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• What Sort of Server Setup Am I Likely to Need? - School A/V streaming

  - by DeathMagus

  My prior experience with servers has generally been limited to home file-sharing servers, low-traffic web-servers, and the like. This leaves me with the technical knowledge of how to set up a system, but little experience in terms of scaling said system. My current project, however, has me as the technical lead in setting up a school for online audio and video streaming. The difficulty I'm running into is that I don't quite have the experience to guess what they'll need, and they don't have the experience to tell me - so I've tried to ask as many pertinent questions about what they want to do with their server, and here's what I found out: About 1000 simultaneous users, and hoping to expand (possibly significantly) Both video and audio streaming, at obviously the highest quality possible Support for both live and playlist-based streaming. Probably only one channel, but as it's an educational opportunity, I imagine letting them have a few more wouldn't hurt. No word on whether they're locked into Windows or whether Linux is acceptable. Approximate budget - $7000. It may actually be about $2k less than this, because of a mishap with another technology firm (they ordered a $7000 DV tape deck for some reason, and now the company wants them to pay a 30% restocking fee). The tentative decisions I've already made: I'm planning on using Icecast 2 for my streaming server, fed by VLC Shoutcast encoding. Since the school already has a DMZ set up, I plan on placing the Icecast server in there, and feeding it through their intranet from a simple workstation computer in their studios. This system isn't in any way mission critical - it's an education tool (they're a media magnet school), so I figure redundancy is not worthwhile to them from a cost:benefit perspective. What I don't know is this: How powerful of a server will I need? What is likely to be my major throttle - bandwidth? How can I mitigate that? Will I need anything special for the encoding workstation other than professional video and audio capture cards and a copy of VLC? Are there any other considerations that I'm simply missing? Thanks a lot for any help - if there's more information you need, let me know and I'll tell you all I can.

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• Google analytics and multiple independent subdomains

  - by MTilsted

  I need some help trying to setup google analytics correct. Here is my setup: We host sites for multiple customers, and each customer have their own subdomain on our site. So we have customerA.oursite.com and customerB.oursite.com As we add more customers we get more subdomains. We do want to track all data for each customer independent, but I don't want to to create a new google tracking code for each new customer. So my plan is to track all visits with "oursite.com", and then I will create a filter in google Analytics to get data for each specific customer(All visits for a specific subdomain). Is this(One tracking code, and a subdomain filter) the right way to do it? To create a subdomain filter i add a new profile for each customer, and then add a custom filter saying include "Request URI" and fill in "CustomerDomain.oursite.com". Is this the correct way to do it? And a general question about filters: Is it really impossible to create a new filter by applying it to data in an existing profile? I would really like to just collect all the data in one "main" profile and then create subdomain filters as we need them. But it seems that google only apply filters to new incomming data, not existing data. Is this really true? The following is my tracking code. Is '_setDomainName','none' the right thing to do? <script type="text/javascript"> /* Tracking code for qrtown.com */ var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-11584298-10']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script>

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• Software Raid 10 corrupted superblock after dual disk failure, how do I recover it?

  - by Shoshomiga

  I have a software raid 10 with 6 x 2tb hard drives (raid 1 for /boot), ubuntu 10.04 is the os. I had a raid controller failure that put 2 drives out of sync, crashed the system and initially the os didnt boot up and went into initramfs instead, saying that drives were busy but I eventually managed to bring the raid up by stopping and assembling the drives. The os booted up and said that there were filesystem errors, I chose to ignore because it would remount the fs in read-only mode if there was a problem. Everything seemed to be working fine and the 2 drives started to rebuild, I was sure that it was a sata controller failure because I had dma errors in my log files. The os crashed soon after that with ext errors. Now its not bringing up the raid, it says that there is no superblock on /dev/sda2, even if I assemble manually with all the device names. I also did a memtest and changed the motherboard in addition to everything else. EDIT: This is my partition layout Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0009c34a Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 511999 254976 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 512000 3904980991 1952234496 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 3904980992 3907028991 1024000 82 Linux swap / Solaris All 6 disks have the same layout, partition #1 is for raid 1 /boot, partition #2 is for raid 10 far plan, partition #3 is swap, but sda did not have swap enabled EDIT2: This is the output of mdadm --detail /dev/md1 Layout : near=1, far=2 Chunk Size : 64k UUID : a0feff55:2018f8ff:e368bf24:bd0fce41 Events : 0.3112126 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 34 0 spare rebuilding /dev/sdc2 1 0 0 1 removed 2 8 18 2 active sync /dev/sdb2 3 8 50 3 active sync /dev/sdd2 4 0 0 4 removed 5 8 82 5 active sync /dev/sdf2 6 8 66 - spare /dev/sde2 EDIT3: I ran ddrescue and it has copied everything from sda except a single 4096 byte sector that I suspect is the raid superblock EDIT4: Here is some more info too long to fit here lshw: http://pastebin.com/2eKrh7nF mdadm --detail /dev/sd[abcdef]1 (raid1): http://pastebin.com/cgMQWerS mdadm --detail /dev/sd[abcdef]2 (raid10): http://pastebin.com/V5dtcGPF dumpe2fs of /dev/sda2 (from the ddrescue cloned drive): http://pastebin.com/sp0GYcJG I tried to recreate md1 based on this info with the command mdadm --create /dev/md1 -v --assume-clean --level=10 --raid-devices=6 --chunk=64K --layout=f2 /dev/sda2 missing /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2 missing /dev/sdf2 But I can't mount it, I also tried to recreate it based on my initial mdadm --detail /dev/md1 but it still doesn't mount It also warns me that /dev/sda2 is an ext2fs file system but I guess its because of ddrescue

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• Holding off Windows 2000/3 Server in Shutdown

  - by user1668993

  We have a C# VS2010 application running on a Windows 2000 Server box (there is also a Windows 2003 Server box) as pretty much the only application running. We remove power from the box. There is a short duration battery (maybe 3 minutes of power) which then waits 10 seconds and then decides things are coming down and notifies Windows that it needs to shut down. Windows sends a CTRL_SHUTDOWN_EVENT event to the application which fields it and tries to keep Windows from going down for a while to let another computer which communicates with this one time to do some file work on the first computer. It does this by a timing loop and after the loop is over, it exits gracefully and the computer shuts down. Nice plan but it doesn't work. The application gets to maybe 20 seconds and the application is forcibly killed by Windows and Windows shuts down. At 90 seconds, the hardware firmware running the battery turns off power to the computer. I have tried searching to find out how to hold off Windows for a bit of time. I tried creating (it wasn't there) the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE subtree: \SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillAppTimeout registry key to 60000 but though it seemed to keep the popup from happening, Windows itself died at about the same amount of time -- we think without having the opportunity to shut itself down gracefully. Maybe the registry key worked but wasn't enough. Basically I have an "ill-mannered" application which is refusing to shut down (for the best of reasons) and without the registry key thing, Windows eventually shuts it down anyway and then shuts itself down. With the registry change, we think what is happening is that Windows doesn't shut down the application but Windows itself is killed suddenly without shutting down but power is still not pulled for about another minute, and then power is pulled. So maybe we have layers here. First there is how long the application tries to stay open. Then there is how long Windows is prepared to allow it to stay open. Then there is ... something... which kills windows. Then there is the power loss. Anyone have any ideas how we can get windows to stay open and in operation say to 70 seconds instead of about 20? Is our registry key right, but not enough? Is there some additional key we need to set to determine how long after windows is notified of a shutdown before it just kills itself? Thanks in advance.

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• Lots of dropped packages when tcpdumping on busy interface

  - by Frands Hansen

  My challenge I need to do tcpdumping of a lot of data - actually from 2 interfaces left in promiscuous mode that are able to see a lot of traffic. To sum it up Log all traffic in promiscuous mode from 2 interfaces Those interfaces are not assigned an IP address pcap files must be rotated per ~1G When 10 TB of files are stored, start truncating the oldest What I currently do Right now I use tcpdump like this: tcpdump -n -C 1000 -z /data/compress.sh -i any -w /data/livedump/capture.pcap $FILTER The $FILTER contains src/dst filters so that I can use -i any. The reason for this is, that I have two interfaces and I would like to run the dump in a single thread rather than two. compress.sh takes care of assigning tar to another CPU core, compress the data, give it a reasonable filename and move it to an archive location. I cannot specify two interfaces, thus I have chosen to use filters and dump from any interface. Right now, I do not do any housekeeping, but I plan on monitoring disk and when I have 100G left I will start wiping the oldest files - this should be fine. And now; my problem I see dropped packets. This is from a dump that has been running for a few hours and collected roughly 250 gigs of pcap files: 430083369 packets captured 430115470 packets received by filter 32057 packets dropped by kernel <-- This is my concern How can I avoid so many packets being dropped? These things I did already try or look at Changed the value of /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max and /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default which did indeed help - actually it took care of just around half of the dropped packets. I have also looked at gulp - the problem with gulp is, that it does not support multiple interfaces in one process and it gets angry if the interface does not have an IP address. Unfortunately, that is a deal breaker in my case. Next problem is, that when the traffic flows though a pipe, I cannot get the automatic rotation going. Getting one huge 10 TB file is not very efficient and I don't have a machine with 10TB+ RAM that I can run wireshark on, so that's out. Do you have any suggestions? Maybe even a better way of doing my traffic dump altogether.

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• What is the probable failure - no BSOD, no event log, monitors sleeping, force reboot required

  - by Tyler

  Every 3 to 15 days, my PC freezes. This typically happens when the computer is idle, I'm coming home from work, back from vacation, etc. It's never happened while using my computer. The monitors are in power save mode The Caps Lock light on the (wireless) keyboard doesn't work Ctrl-alt-del has no effect, mouse (wireless) has no effect The hardware reset button and single press of power putton have no effect Computer does not appear on the network No BSOD, no memory dump Event logs have no errors or indications of problems near the time of crash. Only messages after reboot indicating that there was a reboot without a clean shutdown. Windows is set to never put the computer to sleep (just the display) Here are the vital stats of the build: OS Windows 8 Pro 64-bit CPU Intel i5-2400 Mobo Intel BOXDP67DE Micro ATX GPU MSI N460GTX Cyclone768D5/OC RAM CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) CMX8GX3M2A1333C9 PSU SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold System Drive Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD Data Drive 2 x Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB in hardware RAID 1 Optical Lite-On DVD burner IHAS424-98 And here is the story of how the problem developed and what I've done to diagnose: January 2011, system built with Windows 7 64-bit, runs great. March 2011, Intel replaced the mobo because of the bad sata controllers. October 2012, upgrade to Windows 8 (problems start shortly after). January 2013, system freezes and causes network to fail for the whole house. Unplug the network cable and other devices and PCs can use the internet. Plug it back in, internet goes away for everyone. Reboot and everything is fine. March 2013, install Intel Gigabit CT PCI-E NIC, disable mobo nic in bios. Network strangeness goes away. Freezes are less frequent. Memtest shows no problems (20 passes). Early June 2013, replace Antec PSU with SeaSonic PSU. Mid June 2013, replace OCZ Vertex 2 SSD with Samsung SSD. Late June 2013, get frustrated and hope the community has some good ideas (I'm running out of budget to replace parts). My next plan of attack is setting "Turn off display" to Never and using a screen saver to see how that reacts on the next freeze. It makes me sad to waste power for up to 15 days though. Has anyone out there seen a problem like this? Any ideas on what kind of malfunction would act this way? Ideas of other diagnostic steps to take?

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• Hyper-V Ubuntu Networking Problems Copying Large Amounts of Data

  - by Anonymous

  I am trying to copy a large amount (about 50 GB) of data over my network from a Hyper-V-hosted virtual machine running Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) to another (non-virtual) Ubuntu host that I plan to use for testing upgrades to one of our web applications. The problem I am having is with the virtual machine, which I shall refer to in what follows as "source.host". This machine is running 64-bit Ubuntu Server with the 2.6.38-8-server kernel and the Microsoft Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V kernel modules (hv_utils, hv_timesource, hv_netvsc, hv_blkvsc, hv_storvsc, and hv_vmbus) loaded. It uses a Hyper-V "synthetic network adapter" for its networking interface. To do the copy, I log on to the machine with the data and run the following commands (Call the remote machine "destination.host".): $ cd /path/to/data $ tar -cvf - datafolder/ | ssh [email protected] "cat > ~/data.tar" This runs for a while and then suddenly stops after transferring somewhere from 2-6 GB. The terminal on the source.host machine displays a Write failed: broken pipe error. The odd part is this: after this occurs, the "source.host" machine is no longer able to talk to the rest of the network. I cannot ping any other hosts on the network from the "source.host" machine, and I cannot ping the "source.host" machine from any other host on the network. I am equally unable to access the any of the web services hosted on "source.host". Running ifconfig on "source.host" shows the network adapter to be up and running as usual with the correct IP address and everything. I tried restarting the networking service with $ /etc/init.d/networking restart but the problem does not go away. Restarting the machine makes it capable of talking to the network again -- it can ping and be pinged by other hosts, and the web services are also accessible and usable as normal -- but attempting the copy operation again results in the same failure, requiring another restart. As an experiment, I tried replacing the tar -- ssh pipeline above with a straight scp: $ scp -r datafolder/ [email protected]:~ but to no avail Thinking that the issue might have to do with the kernel packet-send buffers filling up, I tried increasing the buffer size to 12 MB (up from the 128 KB default) with # echo 12582911 > /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_max but this also had no effect. I'm guessing at this point that it might be a problem with the Microsoft synthetic network driver, but I don't really know. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you very much in advance!

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• On ESXi, guest machines hang for significant intervals compared to real machines. How can I fix this?

  - by Tarbox

  This is ESXi version 5.0.0. We plan on upgrading to 5.5 eventually. I have four code profiles, two taken on a real, unvirtualized machine, two taken on a virtual machine. Ordering the list of subroutines by time spent in each one, the two real profiles are practically identical. The two virtual profiles are different from each other and from the real profiles: a subset of subroutines are taking a lot more time on the virtual machines, and the subset is different for each run. The two virtual profiles take a similar amount of time, which is 3 times the amount of time the real profiles take. This gross "how long does it take?" result is consistent after hundreds of tests across three different virtual machines on two different host machines -- the virtual machine is just slower. I've only the code profiling on the four, however. Here's the most guilty set of lines: This is the real machine: 8µs $text = '' unless defined $text; 1.48ms foreach ( split( "\n", $text ) ) { This is the first run on the virtual machine: 20.1ms $text = '' unless defined $text; 1.49ms foreach ( split( "\n", $text ) ) { This is the second run on the virtual machine: 6µs $text = '' unless defined $text; 21.9ms foreach ( split( "\n", $text ) ) { My WAG is that the VM is swapping out the thread and then swapping it back in, destroying some level of cache in the process, but these code profiles were taken when the vm in question was the only active vm on the host, so... what? What does that mean? The guest itself is under light load, this is a latency problem for my users rather than throughput. The host is also under a light load, if I knew what resources to assign where, I could do it without worrying about the cost. I've attempted to lock memory, reserve cpu, assign a restrictive affinity, and disable hyperthread sharing. They don't help, it still takes the VM 2-4x the amount of time to do the same thing as the real machine. The host the tests were run on is 6x2.50GHz, Intel Xeon E5-26400 w/ 16gigs of ram. The guest exhibits the same performance under a wide combination of settings. The real machine is 4x2.13GHz, Xeon E5506 w/ 2 gigs of ram. Thank you for all advice.

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• What DNS server to use for dynamic load-balancing of website?

  - by Marki555

  I will have 2 servers in different datacenters (different countries) and I want to use DNS load-balancing mainly for High Availability of website hosted on those 2 servers. It is just ad tracking site, which records hit in local database and returns few lines on html code. I want to return 2 A records each time because of DNS pinning in browsers (if one server fails, browser will try second A record which it has already cached). Both servers will be acting also as DNS servers for redundancy. Now comes my proposed solution: I will use BIND and have both servers as a master for that zone. On each server there will be running script, which will periodically test availability (http) of both servers and remove IP from DNS in case of failure. Now the questions :) 1) Is BIND suitable for this solution? I think BIND performance is good and it is easy to manipulate the zone file via script. And as I will modify the zone only in case of failure/maintenance, the modifications (and thus bind reload) won't be often. 2) I plan to use TTL of 5 minutes. The website will have about 1000-3000 req/s but from distinct clients (each IP only 1-3 requests), so I think the DNS load won't be too much. I suppose their ISPs will cache the responses for those 5 mins. Is there any reason to lower the TTL even more? 3) Is my master-master approach good? Or should I make one of the servers master and the other one slave? Right now each server can monitor both itself and the other one. If only webservice fails, both DNS nodes will notice it. If the whole server fails, then the remaining DNS node will notice it and the failed node will not answer DNS queries anyway. 4) Is it a big issue when one NS server does not respond to queries? If yes, I can make a third DNS, so anytime at least 2 of them would accept queries... 5) Should I rewrite the zone file via script, or just use dynamic DNS update (for example via nsupdateutility)?

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• debugging JBoss 100% CPU usage

  - by Nate

  We are using JBoss to run two of our WARs. One is our web app, the other is our web service. The web app accesses a database on another machine and makes requests to the web service. The web service makes JMS requests to other machines, aggregates the data, and returns it. At our biggest client, about once a month the JBoss Java process takes 100% of all CPUs. The machine running JBoss has 8 CPUs. Our web app is still accessible during this time, however pages take about 3 minutes to load. Restarting JBoss restores everything to normal. The database machine and all the other machines are fine, only the machine running JBoss is affected. Memory usage is normal. Network utilization is normal. There are no suspect error messages in the JBoss logs. I have set up a test environment as close as possible to the client's production environment and I've done load testing with as much as 2x the number of concurrent users. I have not gotten my test environment to replicate the problem. Where do we go from here? How can we narrow down the problem? Currently the only plan we have is to wait until the problem occurs in production on its own, then do some debugging to determine the cause. So far people have just restarted JBoss when the problem occurred to minimize down time. Next time it happens they will get a developer to take a look. The question is, next time it happens, what can be done to determine the cause? We could setup a separate JBoss instance on the same box and install the web app separately from the web service. This way when the problem next occurs we will know which WAR has the problem (assuming it is our code). This doesn't narrow it down much though. Should I enable JMX remote? This way the next time the problem occurs I can connect with VisualVM and see which threads are taking the CPU and what the hell they are doing. However, is there a significant down side to enabling JMX remote in a production environment? Is there another way to see what threads are eating the CPU and to get a stacktrace to see what they are doing? Any other ideas? Thanks!

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• How to link specific ports to specific domains with Apache virtual hosts?

  - by theJoe

  We have a forward-facing linux box running Apache HTTP server that is acting as a reverse proxy for several back-end servers. The servers are accessed through specific domain names and ports and are set up as virtual hosts within Apache as such: Listen 8001 Listen 8002 <Virtualhost *:8001> ServerName service.one.mycompany.com ProxyPass / http://internal.one.mycompany.com:8001/ ProxyPassReverse / http://internal.one.mycompany.com:8001/ RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK) RewriteRule .* - [F] </Virtualhost> <Virtualhost *:8002> ServerName service.two.mycompany.com ProxyPass / http://internal.two.mycompany.com:8002/ ProxyPassReverse / http://internal.two.mycompany.com:8002/ RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(TRACE|TRACK) RewriteRule .* - [F] </Virtualhost> The proxy server has only one IP address, and both domains are pointing to it. Accessing internal.one via service.one works fine, as does accessing internal.two via service.two. Now the problem is that Apache does not take the requesting domain into account when accessing the virtual hosts. What I mean is that both domains work for both ports: requests for service.one:8002 proxies to internal.two:8002, and requests for service.two:8001 proxies to internal.one:8001, where ideally both these requests should be denied. I can get around this by creating more virtual hosts that explicitly deny these requests: NameVirtualHost *:8001 NameVirtualHost *:8002 <Virtualhost *:8001> ServerName service.two.mycompany.com Redirect permanent / http://errorpage.mycompany.com/ </Virtualhost> <Virtualhost *:8002> ServerName service.one.mycompany.com Redirect permanent / http://errorpage.mycompany.com/ </Virtualhost> But this is not an ideal solution, since we plan to add more services to the proxy, and each new port would need to be explicitly denied on all the other domains, and each new domain would need to be explicitly denied on all ports it is not utilizing. As we add more services, the number of virtual hosts can get out of hand quickly. My question, then, is whether there is a better way? Can we explicitly tie specific ports to specific domains in a virtual host so that only that domain-port combination is processed, and all other combinations are not? Things I’ve tried: Adding NameVirtualHost *:8001, etc. without the additional virtual hosts. Setting ProxyRequests On and Off, as well as ProxyPreserveHost On and Off Adding the server name or IP address to the virtual host header, e.g. <VirtualHost service.one.mycompany.com:8001> Using the <proxy> directive inside the virtual host directive. Lots and lots of googling. The proxy server is running CentOS 6.2 64-bit, Apache HTTPD server 2.2.15. As mentioned, the proxy server has only one IP address, and all the domains we are using are pointing to it.

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• Architectural advice - web camera remote access

  - by Alan Hollis

  I'm looking for architectural advice. I have a client who I've built a website for which essentially allows users to view their web cameras remotely. The current flow of data is as follows: User opens page to view web camera image. Javascript script polls url on server ( appended with unique timestamp ) every 1000ms Ftp connection is enabled for the cameras ftp user. Web camera opens ftp connection to server. Web camera begins taking photos. Web camera sends photo to ftp server. On image url request: Server reads latest image on hard drive uploaded via ftp for camera. Server deleted any older images from the server. This is working okay at the moment for a small amount of users/cameras ( about 10 users and around the same amount of cameras), but we're starting to worrying about the scalability of this approach. My original plan was instead of having the files read from the server, the web server would open up an ftp connection to the web server and read the latest images directly from there meaning we should have been able to scale horizontally fairly easily. But ftp connection establishment times were too slow ( mainly due to the fact that PHP out of the ox is unable to persist ftp connections ) and so we abandoned this approach and went straight for reading from the hard drive. The firmware provider for the cameras state they're able to build a http client which instead of using ftp to upload the image could post the image to a web server. This seems plausible enough to me, but I'm looking for some architectural advice. My current thought is a simple Nginx/PHP/Redis stack. Web camera issues post requests of latest image to Nginx/PHP and the latest image for that camera is stored in Redis. The clients can then pull the latest image from Redis which should be extremely quick as the images will always be stored in memory. The data flow would then become: User opens page to view web camera image. Javascript script polls url on server ( appended with unique timestamp ) every 1000ms Camera is sent an http request to start posting images to a provided url Web camera begins taking photos. Web camera sends post requests to server as fast as it can On image url request: Server reads latest image from redis Server tells redis to delete later image My questions are: Are there any greater overheads of transferring images via HTTP instead of FTP? Is there a simple way to calculate how many potential cameras we could have streaming at once? Is there any way to prevent potentially DOS'ing our own servers due to web camera requests? Is Redis a good solution to this problem? Should I abandon PHP/Ngix combination and go for something else? Is this proposed solution actually any good? Will adding HTTPs to the mix cause posting the image to become too slow? Thanks in advance Alan

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• Why can't we reach some (but not all) external web service via VPN connection?

  - by Paul Haldane

  At work (UK university) we use a set of Windows servers running WS2008R2 and RRAS which offer VPN service to students in our accommodation. We do this to associate the network connections with individuals. Before they've connected to the VPN all they can talk to is the stuff thats needed to setup the VPN and a local web site with documentation on how to connect. Medium term we'll probably replace this but it's what we're using at the moment. VPN on the 2008 servers allocates client a private (10.x) address. Access to external sites is through NAT on the campus routers (same as any other directly connected client on a private address). Non-VPN connections aren't seeing this problem. Older servers run WS 2003 and ISA2004. That setup works but has become unreliable under load. Big difference there was that we were allocating non-RFC1918 addresses to the clients (so no NAT required). Behaviour we're seeing is that once connected to the VPN, clients can reach local web sites (that is sites on the campus network) but only some external sites. It seems (but this may be chance) that the sites we can reach are Google ones (including YouTube). We certainly have trouble reaching Microsoft's Office 365 service (which is a pain because that's where mail for most of our students is). One odd bit of behaviour is that clients can fetch (using wget on a Windows 7 client) http://www.oracle.com/ (which gets a 301 redirect) but hangs when asked to fetch http://www.oracle.com/index.html (which is what the first URL redirects to). Access works reliably if we configure clients to use our local web proxies (Squid). My gut tells me that this is likely to be something in the chain dropping replies either based on HTTP inspection or the IP address in the reply. However I'm puzzled about why we're seeing this with the VPN clients. Plan for tomorrow (when I'm back in the office) is to setup a web server on external connection so that we can monitor behaviour at both ends of the conversation (hoping that the problem manifests itself with our test server). Any suggestions for things we should be looking at?

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• Asterisk: Dropping calls with an "ast_yyerror"

  - by Nick

  I'm having an intermittent issue where asterisk will play our greeting to the caller, and then drop the call instead of making our phones ring. I'm unable to reproduce the problem with any phones I have here, and many callers get through just fine. Some callers though, run into the problem, and I can't find any pattern to it. The bit of information I could find said it was caused by an error in evaluating a dialplan expression. I'm thinking it's this line: exten = START,n,GotoIf($[${FORCE_CLOSED}=TRUE]?CLOSED,1) But I'm not sure what's wrong with it. I see the following error on the console: [Apr 4 16:29:49] WARNING[27038]: ast_expr2.fl:459 ast_yyerror: ast_yyerror(): syntax error: syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting $end; Input:=TRUE^ Surrounding Console output: -- Executing [START@AGInbound:1] Answer("IAX2/AtlantaTeliax-10086", "") in new stack -- Executing [START@AGInbound:2] BackGround("IAX2/AtlantaTeliax-10086", 0000_AG_THANK_YOU_FOR_CALLING_AG") in new stack -- Playing '0000_AG_THANK_YOU_FOR_CALLING_AG.slin' (language 'en') [Apr 4 16:29:49] WARNING[27038]: ast_expr2.fl:459 ast_yyerror: ast_yyerror(): syntax error: syntax error, unexpected '=', expecting $end; Input: =TRUE ^ [Apr 4 16:29:49] WARNING[27038]: ast_expr2.fl:463 ast_yyerror: If you have questions, please refer to doc/tex/channelvariables.tex in the asterisk source. -- Executing [START@AGInbound:3] GotoIf("IAX2/AtlantaTeliax-10086", "?CLOSED,1") in new stack -- Executing [START@AGInbound:4] GotoIfTime("IAX2/AtlantaTeliax-10086", "9:30-17:0|mon-fri|*|*?OPEN,1") in new stack -- Executing [START@AGInbound:5] GotoIfTime("IAX2/AtlantaTeliax-10086", "10:0-18:30|sat|*|*?OPEN,1") in new stack -- Executing [START@AGInbound:6] GotoIfTime("IAX2/AtlantaTeliax-10086", "12:0-17:0|sun|*|*?OPEN,1") in new stack Relevant lines from the dial plan: exten = START,1,Answer() exten = START,n,Background(0000_AG_THANK_YOU_FOR_CALLING_AG) ; See if we're open ; Force Closed if no one's going to be answering exten = START,n,GotoIf($[${FORCE_CLOSED}=TRUE]?CLOSED,1) exten = START,n,GotoIfTime(${AG_WEEKDAY_OPEN_HOUR}:${AG_WEEKDAY_OPEN_MIN}-${AG$ exten = START,n,GotoIfTime(${AG_SATURDAY_OPEN_HOUR}:${AG_SATURDAY_OPEN_MIN}-${$ exten = START,n,GotoIfTime(${AG_SUNDAY_OPEN_HOUR}:${AG_SUNDAY_OPEN_MIN}-${AG_S$ ; ...and we're not. But maybe the time of day has been overridden? exten = START,n,GotoIf($[${OVERRIDE_TIME_OF_DAY}=TRUE]?OPEN,1) ; No override... We're definatly closed. exten = START,n,Goto(CLOSED,1) Any idea what's wrong with the expression? We recently upgraded from 1.4 to 1.6.

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• AGENT: The World's Smartest Watch

  - by Rob Chartier

  AGENT: The World's Smartest Watch by Secret Labs + House of Horology Disclaimer: Most if not all of this content has been gleaned from the comments on the Kickstarter project page and comments section. Any discrepancies between this post and any documentation on agentwatches.com, kickstarter.com, etc.., those official sites take precedence. Overview The next generation smartwatch with brand-new technology. World-class developer tools, unparalleled battery life, Qi wireless charging. Kickstarter Page, Comments Funding period : May 21, 2013 - Jun 20, 2013 MSRP : $249 Other Urls http://www.agentwatches.com/ https://www.facebook.com/agentwatches http://twitter.com/agentwatches http://pinterest.com/agentwatches/ http://paper.li/robchartier/1371234640 Developer Story The first official launch of the preview SDK and emulator will happen on 20-Jun-2013.  All development will be done in Visual Studio 2012, using the .NET Micro Framework SDK 2.3.  The SDK will ship with the first round of the expected API for developers along with an emulator. With that said, there is no need to wait for the SDK.  You can download the tooling now and get started with Apps and Faces immediately.  The only thing that you will not be able to work with is the API; but for example, watch faces, you can start building the basic face rendering with the Bitmap graphics drawing in the .NET Micro Framework.   Does it look good? Before we dig into any more of the gory details, here are a few photos of the current available prototype models.   The watch on the tiny QI Charter   If you wander too far away from your phone, your watch will let you know with a vibration and a message, all but one button will dismiss the message.   An app showing the premium weather data!   Nice stitching on the straps, leather and silicon will be available, along with a few lengths to choose from (short, regular, long lengths). On to those gory details…. Hardware Specs Processor 120MHz ARM Cortex-M4 processor (ATSAM4SD32) with secondary AVR co-processor Flash & RAM 2MB of onboard flash and 160KB of RAM 1/4 of the onboard flash will be used by the OS The flash is permanent (non-volatile) storage. Bluetooth Bluetooth 4.0 BD/EDR + LE Bluetooth 4.0 is backwards compatible with Bluetooth 2.1, so classic Bluetooth functions (BD/EDR, SPP/AVRCP/PBAP/etc.) will work fine. Sensors 3D Accelerometer (Motion) ST LSM303DLHC Ambient Light Sensor Hardware power metering Vibration Motor (You can pulse it to create vibration patterns, not sure about the vibration strength - driven with PWM) No piezo/speaker or microphone. Other QI Wireless Charging, no NFC, no wall adapter included Custom LED Backlight No GPS in the watch. It uses the GPS in your phone. AGENT watch apps are deployed and debugged wirelessly from your PC via Bluetooth. RoHS, Pb-free Battery Expected to use a CR2430-sized rechargeable battery – replaceable (Mouser, Amazon) Estimated charging time from empty is 2 hours with provided charger 7 Days typical with Bluetooth on, 30 days with Bluetooth off (watch-face only mode) The battery should last at least 2 years, with 100s of charge cycles. Physical dimensions Roughly 38mm top-to-bottom on the front face 35mm left-to-right on the front face and around 12mm in depth 22mm strap Two ~1/16" hex screws to attach the watch pin The top watchcase material candidates are PVD stainless steel, brushed matte ceramic, and high-quality polycarbonate (TBD). The glass lens is mineral glass, Anti-glare glass lens Strap options Leather and silicon straps will be available Expected to have three sizes Display 1.28" Sharp Memory Display The display stays on 100% of the time. Dimensions: 128x128 pixels Buttons Custom "Pusher" buttons, they will not make noise like a mouse click, and are very durable. The top-left button activates the backlight; bottom-left changes apps; three buttons on the right are up/select/down and can be used for custom purposes by apps. Backup reset procedure is currently activated by holding the home/menu button and the top-right user button for about ten seconds Device Support Android 2.3 or newer iPhone 4S or newer Windows Phone 8 or newer Heart Rate monitors - Bluetooth SPP or Bluetooth LE (GATT) is what you'll want the heart monitor to support. Almost limitless Bluetooth device support! Internationalization & Localization Full UTF8 Support from the ground up. AGENT's user interface is in English. Your content (caller ID, music tracks, notifications) will be in your native language. We have a plan to cover most major character sets, with Latin characters pre-loaded on the watch. Simplified Chinese will be available Feature overview Phone lost alert Caller ID Music Control (possible volume control) Wireless Charging Timer Stopwatch Vibrating Alarm (possibly custom vibrations for caller id) A few default watch faces Airplane mode (by demand or low power) Can be turned off completely Customizable 3rd party watch faces, applications which can be loaded over bluetooth. Sample apps that maybe installed Weather Sample Apps not installed Exercise App Other Possible Skype integration over Bluetooth. They will provide an AGENT app for your smartphone (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone). You'll be able to use it to load apps onto the watch.. You will be able to cancel phone calls. With compatible phones you can also answer, end, etc. They are adopting the standard hands-free profile to provide these features and caller ID.

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• SQL SERVER – Retrieve and Explore Database Backup without Restoring Database – Idera virtual databas

  - by pinaldave

  I recently downloaded Idera’s SQL virtual database, and tested it. There are a few things about this tool which caught my attention. My Scenario It is quite common in real life that sometimes observing or retrieving older data is necessary; however, it had changed as time passed by. The full database backup was 40 GB in size, and, to restore it on our production server, it usually takes around 16 to 22 minutes, depending on the load server that is usually present. This range in time varies from one server to another as per the configuration of the computer. Some other issues we used to have are the following: When we try to restore a large 40-GB database, we needed at least that much space on our production server. Once in a while, we even had to make changes in the restored database, and use the said changed and restored database for our purpose, making it more time-consuming. My Solution I have heard a lot about the Idera’s SQL virtual database tool.. Well, right after we started to test this tool, we found out that it really delivers what it promises. Using this software was very easy and we were able to restore our database from backup in less than 2 minutes, sparing us from the usual longer time of 16–22 minutes. The needful was finished in a total of 10 minutes. Another interesting observation is that there is no need to have an additional space for restoring the database. For complete database restoration, the single additional MB on the drive is not required anymore. We can use the database in the same way as our regular database, and there is no need for any additional configuration and setup. Let us look at the most relevant points of this product based on my initial experience: Quick restoration of the database backup No additional space required for database restoration virtual database has no physical .MDF or .LDF The database which is restored is, in fact, the backup file converted in the virtual database. DDL and DML queries can be executed against this virtually restored database. Regular backup operation can be implemented against virtual database, creating a physical .bak file that can be used for future use. There was no observed degradation in performance on the original database as well the restored virtual database. Additional T-SQL queries can be let off on the virtual database. Well, this summarizes my quick review. And, as I was saying, I am very impressed with the product and I plan to explore it more. There are many features that I have noticed in this tool, which I think can be very useful if properly understood. I had taken a few screenshots using my demo database afterwards. Let us see what other things this tool can do besides the mentioned activities. I am surprised with its performance so I want to know how exactly this feature works, specifically in the matter of why it does not create any additional files and yet, it still allows update on the virtually restored database. I guess I will have to send an e-mail to the developers of Idera and try to figure this out from them. I think this tool is very useful, and it delivers a high level of performance way more than what I expected. Soon, I will write a review for additional uses of SQL virtual database.. If you are using SQL virtual database in your production environment, I am eager to learn more about it and your experience while using it. The ‘Virtual’ Part of virtual database When I set out to test this software, I thought virtual database had something to do with Hyper-V or visualization. In fact, the virtual database is a kind of database which shows up in your SQL Server Management Studio without actually restoring or even creating it. This tool creates a database in SSMS from the backup of the same database. The backup, however, works virtually the same way as original database. Potential Usage of virtual database: As soon as I described this tool to my teammate, I think his very first reaction was, “hey, if we have this then there is no need for log shipping.” I find his comment very interesting as log shipping is something where logs are moved to another server. In fact, there are no updates on the database from log; I would rather compare it with Snapshot Replication. In fact, whatever we use, snapshot replicated database can be similarly used and configured with virtual database. I totally believe that we can use it for reporting purpose. In fact, after this database was configured, I think the uses of this tool are unlimited. I will have to spend some more time studying it and will get back to you. Click on images to see larger images. virtual database Console Harddrive Space before virtual database Setup Attach Full Backup Screen Backup on Harddrive Attach Full Backup Screen with Settings virtual database Setup – less than 60 sec virtual database Setup – Online Harddrive Space after virtual database Setup Point in Time Recovery Option – Timeline View virtual database Summary No Performance Difference between Regular DB vs Virtual DB Please note that all SQL Server MVP gets free license of this software. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com), Idera (virtual database) Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Add-On, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Idera

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• Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet

  - by Stephen Walther

  The Ajax Control Toolkit is now available from NuGet. This makes it super easy to add the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit to any Web Forms application. If you haven’t used NuGet yet, then you are missing out on a great tool which you can use with Visual Studio to add new features to an application. You can use NuGet with both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms applications. NuGet is compatible with both Websites and Web Applications and it works with both C# and VB.NET applications. For example, I habitually use NuGet to add the latest version of ELMAH, Entity Framework, jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Templates to applications that I create. To download NuGet, visit the NuGet website at: http://NuGet.org Imagine, for example, that you want to take advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit RoundedCorners extender to create cross-browser compatible rounded corners in a Web Forms application. Follow these steps. Right click on your project in the Solution Explorer window and select the option Add Library Package Reference. In the Add Library Package Reference dialog, select the Online tab and enter AjaxControlToolkit in the search box: Click the Install button and the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit will be installed. Installing the Ajax Control Toolkit makes several modifications to your application. First, a reference to the Ajax Control Toolkit is added to your application. In a Web Application Project, you can see the new reference in the References folder: Installing the Ajax Control Toolkit NuGet package also updates your Web.config file. The tag prefix ajaxToolkit is registered so that you can easily use Ajax Control Toolkit controls within any page without adding a @Register directive to the page. <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="ajaxToolkit" assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" /> </controls> </pages> </system.web> </configuration> You should do a rebuild of your application by selecting the Visual Studio menu option Build, Rebuild Solution so that Visual Studio picks up on the new controls (You won’t get Intellisense for the Ajax Control Toolkit controls until you do a build). After you add the Ajax Control Toolkit to your application, you can start using any of the 40 Ajax Control Toolkit controls in your application (see http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/samples/ for a reference for the controls). <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="WebForm1.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm1" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Rounded Corners</title> <style type="text/css"> #pnl1 { background-color: gray; width: 200px; color:White; font: 14pt Verdana; } #pnl1_contents { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <asp:Panel ID="pnl1" runat="server"> <div id="pnl1_contents"> I have rounded corners! </div> </asp:Panel> <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager ID="sm1" runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:RoundedCornersExtender TargetControlID="pnl1" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> The page contains the following three controls: Panel – The Panel control named pnl1 contains the content which appears with rounded corners. ToolkitScriptManager – Every page which uses the Ajax Control Toolkit must contain a single ToolkitScriptManager. The ToolkitScriptManager loads all of the JavaScript files used by the Ajax Control Toolkit. RoundedCornersExtender – This Ajax Control Toolkit extender targets the Panel control. It makes the Panel control appear with rounded corners. You can control the “roundiness” of the corners by modifying the Radius property. Notice that you get Intellisense when typing the Ajax Control Toolkit tags. As soon as you type <ajaxToolkit, all of the available Ajax Control Toolkit controls appear: When you open the page in a browser, then the contents of the Panel appears with rounded corners. The advantage of using the RoundedCorners extender is that it is cross-browser compatible. It works great with Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari even though different browsers implement rounded corners in different ways. The RoundedCorners extender even works with an ancient browser such as Internet Explorer 6. Getting the Latest Version of the Ajax Control Toolkit The Ajax Control Toolkit continues to evolve at a rapid pace. We are hard at work at fixing bugs and adding new features to the project. We plan to have a new release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each month. The easiest way to get the latest version of the Ajax Control Toolkit is to use NuGet. You can open the NuGet Add Library Package Reference dialog at any time to update the Ajax Control Toolkit to the latest version.

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• ASP.NET MVC Custom Profile Provider

  - by Ben Griswold

  It’s been a long while since I last used the ASP.NET Profile provider. It’s a shame, too, because it just works with very little development effort: Membership tables installed? Check. Profile enabled in web.config? Check. SqlProfileProvider connection string set? Check.  Profile properties defined in said web.config file? Check. Write code to set value, read value, build and test. Check. Check. Check.  Yep, I thought the built-in Profile stuff was pure gold until I noticed how the user-based information is persisted to the database. It’s stored as xml and, well, that was going to be trouble if I ever wanted to query the profile data.  So, I have avoided the super-easy-to-use ASP.NET Profile provider ever since, until this week, when I decided I could use it to store user-specific properties which I am 99% positive I’ll never need to query against ever.  I opened up my ASP.NET MVC application, completed steps 1-4 (above) in about 3 minutes, started writing my profile get/set code and that’s where the plan broke down.  Oh yeah. That’s right.  Visual Studio auto-generates a strongly-type Profile reference for web site projects but not for ASP.NET MVC or Web Applications.  Bummer. So, I went through the steps of getting a customer profile provider working in my ASP.NET MVC application: First, I defined a CurrentUser routine and my profile properties in a custom Profile class like so: using System.Web.Profile; using System.Web.Security; using Project.Core;   namespace Project.Web.Context {     public class MemberPreferencesProfile : ProfileBase     {         static public MemberPreferencesProfile CurrentUser         {             get             {                 return (MemberPreferencesProfile)                     Create(Membership.GetUser().UserName);             }         }           public Enums.PresenceViewModes? ViewMode         {             get { return ((Enums.PresenceViewModes)                     ( base["ViewMode"] ?? Enums.PresenceViewModes.Category)); }             set { base["ViewMode"] = value; Save(); }         }     } } And then I replaced the existing profile configuration web.config with the following: <profile enabled="true" defaultProvider="MvcSqlProfileProvider"          inherits="Project.Web.Context.MemberPreferencesProfile">        <providers>     <clear/>     <add name="MvcSqlProfileProvider"          type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider, System.Web,          Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"          connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/"/>   </providers> </profile> Notice that profile is enabled, I’ve defined the defaultProvider and profile is now inheriting from my custom MemberPreferencesProfile class.  Finally, I am now able to set and get profile property values nearly the same way as I did with website projects: viewMode = MemberPreferencesProfile.CurrentUser.ViewMode; MemberPreferencesProfile.CurrentUser.ViewMode = viewMode;

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• Announcing SonicAgile – An Agile Project Management Solution

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m happy to announce the public release of SonicAgile – an online tool for managing software projects. You can register for SonicAgile at www.SonicAgile.com and start using it with your team today. SonicAgile is an agile project management solution which is designed to help teams of developers coordinate their work on software projects. SonicAgile supports creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration. In short, SonicAgile includes all of the tools that you need to coordinate work on a software project, get stuff done, and build great software. Let me discuss each of the features of SonicAgile in more detail. SonicAgile Backlog You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. Basically, all future work planned for a product should be captured in the backlog. We focused our attention on designing the user interface for the backlog. Because the main function of the backlog is to prioritize stories, we made it easy to prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another. We also wanted to make it easy to add stories from the product backlog to a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog contains the stories that you plan to complete during a particular sprint. To add a story to a sprint, you just drag the story from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. Finally, we made it easy to track team velocity — the average amount of work that your team completes in each sprint. Your team’s average velocity is displayed in the backlog. When you add too many stories to a sprint – in other words, you attempt to take on too much work – you are warned automatically: SonicAgile Scrumboard Every workday, your team meets to have their daily scrum. During the daily scrum, you can use the SonicAgile Scrumboard to see (at a glance) what everyone on the team is working on. For example, the following scrumboard shows that Stephen is working on the Fix Gravatar Bug story and Pete and Jane have finished working on the Product Details Page story: Every story can be broken into tasks. For example, to create the Product Details Page, you might need to create database objects, do page design, and create an MVC controller. You can use the Scrumboard to track the state of each task. A story can have acceptance criteria which clarify the requirements for the story to be done. For example, here is how you can specify the acceptance criteria for the Product Details Page story: You cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done. SonicAgile Burndown Charts You can use Burndown charts to track your team’s progress. SonicAgile supports Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. For example, here’s a sample of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points chart: The downward slope shows the progress of the team when closing stories. The vertical axis represents story points and the horizontal axis represents time. Email Integration SonicAgile was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. The most natural way to discuss stories and tasks is through email. However, you don’t want these discussions to get lost. When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog: Why We Built SonicAgile We built SonicAgile because we needed it for our team. Our consulting company, Superexpert, builds websites for financial services, startups, and large corporations. We have multiple teams working on multiple projects. Keeping on top of all of the work that needs to be done to complete a software project is challenging. You need a good sense of what needs to be done, who is doing it, and when the work will be done. We built SonicAgile because we wanted a lightweight project management tool which we could use to coordinate the work that our team performs on software projects. How We Built SonicAgile We wanted SonicAgile to be easy to use, highly scalable, and have a highly interactive client interface. SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application. We built SonicAgile using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. We would not have been able to build such a complex Ajax application without these technologies. Almost all of our MVC controller actions return JSON results (While developing SonicAgile, I would have given my left arm to be able to use the new ASP.NET Web API). The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser. We built SonicAgile on Windows Azure. We are taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. Windows Azure enables us to scale very quickly to handle whatever demand is thrown at us. Summary I hope that you will try SonicAgile. You can register at www.SonicAgile.com (there’s a free 30-day trial). The goal of SonicAgile is to make it easier for teams to get more stuff done, work better together, and build amazing software. Let us know what you think!

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• How TiVo is messing up customer support.

  - by James Fleming

  Ok,  So I've gotten a TiVo and overall, I'm happy, but there have been issues and I suspect I've a defective unit. - Now the nice folks after many service calls were happy to swap it out, and to ensure continuity of service, they sent me a new unit (after a $109 deposit).  That was yesterday. Today, when we go to watch a little TV, and wait for our replacement unit to arrive we find our TiVo service has been suspended. WTF? They have an exchange program, but your unit your waiting to exchange is as dead as a doornail until the replacement arrives. How hard is it to keep the old unit active for an extra week? Here is the exchange w/Tivo below... You are currently number 1 in the queue. We apologize for the delay. We will assign you to an agent as soon as one is available.The average amount of time a customer has to wait is 00:13.  Kaylene (Listening)  Kaylene: Thank you for contacting TiVo! My name is Kaylene. So that I may better assist you, are you an existing customer?  james Fleming: yes I am, but I'm now having second thoughts about being one    Kaylene: Thank you for verifying your information. How may I assist you today James?  james Fleming: I've been having issues w/a tivo box & I'm getting a replacement sent out to me (after paying an additional deposit) and now my current unit is no longer activated  Kaylene: I can help you today!  Kaylene: When we process an exchange we do transfer over the service to the replacement box so it is active and ready to go when you receive it.  james Fleming: which is to say you also make my current box worthless until such time I receive a new box?!?!?  Kaylene: I apologize that your original box was deactivated so we could activate your replacement box.  james Fleming: Why on Earth would I bother to pay in advance for a new box if you were going to kill my existing box.  Kaylene: What features are you needing to use on your current box?  james Fleming: I need to be able to access my netflix subscription (if I'm lucky enough to have it work without rebooting)  Kaylene: Can I have you verify the TiVo Service Number of your TiVo box please?  james Fleming: 7460011906979b4  Kaylene: We have your current box temporary service but not all features are available with temporary service as it is not paid for service.  Kaylene: If you like I can transfer your service back to your current box for now. Then once you receive the new box you will have to call in and have the service transferred back to the new box.  james Fleming: Not paid for? Let's see> one tivo box + 3 year service plan + monthly service + $109 deposit on a second box = what?  Kaylene: Would you like me to transfer your service back to your current box?  james Fleming: Yes - that would be helpful  Kaylene: All you will need to do is contact us again once you receive the new box so we can transfer it back.  Kaylene: I have put your service back on TiVo box 7460011906979b4.  james Fleming: What would also be helpful is your firm informing me to how you'd be cutting service in the interim.  james Fleming: Again - I opted to pay to have a second box delivered BEFORE returning the box I have - thus trying to have a continuity of service..  Kaylene: This is not something we normally do so it is important when you contact us to transfer the service back to the new box when you receive it that you reference this case number: 110622-006089.  Kaylene: I apologize about the inconvenience. You may need  force a few connections for the box to recognize the service again.  james Fleming: If it's not something you normally do than WHY would you have a $109 fee and a term for the service.  james Fleming: I am not mad at you, but your company is not impressing me and I'm blogging about this experience  Kaylene: Again I apologize about the inconvenience but you should be good to go now. Is there anything else I can help you with today?  james Fleming: so I need to go through the re-actviate process or is that somethign you do  Kaylene: When you receive the new TiVo box you need to contact us so we can transfer the service to the new box for you.  james Fleming: sure  Kaylene: Is there anything else I can help you with today James?  james Fleming: Nope - please email this transcript to me  Kaylene: I apologize but we do not have the ability to e-mail you a copy of this transcript. You can view it online at  http://www.tivo.com when you sign into your account or you can copy and paste it now to save it.  Kaylene: Thank you for contacting TiVo today. Your reference number for our conversation is 110622-006089. You can save this for your records, and if necessary, provide this to a later agent to pull up what we discussed. There will be a brief satisfaction survey emailed to you. We would appreciate any feedback on your TiVo Chat Support experience today.  Kaylene: Thank you for using TiVo Chat and have a great day James! Good-bye.  Kaylene has disconnected.

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• “Being Agile” Means No Documentation, Right?

  - by jesschadwick

  Ask most software professionals what Agile is and they’ll probably start talking about flexibility and delivering what the customer wants.  Some may even mention the word “iterations”.  But inevitably, they’ll say at some point that it means less or even no documentation.  After all, doesn’t creating, updating, and circulating painstakingly comprehensive documentation that everyone and their mother have officially signed off on go against the very core of Agile?  Of course it does!  But really, they’re missing the point! Read The Agile Manifesto. (No, seriously - read it now. It’s short. I’ll wait.)  It’s essentially a list of values.  More specifically, it’s a right-side/left-side weighted list of values:  “Value this over that”. Many people seem to get the impression that this is really a “good vs. bad” list and that those values on the right side are evil and should essentially be tossed on the floor.  This leads to the conclusion that in order to be Agile we must throw away our fancy expensive tools, document as little as possible, and scoff at the idea of a project plan.  This conclusion is quite convenient because it essentially means “less work, more productivity!” (particularly in regards to the documentation and project planning).  I couldn’t disagree with this conclusion more. My interpretation of the Manifesto targets “over” as the operative word.  It’s not just a list of right vs. wrong or good vs. bad.  It’s a list of priorities.  In other words, none of the concepts on the list should be removed from your development lifecycle – they are all important… just not equally important.  This is not a unique interpretation, in fact it says so right at the end of the manifesto! So, the next time your team sits down to tackle that big new project, don’t make the first order of business to outlaw all meetings, documentation, and project plans.  Instead, collaborate with both your team and the business members involved (you do have business members sitting in the room, directly involved in the project planning, right?) and determine the bare minimum that will allow all of you to work and communicate in the best way possible.  This often means that you can pick and choose which parts of the Agile methodologies and process work for your particular project and end up with an amalgamation of Waterfall, Agile, XP, SCRUM and whatever other methodologies the members of your team have been exposed to (my favorite is “SCRUMerfall”). The biggest implication of this is that there is no one way to implement Agile.  There is no checklist with which you can tick off boxes and confidently conclude that, “Yep, we’re Agile™!”  In fact, depending on your business and the members of your team, moving to Agile full-bore may actually be ill-advised.  Such a drastic change just ends up taking everyone out of their comfort zone which they inevitably fall back into by the end of the project.  This often results in frustration to the point that Agile is abandoned altogether because “we just need to ship something!”  Needless to say, this is far more devastating to a project. Instead, I offer this approach: keep it simple and take it slow.  If your business members or customers are only involved at the beginning phases and nowhere to be seen until the project is delivered, invite them to your daily meetings; encourage them to keep up to speed on what’s going on on a daily basis and provide feedback.  If your current process is heavy on the documentation, try to reduce it as opposed to eliminating it outright.  If you need a “TPS Change Request” signed in triplicate with a 5-day “cooling off period” before a change is implemented, try a simple bug tracking system!  Tighten the feedback loop! Finally, at the end of every “iteration” (whatever that means to you, as long as it’s relatively frequent), take as much time as you can spare (even if it’s an hour or so) and perform some kind of retrospective.  Learn from your mistakes.  Figure out what’s working for you and what’s not, then fix it.  Before you know it you’ve got a handful of iterations and/or projects under your belt and you sit down with your team to realize that, “Hey, this is working - we’re pretty Agile!”  After all, Agile is a Zen journey.  It’s a destination that you aim for, not force, and even if you never reach true “enlightenment” that doesn’t mean your team can’t be exponentially better off from merely taking the journey.

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• Create an iTunes Account without a credit card

  - by Matthew Guay

  iTunes Store offers a large variety of free content, but to download it you have to have an account. Usually you have to enter your credit card information to sign up, but here’s an easy way to get an iTunes account for free downloads without entering any payment info. Although iTunes Store is known for paid downloads of movies, music, and more, it also has a treasure trove of free media.  Some of it, including Podcasts and iTunes U educational content do not require an account to download.  However, any other free content, including free iPhone/iPod Touch apps and free or promotional music, videos, and TV Shows all require an account to download.  If you try to download a free movie or music download, you will be required to enter payment information. Even though your card will not be charged, it will be kept on file so you can be charged if you download a for-pay item.  However, if you only plan to download free items, it may be preferable to not have your account linked to a credit card. The following steps will get you an account without entering your credit card info. Getting Started First, make sure you have iTunes installed.  If you don’t already have it, download and install it (link below) with the default settings. Now open iTunes, and click the iTunes Store link on the left. Click the App Store link on the top of this page. Select a free app to download.  A simple way to do this is to scroll down to the Top Free Apps box on the right side, hover your mouse over the first item, and click on the Free button that appears when you hover over it. A popup will open asking you to sign in with your Apple ID.  Click “Create New Account”. Click Continue to create your account. Check the box to accept the Store Terms and Conditions, and click Continue.   Enter your email address, password, security question, and date of birth, and uncheck the boxes to get email if you don’t want it…then click Continue. Now, you will be asked to provide a payment method.  Notice now that the last option says None!  Click that bullet option… Then enter your billing address.  Simply enter your normal billing address, even though you are not entering a payment method.  Click Continue and your account will be created! If you get the Address Verification screen just verify your county and click Done. An email will be sent to you to verify your account… Click on the link in your email to verify your account, iTunes will launch and you’re prompted to enter in the Apple ID and Password you just created. Your account is successfully created! Now you can easily download any free media from iTunes.  Keep an eye on the Free on iTunes box on the bottom of the iTunes Store page for interesting downloads, or if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, watch the popular Free downloads on the Apps page. And of course there is always great content on iTunes U to grab free as well. Purchasing for-pay media If you want to purchase an item on the iTunes store later, simply click on the item to download as normal.  Click Buy to proceed with the purchase. iTunes will prompt you that you need to enter payment information to complete the purchase.  Enter your Apple ID email and password, and then add the payment information as prompted.   Remove Payment Information from an iTunes Account If you’ve already entered payment information into your iTunes account, and would like to remove it, click Store in the top iTunes menu, and select View My Account. Enter your Apple ID email and password, and click View Account.   This will open your account information.  Click the Edit Payment Information button.   Now, click the None button to remove your payment information.  Click Done to save the changes. Your account will now prompt you to enter payment information if you try to make a purchase.  You could repeat these steps after making a purchase if you do not want iTunes to keep your payment info on file. Conclusion This is a great way to make an iTunes account without entering your credit card, or to remove your credit card info from your account.  Parents may especially enjoy this tip, as they can have an iTunes account on their kids computer or iPod Touch without worrying about them spending money with it. Links Download iTunes Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Switch Between Signatures in Outlook 2007 the Easy WayRedeem Pre-paid Zune Card Points for Zune Marketplace MediaCreate An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Understanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Draw Online using Harmony How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually

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• Updating the managed debugging API for .NET v4

  - by Brian Donahue

  In any successful investigation, the right tools play a big part in collecting evidence about the state of the "crime scene" as it was before the detectives arrived. Unfortunately for the Crash Scene Investigator, we don't have the budget to fly out to the customer's site, chalk the outline, and eat their doughnuts. We have to rely on the end-user to collect the evidence for us, which means giving them the fingerprint dust and the evidence baggies and leaving them to it. With that in mind, the Red Gate support team have been writing tools that can collect vital clues with a minimum of fuss. Years ago we would have asked for a memory dump, where we used to get the customer to run CDB.exe and produce dumps that we could analyze in-house, but those dumps were pretty unwieldy (500MB files) and the debugger often didn't dump exactly where we wanted, or made five or more dumps. What we wanted was just the minimum state information from the program at the time of failure, so we produced a managed debugger that captured every first and second-chance exception and logged the stack and a minimal amount of variables from the memory of the application, which could all be exported as XML. This caused less inconvenience to the end-user because it is much easier to send a 65KB XML file in an email than a 500MB file containing all of the application's memory. We don't need to have the entire victim shipped out to us when we just want to know what was under the fingernails. The thing that made creating a managed debugging tool possible was the MDbg Engine example written by Microsoft as part of the Debugging Tools for Windows distribution. Since the ICorDebug interface is a bit difficult to understand, they had kindly created some wrappers that provided an event-driven debugging model that was perfect for our needs, but .NET 4 applications under debugging started complaining that "The debugger's protocol is incompatible with the debuggee". The introduction of .NET Framework v4 had changed the managed debugging API significantly, however, without an update for the MDbg Engine code! After a few hours of research, I had finally worked out that most of the version 4 ICorDebug interface still works much the same way in "legacy" v2 mode and there was a relatively easy fix for the problem in that you can still get a reference to legacy ICorDebug by changing the way the interface is created. In .NET v2, the interface was acquired using the CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion method in mscoree.dll. In v4, you must first create IClrMetaHost, enumerate the runtimes, get an ICLRRuntimeInfo interface to the .NET 4 runtime from that, and use the GetInterface method in mscoree.dll to return a "legacy" ICorDebug interface. The rest of the MDbg Engine will continue working the old way. Here is how I had changed the MDbg Engine code to support .NET v4: private void InitFromVersion(string debuggerVersion){if( debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v1") ){throw new ArgumentException( "Can't debug a version 1 CLR process (\"" + debuggerVersion + "\"). Run application in a version 2 CLR, or use a version 1 debugger instead." );} ICorDebug rawDebuggingAPI=null;if (debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v4")){Guid CLSID_MetaHost = new Guid("9280188D-0E8E-4867-B30C-7FA83884E8DE"); Guid IID_MetaHost = new Guid("D332DB9E-B9B3-4125-8207-A14884F53216"); ICLRMetaHost metahost = (ICLRMetaHost)NativeMethods.ClrCreateInterface(CLSID_MetaHost, IID_MetaHost); IEnumUnknown runtimes = metahost.EnumerateInstalledRuntimes(); ICLRRuntimeInfo runtime = GetRuntime(runtimes, debuggerVersion); //Defined in metahost.hGuid CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy = new Guid(0xDF8395B5, 0xA4BA, 0x450b, 0xA7, 0x7C, 0xA9, 0xA4, 0x77, 0x62, 0xC5, 0x20);Guid IID_ICorDebug = new Guid("3D6F5F61-7538-11D3-8D5B-00104B35E7EF"); Object res;runtime.GetInterface(ref CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy, ref IID_ICorDebug, out res); rawDebuggingAPI = (ICorDebug)res; }elserawDebuggingAPI = NativeMethods.CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion((int)CorDebuggerVersion.Whidbey,debuggerVersion);if (rawDebuggingAPI != null)InitFromICorDebug(rawDebuggingAPI);elsethrow new ArgumentException("Support for debugging version " + debuggerVersion + " is not yet implemented");} The changes above will ensure that the debugger can support .NET Framework v2 and v4 applications with the same codebase, but we do compile two different applications: one targeting v2 and the other v4. As a footnote I need to add that some missing native methods and wrappers, along with the EnumerateRuntimes method code, came from the Mindbg project on Codeplex. Another change is that when using the MDbgEngine.CreateProcess to launch a process in the debugger, do not supply a null as the final argument. This does not work any more because GetCORVersion always returns "v2.0.50727" as the function has been deprecated in .NET v4. What's worse is that on a system with only .NET 4, the user will be prompted to download and install .NET v2! Not nice! This works much better: proc = m_Debugger.CreateProcess(ProcessName, ProcessArgs, DebugModeFlag.Default,String.Format("v{0}.{1}.{2}",System.Environment.Version.Major,System.Environment.Version.Minor,System.Environment.Version.Build)); Microsoft "unofficially" plan on updating the MDbg samples soon, but if you have an MDbg-based application, you can get it working right now by changing one method a bit and adding a few new interfaces (ICLRMetaHost, IEnumUnknown, and ICLRRuntimeInfo). The new, non-legacy implementation of MDbg Engine will add new, interesting features like dump-file support and by association I assume garbage-collection/managed object stats, so it will be well worth looking into if you want to extend the functionality of a managed debugger going forward.

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• ASP.NET MVC HandleError Attribute

  - by Ben Griswold

  Last Wednesday, I took a whopping 15 minutes out of my day and added ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) to my ASP.NET MVC application.  If you haven’t heard the news (I hadn’t until recently), ELMAH does a killer job of logging and reporting nearly all unhandled exceptions.  As for handled exceptions, I’ve been using NLog but since I was already playing with the ELMAH bits I thought I’d see if I couldn’t replace it. Atif Aziz provided a quick solution in his answer to a Stack Overflow question.  I’ll let you consult his answer to see how one can subclass the HandleErrorAttribute and override the OnException method in order to get the bits working.  I pretty much took rolled the recommended logic into my application and it worked like a charm.  Along the way, I did uncover a few HandleError fact to which I wasn’t already privy.  Most of my learning came from Steven Sanderson’s book, Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework.  I’ve flipped through a bunch of the book and spent time on specific sections.  It’s a really good read if you’re looking to pick up an ASP.NET MVC reference. Anyway, my notes are found a comments in the following code snippet.  I hope my notes clarify a few things for you too. public class LogAndHandleErrorAttribute : HandleErrorAttribute {     public override void OnException(ExceptionContext context)     {         // A word from our sponsors:         //      http://stackoverflow.com/questions/766610/how-to-get-elmah-to-work-with-asp-net-mvc-handleerror-attribute         //      and Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson         //         // Invoke the base implementation first. This should mark context.ExceptionHandled = true         // which stops ASP.NET from producing a "yellow screen of death." This also sets the         // Http StatusCode to 500 (internal server error.)         //         // Assuming Custom Errors aren't off, the base implementation will trigger the application         // to ultimately render the "Error" view from one of the following locations:         //         //      1. ~/Views/Controller/Error.aspx         //      2. ~/Views/Controller/Error.ascx         //      3. ~/Views/Shared/Error.aspx         //      4. ~/Views/Shared/Error.ascx         //         // "Error" is the default view, however, a specific view may be provided as an Attribute property.         // A notable point is the Custom Errors defaultRedirect is not considered in the redirection plan.         base.OnException(context);           var e = context.Exception;                  // If the exception is unhandled, simply return and let Elmah handle the unhandled exception.         // Otherwise, try to use error signaling which involves the fully configured pipeline like logging,         // mailing, filtering and what have you). Failing that, see if the error should be filtered.         // If not, the error simply logged the exception.         if (!context.ExceptionHandled                || RaiseErrorSignal(e)                   || IsFiltered(context))                  return;           LogException(e); // FYI. Simple Elmah logging doesn't handle mail notifications.     }

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• Your thoughts on Best Practices for Scientific Computing?

  - by John Smith

  A recent paper by Wilson et al (2014) pointed out 24 Best Practices for scientific programming. It's worth to have a look. I would like to hear opinions about these points from experienced programmers in scientific data analysis. Do you think these advices are helpful and practical? Or are they good only in an ideal world? Wilson G, Aruliah DA, Brown CT, Chue Hong NP, Davis M, Guy RT, Haddock SHD, Huff KD, Mitchell IM, Plumbley MD, Waugh B, White EP, Wilson P (2014) Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLoS Biol 12:e1001745. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001745 Box 1. Summary of Best Practices Write programs for people, not computers. (a) A program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once. (b) Make names consistent, distinctive, and meaningful. (c) Make code style and formatting consistent. Let the computer do the work. (a) Make the computer repeat tasks. (b) Save recent commands in a file for re-use. (c) Use a build tool to automate workflows. Make incremental changes. (a) Work in small steps with frequent feedback and course correction. (b) Use a version control system. (c) Put everything that has been created manually in version control. Don’t repeat yourself (or others). (a) Every piece of data must have a single authoritative representation in the system. (b) Modularize code rather than copying and pasting. (c) Re-use code instead of rewriting it. Plan for mistakes. (a) Add assertions to programs to check their operation. (b) Use an off-the-shelf unit testing library. (c) Turn bugs into test cases. (d) Use a symbolic debugger. Optimize software only after it works correctly. (a) Use a profiler to identify bottlenecks. (b) Write code in the highest-level language possible. Document design and purpose, not mechanics. (a) Document interfaces and reasons, not implementations. (b) Refactor code in preference to explaining how it works. (c) Embed the documentation for a piece of software in that software. Collaborate. (a) Use pre-merge code reviews. (b) Use pair programming when bringing someone new up to speed and when tackling particularly tricky problems. (c) Use an issue tracking tool. I'm relatively new to serious programming for scientific data analysis. When I tried to write code for pilot analyses of some of my data last year, I encountered tremendous amount of bugs both in my code and data. Bugs and errors had been around me all the time, but this time it was somewhat overwhelming. I managed to crunch the numbers at last, but I thought I couldn't put up with this mess any longer. Some actions must be taken. Without a sophisticated guide like the article above, I started to adopt "defensive style" of programming since then. A book titled "The Art of Readable Code" helped me a lot. I deployed meticulous input validations or assertions for every function, renamed a lot of variables and functions for better readability, and extracted many subroutines as reusable functions. Recently, I introduced Git and SourceTree for version control. At the moment, because my co-workers are much more reluctant about these issues, the collaboration practices (8a,b,c) have not been introduced. Actually, as the authors admitted, because all of these practices take some amount of time and effort to introduce, it may be generally hard to persuade your reluctant collaborators to comply them. I think I'm asking your opinions because I still suffer from many bugs despite all my effort on many of these practices. Bug fix may be, or should be, faster than before, but I couldn't really measure the improvement. Moreover, much of my time has been invested on defence, meaning that I haven't actually done much data analysis (offence) these days. Where is the point I should stop at in terms of productivity? I've already deployed: 1a,b,c, 2a, 3a,b,c, 4b,c, 5a,d, 6a,b, 7a,7b I'm about to have a go at: 5b,c Not yet: 2b,c, 4a, 7c, 8a,b,c (I could not really see the advantage of using GNU make (2c) for my purpose. Could anyone tell me how it helps my work with MATLAB?)

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