth remembering: a simple guideline for ADF/WebCenter apps would be to first create a high-level group of devices, for example: smartphones, tablets,  and desktop. For each of these large groups, create the basic structure to provide responsiveness: a page template, a skin, and an external CSS: pagetemplate_smartphone.jspx, smartphone_skin.css, smartphone-responsive.css pagetemplate_tablet.jspx, tablet_skin.css, tablet-responsive.css pagetemplate_desktop.jspx, desktop_skin.css, desktop-responsive.css These three assets can be changed on the fly through an user-agent check on the server side, delivering the right UI to the right device. Within each of the assets, you can make fine adjustments for each subgroup of devices with media queries - for example, smart phones with different screen dimensions and pixel density. Having these three groups and the corresponding assets per group seem to be a good compromise between trying to put everything on a single set of assets - specially considering the constraints above - and going to the other side of the spectrum to create assets per discrete device (iPhone4, iPhone5, Nexus, S3, etc.). Keep in mind that these are my rules and are not in any shape or form a best practice - this is how it fits best for the scenarios I've been working with. If you need to use HTML tags on your page, surround them with af:group to protect the DOM structure For stretchable/fluid layouts: Use non-stretching containers: panelGroupLayout, panelBorderLayout, … panelBorderLayout can be used to approximate HTML table component To avoid multiple scroll bars, do not nest scrolling PanelGroupLayout components. Consider layout="vertical" For stretchable/fluid layouts: Most stretchable ADF components also work in flowing context with dimensionsFrom="auto" To stretch a component horizontally, use styleClass="AFStretchWidth" instead of  "width:100%" Skinning Don't use CSS3 @media, @import, animations, etc. on skin css files. They will be removed. CSS3 properties within a class (box-shadow, transition, etc.) work just fine. Consider resetting some skin classes to better control their rendering: body {color: inherit;font: inherit;} af|document {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|commandLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|goLink {-tr-inhibit: all;} af|inputText::content {font: inherit;} Specific meta tags and CSS properties: Use  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0"/> to avoid zooming (if you want) Use -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch to enable native momentum scrolling within overflown areas (here) Use text-rendering: optmizeLegibility to improve readability. (here) User text-overflow: ellipsis to gracefully crop overflown text. (here) The meta-tags are included in each and every page in the metaContainer facet of af:document tag. You can also use a javascript to inject the meta-tags from the template. For the purpose of the example, I wanted to use as few workarounds as possible.   The iPad template and sample application This sample application has been built as a WebCenter Portal application, but you will also be able to reuse the template and techniques on your vanilla ADF application. Keep in mind that I'm neither a designer nor a CSS specialist, so please don't bash me too much on the messy CSS file you'll find on the application.  I've extended the provided PreferencesBean class that comes with WebCenter Portal and added code to dinamically change the template and skin on the fly.   This is the sample application in landscape orientation: This is the sample application in portrait orientation - the left side menu hides automatically based on a CSS media query: Another screenshot with a skinned popup opened: This is a sample application for you to play with - ideally you shouldn't use it as a starting point. On the left side bar you will find links rendered from a WebCenter Portal navigation model - the link triggers a full request through an af:goLink, while the light blue PPR button triggers a PPR navigation. The dark blue toolbar buttons at the top don't have any function,while the Approve and Reject buttons show a skinned popup. The search box of course doesn't have any behavior attahed to it either. There's a known issue right now with some PPR calls that are randomly generating a 403 error redirecting to the login page - I didn't have time to investigate if this is iOS6 specific or not - if you have any insights please let me know your findings. You can download the sample here.

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  • I Hereby Resolve… (T-SQL Tuesday #14)

    - by smisner
    It’s time for another T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jen McCown (blog|twitter), on the topic of resolutions. Specifically, “what techie resolutions have you been pondering, and why?” I like that word – pondering – because I ponder a lot. And while there are many things that I do already because of my job, there are many more things that I ponder about doing…if only I had the time. Then I ponder about making time, but then it’s back to work! In 2010, I was moderately more successful in making time for things that I ponder about than I had been in years past, and I hope to continue that trend in 2011. If Jen hadn’t settled on this topic, I could keep my ponderings to myself and no one would ever know the outcome, but she’s egged me on (and everyone else that chooses to participate)! So here goes… For me, having resolve to do something means that I wouldn’t be doing that something as part of my ordinary routine. It takes extra effort to make time for it. It’s not something that I do once and check off a list, but something that I need to commit to over a period of time. So with that in mind, I hereby resolve… To Learn Something New… One of the things I love about my job is that I get to do a lot of things outside of my ordinary routine. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of opportunity! So what more could I possibly add to that list of things to do? Well, the more I learn, the more I realize I have so much more to learn. It would be much easier to remain in ignorant bliss, but I was born to learn. Constantly. (And apparently to teach, too– my father will tell you that as a small child, I had the neighborhood kids gathered together to play school – in the summer. I’m sure they loved that – but they did it!) These are some of things that I want to dedicate some time to learning this year: Spatial data. I have a good understanding of how maps in Reporting Services works, and I can cobble together a simple T-SQL spatial query, but I know I’m only scratching the surface here. Rob Farley (blog|twitter) posted interesting examples of combining maps and PivotViewer, and I think there’s so many more creative possibilities. I’ve always felt that pictures (including charts and maps) really help people get their minds wrapped around data better, and because a lot of data has a geographic aspect to it, I believe developing some expertise here will be beneficial to my work. PivotViewer. Not only is PivotViewer combined with maps a useful way to visualize data, but it’s an interesting way to work with data. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this interactive demonstration using Netflx OData feed. According to Rob Farley, learning how to work with PivotViewer isn’t trivial. Just the type of challenge I like! Security. You’ve heard of the accidental DBA? Well, I am the accidental security person – is there a word for that role? My eyes used to glaze over when having to study about security, or  when reading anything about it. Then I had a problem long ago that no one could figure out – not even the vendor’s tech support – until I rolled up my sleeves and painstakingly worked through the myriad of potential problems to resolve a very thorny security issue. I learned a lot in the process, and have been able to share what I’ve learned with a lot of people. But I’m not convinced their eyes weren’t glazing over, too. I don’t take it personally – it’s just a very dry topic! So in addition to deepening my understanding about security, I want to find a way to make the subject as it relates to SQL Server and business intelligence more accessible and less boring. Well, there’s actually a lot more that I could put on this list, and a lot more things I have plans to do this coming year, but I run the risk of overcommitting myself. And then I wouldn’t have time… To Have Fun! My name is Stacia and I’m a workaholic. When I love what I do, it’s difficult to separate out the work time from the fun time. But there are some things that I’ve been meaning to do that aren’t related to business intelligence for which I really need to develop some resolve. And they are techie resolutions, too, in a roundabout sort of way! Photography. When my husband and I went on an extended camping trip in 2009 to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, I had a nice little digital camera that took decent pictures. But then I saw the gorgeous cameras that other tourists were toting around and decided I needed one too. So I bought a Nikon D90 and have started to learn to use it, but I’m definitely still in the beginning stages. I traveled so much in 2010 and worked on two book projects that I didn’t have a lot of free time to devote to it. I was very inspired by Kimberly Tripp’s (blog|twitter) and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) photo-adventure in Alaska, though, and plan to spend some dedicated time with my camera this year. (And hopefully before I move to Alaska – nothing set in stone yet, but we hope to move to a remote location – with Internet access – later this year!) Astronomy. I have this cool telescope, but it suffers the same fate as my camera. I have been gone too much and busy with other things that I haven’t had time to work with it. I’ll figure out how it works, and then so much time passes by that I forget how to use it. I have this crazy idea that I can actually put the camera and the telescope together for astrophotography, but I think I need to start simple by learning how to use each component individually. As long as I’m living in Las Vegas, I know I’ll have clear skies for nighttime viewing, but when we move to Alaska, we’ll be living in a rain forest. I have no idea what my opportunities will be like there – except I know that when the sky is clear, it will be far more amazing than anything I can see in Vegas – even out in the desert - because I’ll be so far away from city light pollution. I’ve been contemplating putting together a blog on these topics as I learn. As many of my fellow bloggers in the SQL Server community know, sometimes the best way to learn something is to sit down and write about it. I’m just stumped by coming up with a clever name for the new blog, which I was thinking about inaugurating with my move to Alaska. Except that I don’t know when that will be exactly, so we’ll just have to wait and see which comes first!

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  • RSS feeds in Orchard

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    When we added RSS to Orchard, we wanted to make it easy for any module to expose any contents as a feed. We also wanted the rendering of the feed to be handled by Orchard in order to minimize the amount of work from the module developer. A typical example of such feed exposition is of course blog feeds. We have an IFeedManager interface for which you can get the built-in implementation through dependency injection. Look at the BlogController constructor for an example: public BlogController( IOrchardServices services, IBlogService blogService, IBlogSlugConstraint blogSlugConstraint, IFeedManager feedManager, RouteCollection routeCollection) { If you look a little further in that same controller, in the Item action, you’ll see a call to the Register method of the feed manager: _feedManager.Register(blog); This in reality is a call into an extension method that is specialized for blogs, but we could have made the two calls to the actual generic Register directly in the action instead, that is just an implementation detail: feedManager.Register(blog.Name, "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "containerid", blog.Id } }); feedManager.Register(blog.Name + " - Comments", "rss", new RouteValueDictionary { { "commentedoncontainer", blog.Id } }); What those two effective calls are doing is to register two feeds: one for the blog itself and one for the comments on the blog. For each call, the name of the feed is provided, then we have the type of feed (“rss”) and some values to be injected into the generic RSS route that will be used later to route the feed to the right providers. This is all you have to do to expose a new feed. If you’re only interested in exposing feeds, you can stop right there. If on the other hand you want to know what happens after that under the hood, carry on. What happens after that is that the feedmanager will take care of formatting the link tag for the feed (see FeedManager.GetRegisteredLinks). The GetRegisteredLinks method itself will be called from a specialized filter, FeedFilter. FeedFilter is an MVC filter and the event we’re interested in hooking into is OnResultExecuting, which happens after the controller action has returned an ActionResult and just before MVC executes that action result. In other words, our feed registration has already been called but the view is not yet rendered. Here’s the code for OnResultExecuting: model.Zones.AddAction("head:after", html => html.ViewContext.Writer.Write( _feedManager.GetRegisteredLinks(html))); This is another piece of code whose execution is differed. It is saying that whenever comes time to render the “head” zone, this code should be called right after. The code itself is rendering the link tags. As a result of all that, here’s what can be found in an Orchard blog’s head section: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"     title="Tales from the Evil Empire"     href="/rss?containerid=5" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"     title="Tales from the Evil Empire - Comments"     href="/rss?commentedoncontainer=5" /> The generic action that these two feeds point to is Index on FeedController. That controller has three important dependencies: an IFeedBuilderProvider, an IFeedQueryProvider and an IFeedItemProvider. Different implementations of these interfaces can provide different formats of feeds, such as RSS and Atom. The Match method enables each of the competing providers to provide a priority for themselves based on arbitrary criteria that can be found on the FeedContext. This means that a provider can be selected based not only on the desired format, but also on the nature of the objects being exposed as a feed or on something even more arbitrary such as the destination device (you could imagine for example giving shorter text only excerpts of posts on mobile devices, and full HTML on desktop). The key here is extensibility and dynamic competition and collaboration from unknown and loosely coupled parts. You’ll find this pattern pretty much everywhere in the Orchard architecture. The RssFeedBuilder implementation of IFeedBuilderProvider is also a regular controller with a Process action that builds a RssResult, which is itself a thin ActionResult wrapper around an XDocument. Let’s get back to the FeedController’s Index action. After having called into each known feed builder to get its priority on the currently requested feed, it will select the one with the highest priority. The next thing it needs to do is to actually fetch the data for the feed. This again is a collaborative effort from a priori unknown providers, the implementations of IFeedQueryProvider. There are several implementations by default in Orchard, the choice of which is again done through a Match method. ContainerFeedQuery for example chimes in when a “containerid” parameter is found in the context (see URL in the link tag above): public FeedQueryMatch Match(FeedContext context) { var containerIdValue = context.ValueProvider.GetValue("containerid"); if (containerIdValue == null) return null; return new FeedQueryMatch { FeedQuery = this, Priority = -5 }; } The actual work is done in the Execute method, which finds the right container content item in the Orchard database and adds elements for each of them. In other words, the feed query provider knows how to retrieve the list of content items to add to the feed. The last step is to translate each of the content items into feed entries, which is done by implementations of IFeedItemBuilder. There is no Match method this time. Instead, all providers are called with the collection of items (or more accurately with the FeedContext, but this contains the list of items, which is what’s relevant in most cases). Each provider can then choose to pick those items that it knows how to treat and transform them into the format requested. This enables the construction of heterogeneous feeds that expose content items of various types into a single feed. That will be extremely important when you’ll want to expose a single feed for all your site. So here are feeds in Orchard in a nutshell. The main point here is that there is a fair number of components involved, with some complexity in implementation in order to allow for extreme flexibility, but the part that you use to expose a new feed is extremely simple and light: declare that you want your content exposed as a feed and you’re done. There are cases where you’ll have to dive in and provide new implementations for some or all of the interfaces involved, but that requirement will only arise as needed. For example, you might need to create a new feed item builder to include your custom content type but that effort will be extremely focused on the specialized task at hand. The rest of the system won’t need to change. So what do you think?

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  • How Oracle Data Integration Customers Differentiate Their Business in Competitive Markets

    - by Irem Radzik
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 With data being a central force in driving innovation and competing effectively, data integration has become a key IT approach to remove silos and ensure working with consistent and trusted data. Especially with the release of 12c version, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate offer easy-to-use and high-performance solutions that help companies with their critical data initiatives, including big data analytics, moving to cloud architectures, modernizing and connecting transactional systems and more. In a recent press release we announced the great momentum and analyst recognition Oracle Data Integration products have achieved in the data integration and replication market. In this press release we described some of the key new features of Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. In addition, a few from our 4500+ customers explained how Oracle’s data integration platform helped them achieve their business goals. In this blog post I would like to go over what these customers shared about their experience. Land O’Lakes is one of America’s premier member-owned cooperatives, and offers an extensive line of agricultural supplies, as well as production and business services. Rich Bellefeuille, manager, ETL & data warehouse for Land O’Lakes told us how GoldenGate helped them modernize their critical ERP system without impacting service and how they are moving to new projects with Oracle Data Integrator 12c: “With Oracle GoldenGate 11g, we've been able to migrate our enterprise-wide implementation of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, ERP system, to a new database and application server platform with minimal downtime to our business. Using Oracle GoldenGate 11g we reduced database migration time from nearly 30 hours to less than 30 minutes. Given our quick success, we are considering expansion of our Oracle GoldenGate 12c footprint. We are also in the midst of deploying a solution leveraging Oracle Data Integrator 12c to manage our pricing data to handle orders more effectively and provide a better relationship with our clients. We feel we are gaining higher productivity and flexibility with Oracle's data integration products." ICON, a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries, highlighted the competitive advantage that a solid data integration foundation brings. Diarmaid O’Reilly, enterprise data warehouse manager, ICON plc said “Oracle Data Integrator enables us to align clinical trials intelligence with the information needs of our sponsors. It helps differentiate ICON’s services in an increasingly competitive drug-development industry."  You can find more info on ICON's implementation here. A popular use case for Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration is offloading operational reporting from critical transaction processing systems. SolarWorld, one of the world’s largest solar-technology producers and the largest U.S. solar panel manufacturer, implemented Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration of manufacturing data for fast analysis. Russ Toyama, U.S. senior database administrator for SolarWorld told us real-time data helps their operations and GoldenGate’s solution supports high performance of their manufacturing systems: “We use Oracle GoldenGate for real-time data integration into our decision support system, which performs real-time analysis for manufacturing operations to continuously improve product quality, yield and efficiency. With reliable and low-impact data movement capabilities, Oracle GoldenGate also helps ensure that our critical manufacturing systems are stable and operate with high performance."  You can watch the full interview with SolarWorld's Russ Toyama here. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Starwood Hotels and Resorts is one of the many customers that found out how well Oracle Data Integration products work with Oracle Exadata. Gordon Light, senior director of information technology for StarWood Hotels, says they had notable performance gain in loading Oracle Exadata reporting environment: “We leverage Oracle GoldenGate to replicate data from our central reservations systems and other OLTP databases – significantly decreasing the overall ETL duration. Moving forward, we plan to use Oracle GoldenGate to help the company achieve near-real-time reporting.”You can listen about Starwood Hotels' implementation here. Many companies combine the power of Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle Data Integrator to have a single, integrated data integration platform for variety of use cases across the enterprise. Ufone is another good example of that. The leading mobile communications service provider of Pakistan has improved customer service using timely customer data in its data warehouse. Atif Aslam, head of management information systems for Ufone says: “Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate help us integrate information from various systems and provide up-to-date and real-time CRM data updates hourly, rather than daily. The applications have simplified data warehouse operations and allowed business users to make faster and better informed decisions to protect revenue in the fast-moving Pakistani telecommunications market.” You can read more about Ufone's use case here. In our Oracle Data Integration 12c launch webcast back in November we also heard from BT’s CTO Surren Parthab about their use of GoldenGate for moving to private cloud architecture. Surren also shared his perspectives on Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c releases. You can watch the video here. These are only a few examples of leading companies that have made data integration and real-time data access a key part of their data governance and IT modernization initiatives. They have seen real improvements in how their businesses operate and differentiate in today’s competitive markets. You can read about other customer examples in our Ebook: The Path to the Future and access resources including white papers, data sheets, podcasts and more via our Oracle Data Integration resource kit. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • So, how is the Oracle HCM Cloud User Experience? In a word, smokin’!

    - by Edith Mireles-Oracle
    By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Oracle unveiled its game-changing cloud user experience strategy at Oracle OpenWorld 2013 (remember that?) with a new simplified user interface (UI) paradigm.  The Oracle HCM cloud user experience is about light-weight interaction, tailored to the task you are trying to accomplish, on the device you are comfortable working with. A key theme for the Oracle user experience is being able to move from smartphone to tablet to desktop, with all of your data in the cloud. The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience provides designs for better productivity, no matter when and how your employees need to work. Release 8  Oracle recently demonstrated how fast it is moving development forward for our cloud applications, with the availability of release 8.  In release 8, users will see expanded simplicity in the HCM cloud user experience, such as filling out a time card and succession planning. Oracle has also expanded its mobile capabilities with task flows for payslips, managing absences, and advanced analytics. In addition, users will see expanded extensibility with the new structures editor for simplified pages, and the with the user interface text editor, which allows you to update language throughout the UI from one place. If you don’t like calling people who work for you “employees,” you can use this tool to create a term that is suited to your business.  Take a look yourself at what’s available now. What are people saying?Debra Lilley (@debralilley), an Oracle ACE Director who has a long history with Oracle Applications, recently gave her perspective on release 8: “Having had the privilege of seeing a preview of release 8, I am again impressed with the enhancements around simplified UI. Even more so, at a user group event in London this week, an existing Cloud HCM customer speaking publically about his implementation said he was very excited about release 8 as the absence functionality was so superior and simple to use.”  In an interview with Lilley for a blog post by Dennis Howlett  (@dahowlett), we probably couldn’t have asked for a more even-handed look at the Oracle Applications Cloud and the impact of user experience. Take the time to watch all three videos and get the full picture.  In closing, Howlett’s said: “There is always the caveat that getting from the past to Fusion [from the editor: Fusion is now called the Oracle Applications Cloud] is not quite as simple as may be painted, but the outcomes are much better than anticipated in large measure because the user experience is so much better than what went before.” Herman Slange, Technical Manager with Oracle Applications partner Profource, agrees with that comment. “We use on-premise Financials & HCM for internal use. Having a simple user interface that works on a desktop as well as a tablet for (very) non-technical users is a big relief. Coming from E-Business Suite, there is less training (none) required to access HCM content.  From a technical point of view, having the abilities to tailor the simplified UI very easy makes it very efficient for us to adjust to specific customer needs.  When we have a conversation about simplified UI, we just hand over a tablet and ask the customer to just use it. No training and no explanation required.” Finally, in a story by Computer Weekly  about Oracle customer BG Group, a natural gas exploration and production company based in the UK and with a presence in 20 countries, the author states: “The new HR platform has proved to be easier and more intuitive for HR staff to use than the previous SAP-based technology.” What’s Next for Oracle’s Applications Cloud User Experiences? This is the question that Steve Miranda, Oracle Executive Vice President, Applications Development, asks the Applications User Experience team, and we’ve been hard at work for some time now on “what’s next.”  I can’t say too much about it, but I can tell you that we’ve started talking to customers and partners, under non-disclosure agreements, about user experience concepts that we are working on in order to get their feedback. We recently had a chance to talk about possibilities for the Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit. This was a fantastic event, hosted by Shane Bliss and Vance Morossi of the Oracle Client Success Team. We got to use the uber-slick facilities of Allergan, our hosts (of Botox fame), headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with a presence in more than 100 countries. Photo by Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User Experience Vance Morossi, left, and Shane Bliss, of the Oracle Client Success Team, at an Oracle HCM Southern California Customer Success Summit.  We were treated to a few really excellent talks around human resources (HR). Alice White, VP Human Resources, discussed Allergan's process for global talent acquisition -- how Allergan has designed and deployed a global process, and global tools, along with Oracle and Cognizant, and are now at the end of a global implementation. She shared a couple of insights about the journey for Allergan: “One of the major areas for improvement was on role clarification within the company.” She said the company is “empowering managers and deputizing them as recruiters. Now it is a global process that is nimble and efficient."  Deepak Rammohan, VP Product Management, HCM Cloud, Oracle, also took the stage to talk about pioneering modern HR. He reflected modern HR problems of getting the right data about the workforce, the importance of getting the right talent as a key strategic initiative, and other workforce insights. "How do we design systems to deal with all of this?” he asked. “Make sure the systems are talent-centric. The next piece is collaborative, engaging, and mobile. A lot of this is influenced by what users see today. The last thing is around insight; insight at the point of decision-making." Rammohan showed off some killer HCM Cloud talent demos focused on simplicity and mobility that his team has been cooking up, and closed with a great line about the nature of modern recruiting: "Recruiting is a team sport." Deepak Rammohan, left, and Jake Kuramoto, both of Oracle, debate the merits of a Google Glass concept demo for recruiters on-the-go. Later, in an expo-style format, the Apps UX team showed several concepts for next-generation HCM Cloud user experiences, including demos shown by Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramoto) of The AppsLab, and Aylin Uysal (@aylinuysal), Director, HCM Cloud user experience. We even hauled out our eye-tracker, a research tool used to show where the eye is looking at a particular screen, thanks to teammate Michael LaDuke. Dionne Healy, HCM Client Executive, and Aylin Uysal, Director, HCM Cloud user experiences, Oracle, take a look at new HCM Cloud UX concepts. We closed the day with Jeremy Ashley (@jrwashley), VP, Applications User Experience, who brought it all back together by talking about the big picture for applications cloud user experiences. He covered the trends we are paying attention to now, what users will be expecting of their modern enterprise apps, and what Oracle’s design strategy is around these ideas.   We closed with an excellent reception hosted by ADP Payroll services at Bistango. Want to read more?Want to see where our cloud user experience is going next? Read more on the UsableApps web site about our latest design initiative: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” Or catch up on the back story by looking over our Applications Cloud user experience content on the UsableApps web site.  You can also find out where we’ll be next at the Events page on UsableApps.

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  • Computer crashes on resume from standby almost every time

    - by Los Frijoles
    I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Core i5 2500K and ASRock Z68 Pro3-M motherboard (no graphics card, hd is a WD Green 1TB, and cd drive is some cheap lite-on drive). Since installing 12.04, my computer has been freezing after resume, but not every time. When I start to resume, it starts going normally with a blinking cursor on the screen and then sometimes it will continue on to the gnome 3 unlock screen. Most of the time, however, it will blink for a little bit and then the monitor will flip modes and shut off due to no signal. Pressing keys on the keyboard gets no response (num lock light doesn't respond, Ctrl-Alt-F1 fails to drop it into a terminal, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work) and so I assume the computer is crashed. The worst part is, the logs look entirely normal. Here is my system log during one of these crashes and my subsequent hard poweroff and restart: Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-1, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[12419]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 22:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[9061]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[22142]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 22:39:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26909]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560822] show_signal_msg: 36 callbacks suppressed Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560828] chromium-browse[9139]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:05:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [58586.415158] chromium-browse[21025]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[13542]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.317590] usb 2-1.7: USB disconnect, device number 8 Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319672] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Synchronizing SCSI cache Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319737] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Jun 6 23:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26580]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 29925[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30131 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30162 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30163 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30166 of process 30166 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop pulseaudio[30166]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running. Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 2942[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 29925[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 1286[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.6" x-pid="1053" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd-2039: Could not open output pipe '/dev/xconsole' [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ] Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Ericsson MBM Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Sierra Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Generic Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Huawei Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Linktop Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Failed to init gatt_example plugin Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Listening for HCI events on hci0 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> NetworkManager (version 0.9.4.0) is starting... Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> Read config file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> VPN: loaded org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> DNS: loaded plugin dnsmasq Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu Sorry it's so huge; the restart happens at 23:28:12 I believe and all I see is that chromium segfaulted a few times. I wouldn't think a segfault from an individual program on the computer would crash it, but could that be the issue?

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  • OBJ model loaded in LWJGL has a black area with no texture

    - by gambiting
    I have a problem with loading an .obj file in LWJGL and its textures. The object is a tree(it's a paid model from TurboSquid, so I can't post it here,but here's the link if you want to see how it should look like): http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/701294 I wrote a custom OBJ loader using the LWJGL tutorial from their wiki. It looks like this: public class OBJLoader { public static Model loadModel(File f) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f)); Model m = new Model(); String line; Texture currentTexture = null; while((line=reader.readLine()) != null) { if(line.startsWith("v ")) { float x = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[1]); float y = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[2]); float z = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[3]); m.verticies.add(new Vector3f(x,y,z)); }else if(line.startsWith("vn ")) { float x = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[1]); float y = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[2]); float z = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[3]); m.normals.add(new Vector3f(x,y,z)); }else if(line.startsWith("vt ")) { float x = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[1]); float y = Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[2]); m.texVerticies.add(new Vector2f(x,y)); }else if(line.startsWith("f ")) { Vector3f vertexIndicies = new Vector3f(Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[1].split("/")[0]), Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[2].split("/")[0]), Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[3].split("/")[0])); Vector3f textureIndicies = new Vector3f(Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[1].split("/")[1]), Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[2].split("/")[1]), Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[3].split("/")[1])); Vector3f normalIndicies = new Vector3f(Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[1].split("/")[2]), Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[2].split("/")[2]), Float.valueOf(line.split(" ")[3].split("/")[2])); m.faces.add(new Face(vertexIndicies,textureIndicies,normalIndicies,currentTexture.getTextureID())); }else if(line.startsWith("g ")) { if(line.length()>2) { String name = line.split(" ")[1]; currentTexture = TextureLoader.getTexture("PNG", ResourceLoader.getResourceAsStream("res/" + name + ".png")); System.out.println(currentTexture.getTextureID()); } } } reader.close(); System.out.println(m.verticies.size() + " verticies"); System.out.println(m.normals.size() + " normals"); System.out.println(m.texVerticies.size() + " texture coordinates"); System.out.println(m.faces.size() + " faces"); return m; } } Then I create a display list for my model using this code: objectDisplayList = GL11.glGenLists(1); GL11.glNewList(objectDisplayList, GL11.GL_COMPILE); Model m = null; try { m = OBJLoader.loadModel(new File("res/untitled4.obj")); } catch (Exception e1) { e1.printStackTrace(); } int currentTexture=0; for(Face face: m.faces) { if(face.texture!=currentTexture) { currentTexture = face.texture; GL11.glBindTexture(GL11.GL_TEXTURE_2D, currentTexture); } GL11.glColor3f(1f, 1f, 1f); GL11.glBegin(GL11.GL_TRIANGLES); Vector3f n1 = m.normals.get((int) face.normal.x - 1); GL11.glNormal3f(n1.x, n1.y, n1.z); Vector2f t1 = m.texVerticies.get((int) face.textures.x -1); GL11.glTexCoord2f(t1.x, t1.y); Vector3f v1 = m.verticies.get((int) face.vertex.x - 1); GL11.glVertex3f(v1.x, v1.y, v1.z); Vector3f n2 = m.normals.get((int) face.normal.y - 1); GL11.glNormal3f(n2.x, n2.y, n2.z); Vector2f t2 = m.texVerticies.get((int) face.textures.y -1); GL11.glTexCoord2f(t2.x, t2.y); Vector3f v2 = m.verticies.get((int) face.vertex.y - 1); GL11.glVertex3f(v2.x, v2.y, v2.z); Vector3f n3 = m.normals.get((int) face.normal.z - 1); GL11.glNormal3f(n3.x, n3.y, n3.z); Vector2f t3 = m.texVerticies.get((int) face.textures.z -1); GL11.glTexCoord2f(t3.x, t3.y); Vector3f v3 = m.verticies.get((int) face.vertex.z - 1); GL11.glVertex3f(v3.x, v3.y, v3.z); GL11.glEnd(); } GL11.glEndList(); The currentTexture is an int - it contains the ID of the currently used texture. So my model looks absolutely fine without textures: (sorry I cannot post hyperlinks since I am a new user) i.imgur.com/VtoK0.png But look what happens if I enable GL_TEXTURE_2D: i.imgur.com/z8Kli.png i.imgur.com/5e9nn.png i.imgur.com/FAHM9.png As you can see an entire side of the tree appears to be missing - and it's not transparent, since it's not in the colour of the background - it's rendered black. It's not a problem with the model - if I load it using Kanji's OBJ loader it works fine(but the thing is,that I need to write my own OBJ loader) i.imgur.com/YDATo.png this is my OpenGL init section: //init display try { Display.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(Support.SCREEN_WIDTH, Support.SCREEN_HEIGHT)); Display.create(); Display.setVSyncEnabled(true); } catch (LWJGLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); System.exit(0); } GL11.glLoadIdentity(); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_TEXTURE_2D); GL11.glClearColor(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glShadeModel(GL11.GL_SMOOTH); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_DEPTH_TEST); GL11.glDepthFunc(GL11.GL_LESS); GL11.glDepthMask(true); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_NORMALIZE); GL11.glMatrixMode(GL11.GL_PROJECTION); GLU.gluPerspective (90.0f,800f/600f, 1f, 500.0f); GL11.glMatrixMode(GL11.GL_MODELVIEW); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_CULL_FACE); GL11.glCullFace(GL11.GL_BACK); //enable lighting GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_LIGHTING); ByteBuffer temp = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(16); temp.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); GL11.glMaterial(GL11.GL_FRONT, GL11.GL_DIFFUSE, (FloatBuffer)temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightDiffuse).flip()); GL11.glMaterialf(GL11.GL_FRONT, GL11.GL_SHININESS,(int)material_shinyness); GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_DIFFUSE, (FloatBuffer)temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightDiffuse2).flip()); // Setup The Diffuse Light GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_POSITION,(FloatBuffer)temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightPosition2).flip()); GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_AMBIENT,(FloatBuffer)temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightAmbient).flip()); GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_SPECULAR,(FloatBuffer)temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightDiffuse2).flip()); GL11.glLightf(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_CONSTANT_ATTENUATION, 0.1f); GL11.glLightf(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_LINEAR_ATTENUATION, 0.0f); GL11.glLightf(GL11.GL_LIGHT2, GL11.GL_QUADRATIC_ATTENUATION, 0.0f); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_LIGHT2); Could somebody please help me?

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  • How can a code editor effectively hint at code nesting level - without using indentation?

    - by pgfearo
    I've written an XML text editor that provides 2 view options for the same XML text, one indented (virtually), the other left-justified. The motivation for the left-justified view is to help users 'see' the whitespace characters they're using for indentation of plain-text or XPath code without interference from indentation that is an automated side-effect of the XML context. I want to provide visual clues (in the non-editable part of the editor) for the left-justified mode that will help the user, but without getting too elaborate. I tried just using connecting lines, but that seemed too busy. The best I've come up with so far is shown in a mocked up screenshot of the editor below, but I'm seeking better/simpler alternatives (that don't require too much code). [Edit] Taking the heatmap idea (from: @jimp) I get this and 3 alternatives - labelled a, b and c: The following section describes the accepted answer as a proposal, bringing together ideas from a number of other answers and comments. As this question is now community wiki, please feel free to update this. NestView The name for this idea which provides a visual method to improve the readability of nested code without using indentation. Contour Lines The name for the differently shaded lines within the NestView The image above shows the NestView used to help visualise an XML snippet. Though XML is used for this illustration, any other code syntax that uses nesting could have been used for this illustration. An Overview: The contour lines are shaded (as in a heatmap) to convey nesting level The contour lines are angled to show when a nesting level is being either opened or closed. A contour line links the start of a nesting level to the corresponding end. The combined width of contour lines give a visual impression of nesting level, in addition to the heatmap. The width of the NestView may be manually resizable, but should not change as the code changes. Contour lines can either be compressed or truncated to keep acheive this. Blank lines are sometimes used code to break up text into more digestable chunks. Such lines could trigger special behaviour in the NestView. For example the heatmap could be reset or a background color contour line used, or both. One or more contour lines associated with the currently selected code can be highlighted. The contour line associated with the selected code level would be emphasized the most, but other contour lines could also 'light up' in addition to help highlight the containing nested group Different behaviors (such as code folding or code selection) can be associated with clicking/double-clicking on a Contour Line. Different parts of a contour line (leading, middle or trailing edge) may have different dynamic behaviors associated. Tooltips can be shown on a mouse hover event over a contour line The NestView is updated continously as the code is edited. Where nesting is not well-balanced assumptions can be made where the nesting level should end, but the associated temporary contour lines must be highlighted in some way as a warning. Drag and drop behaviors of Contour Lines can be supported. Behaviour may vary according to the part of the contour line being dragged. Features commonly found in the left margin such as line numbering and colour highlighting for errors and change state could overlay the NestView. Additional Functionality The proposal addresses a range of additional issues - many are outside the scope of the original question, but a useful side-effect. Visually linking the start and end of a nested region The contour lines connect the start and end of each nested level Highlighting the context of the currently selected line As code is selected, the associated nest-level in the NestView can be highlighted Differentiating between code regions at the same nesting level In the case of XML different hues could be used for different namespaces. Programming languages (such as c#) support named regions that could be used in a similar way. Dividing areas within a nesting area into different visual blocks Extra lines are often inserted into code to aid readability. Such empty lines could be used to reset the saturation level of the NestView's contour lines. Multi-Column Code View Code without indentation makes the use of a multi-column view more effective because word-wrap or horizontal scrolling is less likely to be required. In this view, once code has reach the bottom of one column, it flows into the next one: Usage beyond merely providing a visual aid As proposed in the overview, the NestView could provide a range of editing and selection features which would be broadly in line with what is expected from a TreeView control. The key difference is that a typical TreeView node has 2 parts: an expander and the node icon. A NestView contour line can have as many as 3 parts: an opener (sloping), a connector (vertical) and a close (sloping). On Indentation The NestView presented alongside non-indented code complements, but is unlikely to replace, the conventional indented code view. It's likely that any solutions adopting a NestView, will provide a method to switch seamlessly between indented and non-indented code views without affecting any of the code text itself - including whitespace characters. One technique for the indented view would be 'Virtual Formatting' - where a dynamic left-margin is used in lieu of tab or space characters. The same nesting-level data used to dynamically render the NestView could also used for the more conventional-looking indented view. Printing Indentation will be important for the readability of printed code. Here, the absence of tab/space characters and a dynamic left-margin means that the text can wrap at the right-margin and still maintain the integrity of the indented view. Line numbers can be used as visual markers that indicate where code is word-wrapped and also the exact position of indentation: Screen Real-Estate: Flat Vs Indented Addressing the question of whether the NestView uses up valuable screen real-estate: Contour lines work well with a width the same as the code editor's character width. A NestView width of 12 character widths can therefore accommodate 12 levels of nesting before contour lines are truncated/compressed. If an indented view uses 3 character-widths for each nesting level then space is saved until nesting reaches 4 levels of nesting, after this nesting level the flat view has a space-saving advantage that increases with each nesting level. Note: A minimum indentation of 4 character widths is often recommended for code, however XML often manages with less. Also, Virtual Formatting permits less indentation to be used because there's no risk of alignment issues A comparison of the 2 views is shown below: Based on the above, its probably fair to conclude that view style choice will be based on factors other than screen real-estate. The one exception is where screen space is at a premium, for example on a Netbook/Tablet or when multiple code windows are open. In these cases, the resizable NestView would seem to be a clear winner. Use Cases Examples of real-world examples where NestView may be a useful option: Where screen real-estate is at a premium a. On devices such as tablets, notepads and smartphones b. When showing code on websites c. When multiple code windows need to be visible on the desktop simultaneously Where consistent whitespace indentation of text within code is a priority For reviewing deeply nested code. For example where sub-languages (e.g. Linq in C# or XPath in XSLT) might cause high levels of nesting. Accessibility Resizing and color options must be provided to aid those with visual impairments, and also to suit environmental conditions and personal preferences: Compatability of edited code with other systems A solution incorporating a NestView option should ideally be capable of stripping leading tab and space characters (identified as only having a formatting role) from imported code. Then, once stripped, the code could be rendered neatly in both the left-justified and indented views without change. For many users relying on systems such as merging and diff tools that are not whitespace-aware this will be a major concern (if not a complete show-stopper). Other Works: Visualisation of Overlapping Markup Published research by Wendell Piez, dated from 2004, addresses the issue of the visualisation of overlapping markup, specifically LMNL. This includes SVG graphics with significant similarities to the NestView proposal, as such, they are acknowledged here. The visual differences are clear in the images (below), the key functional distinction is that NestView is intended only for well-nested XML or code, whereas Wendell Piez's graphics are designed to represent overlapped nesting. The graphics above were reproduced - with kind permission - from http://www.piez.org Sources: Towards Hermenutic Markup Half-steps toward LMNL

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  • 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

    - by Matt
    Coda plays an important role in designing layout on Mac. There are numerous coda alternatives for windows and Linux too. It is not possible to describe each and everyone so some of the coda alternatives, which work on both windows and Linux platforms, are discussed below. EditPlus $35.00 Good thing about EditPlus is that it highlights URLs and email addresses, activating them when you ‘crtl + double-click’. It also has a built in browser for previewing HTML, and FTP and SFTP support. Also supports Macros and RegEx find and replace. UltraEdit $49.99 It is another good coda alternative for windows and Linux. It is the best suited editor for text, HTML and HEX. It also plays an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. It supports disk-based 64-bit or standard file handling on 32-bit Windows platforms or window 2000 and later versions. HippoEdit $39.95 HippoEDIT has the best autocomplete it gives pop a ‘tooltip’ above your cursor as you type, suggesting words you’ve already typed. It does syntax highlighting for over 2 dozen language. Sublime Text $59.00 Sublime Text awesome ‘zoomed out’ view of the file lets you focus on the area you want. It lets you open a local file when you right-click on its link, and there are a few automation features, so this would make a solid choice of a text editor. Textpad $24.70 TextPad is simple editor with nifty features such as column select, drag-and-drop text between files, and hyperlink support. It also supports large files. Aptana Free Aptana Studio is one of the best editors working on both windows and Linux. It is a complete web development setting that has a nice blend of powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services. It is quite helpful as it support for PHP, CSS, FTP, and more. SciTE Free It is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. It has gradually developed as a generally useful editor. It provides for building and running programs. It is best to be used for jobs with simple configurations. SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12 E Text Editor $34.96 E Text Editor is a new text editor for Windows, which also works on Linux as well. It has powerful editing features and also some unique abilities. It makes text manipulation quite fast and easy, and makes user focus on his writing as it automatically does all the manual work. It can be extend it in any language. It supports Text Mate bundles, thus allows the user to tap into a huge and active community. Editra Free Editra is an upcoming editor, with some fantastic features such as user profiles, auto-completion, session saving, and syntax highlighing for 60+ languages. Plugins can extend the feature set, offering an integrated python console, FTP client, file browser, and calculator, among others. PSPad Free PSPad is a good Template for writing CSS, as it an internal web browser, and a macro recorder to the table. It also supports hex editing, and some degree of code compiling. JEdit Free It is a mature programmer’s text editor and has taken a good deal of time to be developed as it is today. It is better than many costlier development tools due to its features and simplicity of use. It has been released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Which also adds to its attractiveness. NEdit Free It is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which also works on Linux. It combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the full functionality and stability required by users who edit text for long period a day. It also provides for thorough support for development in various languages. It also facilitates the use of text processors, and other tools at the same time. It can be used productively by anyone who needs to edit text. It is quite a user-friendly tool. Its salient features include syntax highlighting with built in pattern, auto indent, tab emulation, block indentation adjustment etc. As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. MadEdit Free Mad Edit is an Open-Source and Cross-Platform Text/Hex Editor. It is written in C++ and wxWidgets. MadEdit can edit files in Text/Column/Hex modes. It also supports many useful functions, such as Syntax Highlighting, Word Wrap, Encoding for UTF8/16/32,and others. It also supports word count, which makes it quite a useful text editor for both windows and Linux. It has been recently modified on 10/09/2010. KompoZer Free Kompozer is a complete web authoring system that has a combination of web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer has been designed to be completely and extensively easy to use. It is thus an ideal tool for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without knowing HTML or web coding. It is based on the NVU source code. Vim Free Vim or “Vi IMproved” is an advanced text editor. Its salient features are syntax highlighting, word completion and it also has a huge amount of contributed content. Vim has several “modes” on offer for editing, which adds to the efficiency in editing. Thus it becomes a non-user-friendly application but it is also strength for its users. The normal mode binds alphanumeric keys to task-oriented commands. The visual mode highlights text. More tools for search & replace, defining functions, etc. are offered through command line mode. Vim comes with complete help. NotePad ++ Free One of the the best free text editor for Windows out there; with support for simple things—like syntax highlighting and folding—all the way up to FTP, Notepad++ should tick most of the boxes Notepad2 Free Notepad2 is also based on the Scintilla editing engine, but it’s much simpler than Notepad++. It bills itself as being fast, light-weight, and Notepad-like. Crimson Editor Free Crimson Editor has the ability to edit remote files, using a built-in FTP client; there’s also a spell checker. TotalEdit Free TotalEdit allows file comparison, RegEx search and replace, and has multiple options for file backup / versioning. For cleanup, it offers (X)HTML and XML customizable formatting, and a spell checker. In-Type Free ConTEXT Free SourceEdit Free SourceEdit includes features such as clipboard history, syntax highlighting and autocompletion for a decent set of languages. A hex editor and FTP client. RJ TextED Free RJ TextED supports integration with TopStyle Lite. Provides HTML validation and formatting. It includes an FTP client, a file browser, and a code browser, as well as a character map and support for email. GEDIT Free It is one of the best coda alternatives for windows and Linux. It has syntax highlighting and is best suitable for programming. It has many attractive features such as full support for UTF-8, undo/redo, and clipboard support, search and replace, configurable syntax highlighting for various languages and many more supportive features. It is extensible with plug ins. Other important coda alternatives for windows and Linux are Redcar, Bluefish Editor, NVU, Ruby Mine, Slick Edit, Geany, Editra, txt2html and CSSED. There are many more. Its up to user to decide which one suits best to his requirements. Related posts:10 Useful Text Editor For Developer Applications to Install & Run Windows on Linux Open Source WYSIWYG Text Editors

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  • WP7 Tips–Part I– Media File Coding Techniques to help pass the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Certification Requirements

    - by seaniannuzzi
    Overview Developing an application that plays media files on a Windows Phone 7 Device seems fairly straight forward.  However, what can make this a bit frustrating are the necessary requirements in order to pass the WP7 marketplace requirements so that your application can be published.  If you are new to this development, be aware of these common challenges that are likely to be made.  Below are some techniques and recommendations on how optimize your application to handle playing MP3 and/or WMA files that needs to adhere to the marketplace requirements.   Windows Phone 7 Certification Requirements Windows Phone 7 Developers Blog   Some common challenges are: Not prompting the user if another media file is playing in the background before playing your media file Not allowing the user to control the volume Not allowing the user to mute the sound Not allowing the media to be interrupted by a phone call  To keep this as simple as possible I am only going to focus on what “not to do” and what “to do” in order to implement a simple media solution. Things you will need or may be useful to you before you begin: Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio 2010 Feature Packs Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Windows Phone Emulator Resources Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio XNA Game Studio 4.0 Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone Note: Please keep in mind you do not need all of these downloaded and installed, it is just easier to have all that you need now rather than add them on later.   Objective Summary Create a Windows Phone 7 – Windows Media Sample Application.  The application will implement many of the required features in order to pass the WP7 marketplace certification requirements in order to publish an application to WP7’s marketplace. (Disclaimer: I am not trying to indicate that this application will always pass as the requirements may change or be updated)   Step 1: – Create a New Windows Phone 7 Project   Step 2: – Update the Title and Application Name of your WP7 Application For this example I changed: the Title to: “DOTNETNUZZI WP7 MEDIA SAMPLE - v1.00” and the Page Title to:  “media magic”. Note: I also updated the background.   Step 3: – XAML - Media Element Preparation and Best Practice Before we begin the next step I just wanted to point out a few things that you should not do as a best practice when developing an application for WP7 that is playing music.  Please keep in mind that these requirements are not the same if you are playing Sound Effects and are geared towards playing media in the background.   If you have coded this – be prepared to change it:   To avoid a failure from the market place remove all of your media source elements from your XAML or simply create them dynamically.  To keep this simple we will remove the source and set the AutoPlay property to false to ensure that there are no media elements are active when the application is started. Proper example of the media element with No Source:   Some Additional Settings - Add XAML Support for a Mute Button   Step 4: – Boolean to handle toggle of Mute Feature Step 5: – Add Event Handler for Main Page Load   Step 6: – Add Reference to the XNA Framework   Step 7: – Add two Using Statements to Resolve the Namespace of Media and the Application Bar using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; using Microsoft.Phone.Shell;   Step 8: – Add the Method to Check the Media State as Shown Below   Step 9: – Add Code to Mute the Media File Step 10: – Add Code to Play the Media File //if the state of the media has been checked you are good to go. media_sample.Play(); Note: If we tried to perform this operation at this point you will receive the following error: System.InvalidOperationException was unhandled Message=FrameworkDispatcher.Update has not been called. Regular FrameworkDispatcher.Update calls are necessary for fire and forget sound effects and framework events to function correctly. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193853 for details. StackTrace:        at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.FrameworkDispatcher.AddNewPendingCall(ManagedCallType callType, UInt32 arg)        at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.UserAsyncDispatcher.HandleManagedCallback(ManagedCallType managedCallType, UInt32 managedCallArgs) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.UserAsyncDispatcher.AsyncDispatcherThreadFunction()            It is not recommended that you just add the FrameworkDispatcher.Update(); call before playing the media file. It is recommended that you implement the following class to your solution and implement this class in the app.xaml.cs file.   Step 11: – Add FrameworkDispatcher Features I recommend creating a class named XNAAsyncDispatcher and adding the following code:   After you have added the code accordingly, you can now implement this into your app.xaml.cs file as highlighted below.   Note:  If you application sound file is not playing make sure you have the proper “Build Action” set such as Content.   Running the Sample Now that we have some of the foundation created you should be able to run the application successfully.  When the application launches your sound options should be set accordingly when the “checkMediaState” method is called.  As a result the application will properly setup the media options and/or alert the user accordinglyper the certification requirements.  In addition, the sample also shows a quick way to mute the sound in your application by simply removing the URI source of the media file.  If everything successfully compiled the application should look similar to below.                 <sound playing>   Summary At this point we have a fully functional application that provides techniques on how to avoid some common challenges when working with media files and developing applications for Windows Phone 7.  The techniques mentioned above should make things a little easier and helpful in getting your WP7 application approved and published on the Marketplace.  The next blog post will be titled: WP7 Tips–Part II - How to write code that will pass the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Requirements for Themes (light and dark). If anyone has any questions or comments please comment on this blog. 

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  • Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

    The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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  • Dynamic Code for type casting Generic Types 'generically' in C#

    - by Rick Strahl
    C# is a strongly typed language and while that's a fundamental feature of the language there are more and more situations where dynamic types make a lot of sense. I've written quite a bit about how I use dynamic for creating new type extensions: Dynamic Types and DynamicObject References in C# Creating a dynamic, extensible C# Expando Object Creating a dynamic DataReader for dynamic Property Access Today I want to point out an example of a much simpler usage for dynamic that I use occasionally to get around potential static typing issues in C# code especially those concerning generic types. TypeCasting Generics Generic types have been around since .NET 2.0 I've run into a number of situations in the past - especially with generic types that don't implement specific interfaces that can be cast to - where I've been unable to properly cast an object when it's passed to a method or assigned to a property. Granted often this can be a sign of bad design, but in at least some situations the code that needs to be integrated is not under my control so I have to make due with what's available or the parent object is too complex or intermingled to be easily refactored to a new usage scenario. Here's an example that I ran into in my own RazorHosting library - so I have really no excuse, but I also don't see another clean way around it in this case. A Generic Example Imagine I've implemented a generic type like this: public class RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase, new() You can now happily instantiate new generic versions of this type with custom template bases or even a non-generic version which is implemented like this: public class RazorEngine : RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase> { public RazorEngine() : base() { } } To instantiate one: var engine = new RazorEngine<MyCustomRazorTemplate>(); Now imagine that the template class receives a reference to the engine when it's instantiated. This code is fired as part of the Engine pipeline when it gets ready to execute the template. It instantiates the template and assigns itself to the template: var template = new TBaseTemplateType() { Engine = this } The problem here is that possibly many variations of RazorEngine<T> can be passed. I can have RazorTemplateBase, RazorFolderHostTemplateBase, CustomRazorTemplateBase etc. as generic parameters and the Engine property has to reflect that somehow. So, how would I cast that? My first inclination was to use an interface on the engine class and then cast to the interface.  Generally that works, but unfortunately here the engine class is generic and has a few members that require the template type in the member signatures. So while I certainly can implement an interface: public interface IRazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> it doesn't really help for passing this generically templated object to the template class - I still can't cast it if multiple differently typed versions of the generic type could be passed. I have the exact same issue in that I can't specify a 'generic' generic parameter, since there's no underlying base type that's common. In light of this I decided on using object and the following syntax for the property (and the same would be true for a method parameter): public class RazorTemplateBase :MarshalByRefObject,IDisposable { public object Engine {get;set; } } Now because the Engine property is a non-typed object, when I need to do something with this value, I still have no way to cast it explicitly. What I really would need is: public RazorEngine<> Engine { get; set; } but that's not possible. Dynamic to the Rescue Luckily with the dynamic type this sort of thing can be mitigated fairly easily. For example here's a method that uses the Engine property and uses the well known class interface by simply casting the plain object reference to dynamic and then firing away on the properties and methods of the base template class that are common to all templates:/// <summary> /// Allows rendering a dynamic template from a string template /// passing in a model. This is like rendering a partial /// but providing the input as a /// </summary> public virtual string RenderTemplate(string template,object model) { if (template == null) return string.Empty; // if there's no template markup if(!template.Contains("@")) return template; // use dynamic to get around generic type casting dynamic engine = Engine; string result = engine.RenderTemplate(template, model); if (result == null) throw new ApplicationException("RenderTemplate failed: " + engine.ErrorMessage); return result; } Prior to .NET 4.0  I would have had to use Reflection for this sort of thing which would have a been a heck of a lot more verbose, but dynamic makes this so much easier and cleaner and in this case at least the overhead is negliable since it's a single dynamic operation on an otherwise very complex operation call. Dynamic as  a Bailout Sometimes this sort of thing often reeks of a design flaw, and I agree that in hindsight this could have been designed differently. But as is often the case this particular scenario wasn't planned for originally and removing the generic signatures from the base type would break a ton of other code in the framework. Given the existing fairly complex engine design, refactoring an interface to remove generic types just to make this particular code work would have been overkill. Instead dynamic provides a nice and simple and relatively clean solution. Now if there were many other places where this occurs I would probably consider reworking the code to make this cleaner but given this isolated instance and relatively low profile operation use of dynamic seems a valid choice for me. This solution really works anywhere where you might end up with an inheritance structure that doesn't have a common base or interface that is sufficient. In the example above I know what I'm getting but there's no common base type that I can cast to. All that said, it's a good idea to think about use of dynamic before you rush in. In many situations there are alternatives that can still work with static typing. Dynamic definitely has some overhead compared to direct static access of objects, so if possible we should definitely stick to static typing. In the example above the application already uses dynamics extensively for dynamic page page templating and passing models around so introducing dynamics here has very little additional overhead. The operation itself also fires of a fairly resource heavy operation where the overhead of a couple of dynamic member accesses are not a performance issue. So, what's your experience with dynamic as a bailout mechanism? © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp   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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