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• XML to be validated against multiple xsd schemas

  - by Michael Rusch

  I'm writing the xsd and the code to validate, so I have great control here. I would like to have an upload facility that adds stuff to my application based on an xml file. One part of the xml file should be validated against different schemas based on one of the values in the other part of it. Here's an example to illustrate: <foo> <name>Harold</name> <bar>Alpha</bar> <baz>Mercury</baz> <!-- ... more general info that applies to all foos ... --> <bar-config> <!-- the content here is specific to the bar named "Alpha" --> </bar-config> <baz-config> <!-- the content here is specific to the baz named "Mercury" --> </baz> </foo> In this case, there is some controlled vocabulary for the content of <bar>, and I can handle that part just fine. Then, based on the bar value, the appropriate xml schema should be used to validate the content of bar-config. Similarly for baz and baz-config. The code doing the parsing/validation is written in Java. Not sure how language-dependent the solution will be. Ideally, the solution would permit the xml author to declare the appropriate schema locations and what-not so that s/he could get the xml validated on the fly in a sufficiently smart editor. Also, the possible values for <bar> and <baz> are orthogonal, so I don't want to do this by extension for every possible bar/baz combo. What I mean is, if there are 24 possible bar values/schemas and 8 possible baz values/schemas, I want to be able to write 1 + 24 + 8 = 33 total schemas, instead of 1 * 24 * 8 = 192 total schemas. Also, I'd prefer to NOT break out the bar-config and baz-config into separate xml files if possible. I realize that might make all the problems much easier, as each xml file would have a single schema, but I'm trying to see if there is a good single-xml-file solution.

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• HTML Purifier: Removing an element conditionally based on its attributes

  - by pinkgothic

  As per the HTML Purifier smoketest, 'malformed' URIs are occasionally discarded to leave behind an attribute-less anchor tag, e.g. <a href="javascript:document.location='http://www.google.com/'">XSS</a> becomes <a>XSS</a> ...as well as occasionally being stripped down to the protocol, e.g. <a href="http://1113982867/">XSS</a> becomes <a href="http:/">XSS</a> While that's unproblematic, per se, it's a bit ugly. Instead of trying to strip these out with regular expressions, I was hoping to use HTML Purifier's own library capabilities / injectors / plug-ins / whathaveyou. Point of reference: Handling attributes Conditionally removing an attribute in HTMLPurifier is easy. Here the library offers the class HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform with the method confiscateAttr(). While I don't personally use the functionality of confiscateAttr(), I do use an HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform as per this thread to add target="_blank" to all anchors. // more configuration stuff up here $htmlDef = $htmlPurifierConfiguration->getHTMLDefinition(true); $anchor = $htmlDef->addBlankElement('a'); $anchor->attr_transform_post[] = new HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform_Target(); // purify down here HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform_Target is a very simple class, of course. class HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform_Target extends HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform { public function transform($attr, $config, $context) { // I could call $this->confiscateAttr() here to throw away an // undesired attribute $attr['target'] = '_blank'; return $attr; } } That part works like a charm, naturally. Handling elements Perhaps I'm not squinting hard enough at HTMLPurifier_TagTransform, or am looking in the wrong place(s), or generally amn't understanding it, but I can't seem to figure out a way to conditionally remove elements. Say, something to the effect of: // more configuration stuff up here $htmlDef = $htmlPurifierConfiguration->getHTMLDefinition(true); $anchor = $htmlDef->addElementHandler('a'); $anchor->elem_transform_post[] = new HTMLPurifier_ElementTransform_Cull(); // add target as per 'point of reference' here // purify down here With the Cull class extending something that has a confiscateElement() ability, or comparable, wherein I could check for a missing href attribute or a href attribute with the content http:/. HTMLPurifier_Filter I understand I could create a filter, but the examples (Youtube.php and ExtractStyleBlocks.php) suggest I'd be using regular expressions in that, which I'd really rather avoid, if it is at all possible. I'm hoping for an onboard or quasi-onboard solution that makes use of HTML Purifier's excellent parsing capabilities. Returning null in a child-class of HTMLPurifier_AttrTransform unfortunately doesn't cut it. Anyone have any smart ideas, or am I stuck with regexes? :)

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• Tree Node Checked behavior on a TreeView in Compact Framework 3.5 running on Windows Mobile 6.5

  - by Hydroslide

  I have been upgrading an existing .NET Windows Mobile application to use the 3.5 version of the compact framework and to run on Windows Mobile 6.5. I have a form with a TreeView. The TreeView.Checkboxes property is set to true so that each node has a check box. This gives no trouble in all previous versions of Windows Mobile. However, in version 6.5 when you click on a check box it appears to check and then uncheck instantaneously. But it only raises the AfterCheck event once. The only way I can get a check to stick is by double clicking it (which is the wrong behavior). Has anyone seen this behavior? Does anyone know of a workaround for it? I have included a simple test form. Dump this form into a Visual Studio 2008 Smart Device application targeted at Windows Mobile 6 to see what I mean. Public Class frmTree Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form #Region " Windows Form Designer generated code " Public Sub New() MyBase.new() ' This call is required by the Windows Form Designer. InitializeComponent() ' Add any initialization after the InitializeComponent() call. End Sub 'Form overrides dispose to clean up the component list. <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCode()> _ Protected Overrides Sub Dispose(ByVal disposing As Boolean) If disposing AndAlso components IsNot Nothing Then components.Dispose() End If MyBase.Dispose(disposing) End Sub 'Required by the Windows Form Designer Private components As System.ComponentModel.IContainer Friend WithEvents TreeView1 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeView Private mainMenu1 As System.Windows.Forms.MainMenu 'NOTE: The following procedure is required by the Windows Form Designer 'It can be modified using the Windows Form Designer. 'Do not modify it using the code editor. <System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThrough()> _ Private Sub InitializeComponent() Dim TreeNode1 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node0") Dim TreeNode2 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node2") Dim TreeNode3 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node3") Dim TreeNode4 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node4") Dim TreeNode5 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node1") Dim TreeNode6 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node5") Dim TreeNode7 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node6") Dim TreeNode8 As System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode("Node7") Me.mainMenu1 = New System.Windows.Forms.MainMenu Me.TreeView1 = New System.Windows.Forms.TreeView Me.SuspendLayout() ' 'TreeView1 ' Me.TreeView1.CheckBoxes = True Me.TreeView1.Location = New System.Drawing.Point(37, 41) Me.TreeView1.Name = "TreeView1" TreeNode2.Text = "Node2" TreeNode3.Text = "Node3" TreeNode4.Text = "Node4" TreeNode1.Nodes.AddRange(New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode() {TreeNode2, TreeNode3, TreeNode4}) TreeNode1.Text = "Node0" TreeNode6.Text = "Node5" TreeNode7.Text = "Node6" TreeNode8.Text = "Node7" TreeNode5.Nodes.AddRange(New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode() {TreeNode6, TreeNode7, TreeNode8}) TreeNode5.Text = "Node1" Me.TreeView1.Nodes.AddRange(New System.Windows.Forms.TreeNode() {TreeNode1, TreeNode5}) Me.TreeView1.Size = New System.Drawing.Size(171, 179) Me.TreeView1.TabIndex = 0 ' 'frmTree ' Me.AutoScaleDimensions = New System.Drawing.SizeF(96.0!, 96.0!) Me.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Dpi Me.AutoScroll = True Me.ClientSize = New System.Drawing.Size(240, 268) Me.Controls.Add(Me.TreeView1) Me.Menu = Me.mainMenu1 Me.Name = "frmTree" Me.Text = "frmTree" Me.ResumeLayout(False) End Sub #End Region End Class

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• Creating a variable list Pashua, OS X & Bash.

  - by S1syphus

  First of all, for those that don't know pashua is a tool for creating native Aqua dialog windows. An example of what a window config looks like is # pashua_run() # Define what the dialog should be like # Take a look at Pashua's Readme file for more info on the syntax conf=" # Set transparency: 0 is transparent, 1 is opaque *.transparency=0.95 # Set window title *.title = Introducing Pashua # Introductory text tb.type = text tb.default = "HELLO WORLD" tb.height = 276 tb.width = 310 tb.x = 340 tb.y = 44 if [ -e "$icon" ] then # Display Pashua's icon conf="$conf img.type = image img.x = 530 img.y = 255 img.path = $icon" fi if [ -e "$bgimg" ] then # Display background image conf="$conf bg.type = image bg.x = 30 bg.y = 2 bg.path = $bgimg" fi pashua_run "$conf" echo " tb = $tb" The problem is, Pashua can't really get output from stdout, but it can get arguments. Following on from what Dennis Williamson posted here. What ideally it should do is generate an output file based on information from a text file, To executed in pashua_run ore add the pashua_run around the window argument: count=1 while read -r i do echo "AB${count}.type = openbrowser" echo "AB${count}.label = Choose a master playlist file" echo "AB${count}.width=310" echo "AB${count}.tooltip = Blabla filesystem browser" echo "some text with a line from the file: $i" (( count++ )) done < TEST.txt >> long.txt SO the output is AB1.type = openbrowser AB1.label = Choose a master playlist file AB1.width=310 AB1.tooltip = Blabla filesystem browser some text with a line from the file: foo AB2.type = openbrowser AB2.label = Choose a master playlist file AB2.width=310 AB2.tooltip = Blabla filesystem browser some text with a line from the file: bar AB3.type = openbrowser AB3.label = Choose a master playlist file AB3.width=310 AB3.tooltip = Blabla filesystem browser some text with a line from the file: dev AB4.type = openbrowser AB4.label = Choose a master playlist file AB4.width=310 AB4.tooltip = Blabla filesystem random So if there is a clever way to get the output of that and place it into pashua run would be cool, on the fly: I.E load te contents of TEST.txt and generate the place it into pashua_run, I've tried using cat and opening the file... but because it's in Pashua_run it doesn't work, is there a smart way to break out then back in? Or the second way which I was thinking, was create get the output then append it into the middle text file containing the pashua runtime, then execute it, maybe slightly hacky, but I would imagine it will do the job. Any ideas? ++ I know I probably could make my life a lot easier, by doing this in actionscript and cocoa, although at present don't have time for such a learning curve, although I do plan to get round to it.

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• Asynchronous vs Synchronous vs Threading in an iPhone App

  - by Coocoo4Cocoa

  I'm in the design stage for an app which will utilize a REST web service and sort of have a dilemma in as far as using asynchronous vs synchronous vs threading. Here's the scenario. Say you have three options to drill down into, each one having its own REST-based resource. I can either lazily load each one with a synchronous request, but that'll block the UI and prevent the user from hitting a back navigation button while data is retrieved. This case applies almost anywhere except for when your application requires a login screen. I can't see any reason to use synchronous HTTP requests vs asynchronous because of that reason alone. The only time it makes sense is to have a worker thread make your synchronous request, and notify the main thread when the request is done. This will prevent the block. The question then is bench marking your code and seeing which has more overhead, a threaded synchronous request or an asynchronous request. The problem with asynchronous requests is you need to either setup a smart notification or delegate system as you can have multiple requests for multiple resources happening at any given time. The other problem with them is if I have a class, say a singleton which is handling all of my data, I can't use asynchronous requests in a getter method. Meaning the following won't go: - (NSArray *)users { if(users == nil) users = do_async_request // NO GOOD return users; } whereas the following: - (NSArray *)users { if(users == nil) users == do_sync_request // OK. return users; } You also might have priority. What I mean by priority is if you look at Apple's Mail application on the iPhone, you'll notice they first suck down your entire POP/IMAP tree before making a second request to retrieve the first 2 lines (the default) of your message. I suppose my question to you experts is this. When are you using asynchronous, synchronous, threads -- and when are you using either async/sync in a thread? What kind of delegation system do you have setup to know what to do when a async request completes? Are you prioritizing your async requests? There's a gamut of solutions to this all too common problem. It's simple to hack something out. The problem is, I don't want to hack and I want to have something that's simple and easy to maintain.

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• Debugging site written mainly in JScript with AJAX code injection

  - by blumidoo

  Hello, I have a legacy code to maintain and while trying to understand the logic behind the code, I have run into lots of annoying issues. The application is written mainly in Java Script, with extensive usage of jQuery + different plugins, especially Accordion. It creates a wizard-like flow, where client code for the next step is downloaded in the background by injecting a result of a remote AJAX request. It also uses callbacks a lot and pretty complicated "by convention" programming style (lots of events handlers are created on the fly based on certain object names - e.g. current page name, current step name). Adding to that, the code is very messy and there is no obvious inner structure - the functions are scattered in the code, file names do not reflect the business role of the code, lots of functions and code snippets are most likely not used at all etc. PROBLEM: How to approach this code base, so that the inner flow of the code can be sort-of "reverse engineered" using a suite of smart debugging tools. Ideally, I would like to be able to attach to the running application and step through the code, breaking on each new function call. Also, it would be nice to be able to create a "diagram of calls" in the application (i.e. in order to run a particular page logic, this particular flow of function calls was executed in a particular order). Not to mention to be able to run a coverage analysis, identifying potentially orphaned code fragments. I would like to stress out once more, that it is impossible to understand the inner logic of the application just by looking at the code itself, unless you have LOTS of spare time and beer crates, which I unfortunately do not have :/ (shame...) An IDE of some sort that would aid in extending that code would be also great, but I am currently looking into possibility to use Visual Studio 2010 to do the job, as the site itself is a mix of Classic ASP and ASP.NET (I'd say - 70% Java Script with jQuery, 30% ASP). I have obviously tried FireBug, but I was unable to find a way to define a breakpoint or step into the code, which is "injected" into the client JS using AJAX calls (i.e. the application retrieves the code by invoking an URL and injects it to the client local code). Venkman debugger had similar issues. Any hints would be welcome. Feel free to ask additional questions.

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• Simple database design and LINQ

  - by Anders Svensson

  I have very little experience designing databases, and now I want to create a very simple database that does the same thing I have previously had in xml. Here's the xml: <services> <service type="writing"> <small>125</small> <medium>100</medium> <large>60</large> <xlarge>30</xlarge> </service> <service type="analysis"> <small>56</small> <medium>104</medium> <large>200</large> <xlarge>250</xlarge> </service> </services> Now, I wanted to create the same thing in a SQL database, and started doing this ( hope this formats ok, but you'll get the gist, four columns and two rows): > ServiceType Small Medium Large > > Writing 125 100 60 > > Analysis 56 104 200 This didn't work too well, since I then wanted to use LINQ to select, say, the Large value for Writing (60). But I couldn't use LINQ for this (as far as I know) and use a variable for the size (see parameters in the method below). I could only do that if I had a column like "Size" where Small, Medium, and Large would be the values. But that doesn't feel right either, because then I would get several rows with ServiceType = Writing (3 in this case, one for each size), and the same for Analysis. And if I were to add more servicetypes I would have to do the same. Simply repetitive... Is there any smart way to do this using relationships or something? Using the second design above (although not good), I could use the following LINQ to select a value with parameters sent to the method: protected int GetHourRateDB(string serviceType, Size size) { CalculatorLinqDataContext context = new CalculatorLinqDataContext(); var data = (from calculatorData in context.CalculatorDatas where calculatorData.Service == serviceType && calculatorData.Size == size.ToString() select calculatorData).Single(); return data.Hours; } But if there is another better design, could you please also describe how to do the same selection using LINQ with that design? Please keep in mind that I am a rookie at database design, so please be as explicit and pedagogical as possible :-) Thanks! Anders

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• Store a long string into mult array

  - by QLiu

  Hello All, I have a long string arrays, which looks like that var callinfo_data=new Array( "1300 135 604#<b>Monday - Friday: 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. AEST</b>", //Australia .. "0844000040#<b>lunedì-venerdì ore 10:00 - 17:00 CET</b>", //Switzerland (it) "212 356 9707#<b>Hafta içi her gün: 10:00 - 18:00</b>", //Turkey "08451610009#<b>Monday - Friday: 9:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. GMT</b>", //UK "866 486 6866#<b>Monday - Friday: 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. EST</b><br />Saturday: 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. EST", //USA "+31208501004#<b>Monday - Friday: 9:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. GMT+1</b>", //other countries " # "); As you see, it contact Phone number and open time. I can use split to separet them into info=callinfo_data[n].split("#"); two sections, And then i can represent them in HTML like "<div id ='phoneNumber'>"+info[0]+"</div><div id='openTime'>"+info[1]+"</div>" But my display phone number function will read the cookie variables, and then select the right contact info to display. Like, phone=callinfo_data[2].split("#"); if (locale == 'UK') details = phone[0]+ build_dropdown(locale); else if (locale == 'fr') details = 'French Contact Details<br>'+build_dropdown(locale); else if (locale == 'be') details = 'Belgian Contact Details<br>'+ build_dropdown(locale); else details = 'Unknown Contact Detail'; writeContactInfo(details); My questions are how I can build a function to load phone number and time based on my cookie variables, UK in a smart way. I can hard code everything, but i think it is too silly. I have to write a long code like: phone1= allinfo_data[0].split("#"); phone1= allinfo_data[1].split("#"); ... etc Second questions, how can I load this long arrays into easy access multi arrays? Thank you Regards, Qing

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• How hard programming is? Really. [closed]

  - by Bubba88

  Hi! The question is about your perception of programming activity. How hard/exacting this task is? There is much buzz about programming nowadays, people say that programmers are smart, very technical and abstract at a time, know much about world, psychology etc.. They say, that programmers got really powerful brain thing, cause there is much to keep in consideration simultaneously again with much information folded into each other associatively (up 10 levels of folding they say))) Still, there are some terms to specify at our own.. So that is the question: What do you think about programming in general? Is it hard? Is it 'for everyone' or for the particular kind of people only? How much non-CS background do you need to program (just to program, really; enterprise applications for example)? How long is the learning curve? (again, for programming in general) And another bunch of random questions: - If you were not to like/love programming, would that be a serious trouble bothering your current employment? - If you were to start from the beginning, would you chose that direction this time? - What other areas (jobs or maybe hobbies) are comparable to programming in the way they can explode someone's lovely brain? - Is 'non turing-complete programming' (SQL, XML, etc.) comparable to what we do or is it really way easier, less requiring, cheap and akin to cooking :)? Well, the essence is: How would you describe programming activity WRT to its difficulty? Or, on the other hand: Did you ever catch yourself thinking at some point: OMG, it's sooo hard! I don't know how would I ever program, even carried away this way and doing programming just for fun? It's very interesting to know your opinion, your'e the programmers after all. I mean much people must be exaggerating/speculating about the thing they do not really know about. But that musn't be the case here on SO :) P.S.: I'll try my best to update this post later, and you please edit it too. At least I'll get decent English in my question text :)

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• Multiline editable textarea in SVG

  - by Timo

  I'm trying to implement multiline editable textfield in SVG. I have the following code in http://jsfiddle.net/ca4d3/ : <svg width="1000" height="1000" overflow="scroll"> <g transform="rotate(5)"> <rect width="300" height="400" fill="#22DD22" fill-opacity="0.5"/> </g> <foreignObject x="10" y="10" overflow="visible" width="10000" height="10000" requiredFeatures="http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/feature#Extensibility"> <p style="display:table-cell;padding:10px;border:1px solid red; background-color:white;opacity:0.5;font-family:Verdana; font-size:20px;white-space: pre; word-wrap: normal; overflow: visible; overflow-y: visible; overflow-x:visible;" contentEditable="true" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Write here some text. Be smart and select some word. If you wanna be really COOL, paste here something cool! </p> </foreignObject> </svg> In newest Chrome, Safari and Firefox the code works in some way, but in Opera and IE 9 not. The goal is that: 0) Works in newest Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and IE and if ever possible in some pads. 1) White-spaces are preserved and text wraps only on newline char (works in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, but not in Opera and IE 9 *). 2) The textfield is editable (in the same reliable and stabile way as textareas and contenteditable p elements in html) and height and width is expanded to fit text (works in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, but not in Opera and IE 9 *). 3) Texfield can be transformed (rotated, skewed, translated) while maintaining text editability (Tested rotation, but not work in any browser *). EDIT: Foreignobject rotation works on Firefox 15.0.1, but not in Safari 5.1.7 (6534.57.2), Chrome 22.0.1229.79, Opera 12.02, IE 9. Tested on Mac OS X 10.6.8. 4) Textfield can be clipped and masked while not necessarily maintaining text editability (not yet tested). *) using above code These all can be achieved using Flash, but Flash has so severe problems that it is not suitable for my purposes (after every little change in code, all have to be compiled again using Flex, which is slow, font size has limits, tracking technique is pixeloriented, not relative to em size etc.) and there still are differences across platforms. And I want to give a try to SVG! GUESTION: Can I achieve my goals 0-4 with current SVG support in browsers? Is coming SVG 2.0 for some help in this case? EDIT: Changed display:table to display:table-cell (and added new jsfiddle), because display:table made the field to loses focus when pressed arrow-up on first text row.

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• How and why do I set up a C# build machine?

  - by mmr

  Hi all, I'm working with a small (4 person) development team on a C# project. I've proposed setting up a build machine which will do nightly builds and tests of the project, because I understand that this is a Good Thing. Trouble is, we don't have a whole lot of budget here, so I have to justify the expense to the powers that be. So I want to know: What kind of tools/licenses will I need? Right now, we use Visual Studio and Smart Assembly to build, and Perforce for source control. Will I need something else, or is there an equivalent of a cron job for running automated scripts? What, exactly, will this get me, other than an indication of a broken build? Should I set up test projects in this solution (sln file) that will be run by these scripts, so I can have particular functions tested? We have, at the moment, two such tests, because we haven't had the time (or frankly, the experience) to make good unit tests. What kind of hardware will I need for this? Once a build has been finished and tested, is it a common practice to put that build up on an ftp site or have some other way for internal access? The idea is that this machine makes the build, and we all go to it, but can make debug builds if we have to. How often should we make this kind of build? How is space managed? If we make nightly builds, should we keep around all the old builds, or start to ditch them after about a week or so? Is there anything else I'm not seeing here? I realize that this is a very large topic, and I'm just starting out. I couldn't find a duplicate of this question here, and if there's a book out there I should just get, please let me know. EDIT: I finally got it to work! Hudson is completely fantastic, and FxCop is showing that some features we thought were implemented were actually incomplete. We also had to change the installer type from Old-And-Busted vdproj to New Hotness WiX. Basically, for those who are paying attention, if you can run your build from the command line, then you can put it into hudson. Making the build run from the command line via MSBuild is a useful exercise in itself, because it forces your tools to be current.

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• how to design this relation in a DB schema

  - by raticulin

  I have a table Car in my db, one of the columns is purchaseDate. I want to be able to tag every car with a number of Policies (limited to 10 policies). Each policy has a time to life (ttl, a duration of time, like '5 years', '10 months' etc), that is, for how long since the car's purchaseDate the policy can be applied. I need to perform the following actions: when inserting a Car, it will be set with a number of Policies (at least one is set) sometimes a Car will be updated to add/remove a Policy searches must be done taking into account date/policies, for example: 'select all cars that are not covered by any policy as of today' My current design is (pol0..pol9 are the policies): CREATE TABLE Car ( id int NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1), purchaseDate datetime NOT NULL, //more stuff... pol0 smallint default NULL, pol1 smallint default NULL, pol2 smallint default NULL, pol3 smallint default NULL, pol4 smallint default NULL, pol5 smallint default NULL, pol6 smallint default NULL, pol7 smallint default NULL, pol8 smallint default NULL, pol9 smallint default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) ) CREATE TABLE Policy ( id smallint NOT NULL, name varchar(50) collate Latin1_General_BIN NOT NULL, ttl varchar(100) collate Latin1_General_BIN NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id) ) The problem I am facing is that the sql to perform the query above is a nightmare to write. As I don't know in which column each policy can be, so I have to check all columns for every policy etc etc. So I am wondering wether it is worth changing this. My questions are: The smallint as Policy id was chosen instead of an 'int IDENTITY' in order to save some space as there are going to be millions of Car records. It just adds complexity when creating a Policy as we must handle the id etc. Was it worth doing this? I am thinking that maybe there is a much better design? Obviously we could move the policy/car relation to its own table CarPolicy, benefits would be: no limit on 10 policies per car adding/removing etc much easier when only the default policy is applied (when no others are applied one called Default policy is applied), we could signal that by not having any entry in CarPolicy, now this is just done inserting the Default policy id in one of the columns. The cons are that we would need to change the DB, ORM classes etc. What would you recommend? Maybe there is another smart way to implement this that we are not aware without using the CarPolicy table?

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• How do you unit test the real world?

  - by Kim Sun-wu

  I'm primarily a C++ coder, and thus far, have managed without really writing tests for all of my code. I've decided this is a Bad Idea(tm), after adding new features that subtly broke old features, or, depending on how you wish to look at it, introduced some new "features" of their own. But, unit testing seems to be an extremely brittle mechanism. You can test for something in "perfect" conditions, but you don't get to see how your code performs when stuff breaks. A for instance is a crawler, let's say it crawls a few specific sites, for data X. Do you simply save sample pages, test against those, and hope that the sites never change? This would work fine as regression tests, but, what sort of tests would you write to constantly check those sites live and let you know when the application isn't doing it's job because the site changed something, that now causes your application to crash? Wouldn't you want your test suite to monitor the intent of the code? The above example is a bit contrived, and something I haven't run into (in case you haven't guessed). Let me pick something I have, though. How do you test an application will do its job in the face of a degraded network stack? That is, say you have a moderate amount of packet loss, for one reason or the other, and you have a function DoSomethingOverTheNetwork() which is supposed to degrade gracefully when the stack isn't performing as it's supposed to; but does it? The developer tests it personally by purposely setting up a gateway that drops packets to simulate a bad network when he first writes it. A few months later, someone checks in some code that modifies something subtly, so the degradation isn't detected in time, or, the application doesn't even recognize the degradation, this is never caught, because you can't run real world tests like this using unit tests, can you? Further, how about file corruption? Let's say you're storing a list of servers in a file, and the checksum looks okay, but the data isn't really. You want the code to handle that, you write some code that you think does that. How do you test that it does exactly that for the life of the application? Can you? Hence, brittleness. Unit tests seem to test the code only in perfect conditions(and this is promoted, with mock objects and such), not what they'll face in the wild. Don't get me wrong, I think unit tests are great, but a test suite composed only of them seems to be a smart way to introduce subtle bugs in your code while feeling overconfident about it's reliability. How do I address the above situations? If unit tests aren't the answer, what is? Thanks!

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• Is there a programming language with be semantics close to English ?

  - by ivo s

  Most languages allow to 'tweek' to certain extend parts of the syntax (C++,C#) and/or semantics that you will be using in your code (Katahdin, lua). But I have not heard of a language that can just completely define how your code will look like. So isn't there some language which already exists that has such capabilities to override all syntax & define semantics ? Example of what I want to do is basically from the C# code below: foreach(Fruit fruit in Fruits) { if(fruit is Apple) { fruit.Price = fruit.Price/2; } } I want do be able to to write the above code in my perfect language like this: Check if any fruits are Macintosh apples and discount the price by 50%. The advantages that come to my mind looking from a coder's perspective in this "imaginary" language are: It's very clear what is going on (self descriptive) - it's plain English after all even kid would understand my program Hides all complexities which I have to write in C#. But why should I care to learn that if statements, arithmetic operators etc since there are already implemented The disadvantages that I see for a coder who will maintain this program are: Maybe you would express this program differently from me so you may not get all the information that I've expressed in my sentence Programs can be quite verbose and hard to debug but if possible to even proximate this type of syntax above maybe more people would start programming right? That would be amazing I think. I can go to work and just write an essay to draw a square on a winform like this: Create a form called MyGreetingForm. Draw a square with in the middle of MyGreetingFormwith a side of 100 points. In the middle of the square write "Hello! Click here to continue" in Arial font. In the above code the parser must basically guess that I want to use the unnamed square from the previous sentence, it'd be hard to write such a smart parser I guess, yet it's so simple what I want to do. If the user clicks on square in the middle of MyGreetingForm show MyMainForm. In the above code 'basically' the compiler must: 1)generate an event handler 2) check if there is any square in the middle of the form and if there is - 3) hide the form and show another form It looks very hard to do but it doesn't look impossible IMO to me at least approximate this (I can personally generate a parser to perform the 3 steps above np & it's basically the same that it has to do any way when you add even in c# a.MyEvent=+handler; so I don't see a problem here) so I'm thinking maybe somebody already did something like this ? Or is there some practical burden of complexity to create such a 'essay style' programming language which I can't see ? I mean what's the worse that can happen if the parser is not that good? - your program will crash so you have to re-word it:)

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• Swing: does DefaultBoundedRangeModel coalesce multiple events?

  - by Jason S

  I have a JProgressBar displaying a BoundedRangeModel which is extremely fine grained and I was concerned that updating it too often would slow down my computer. So I wrote a quick test program (see below) which has a 10Hz timer but each timer tick makes 10,000 calls to microtick() which in turn increments the BoundedRangeModel. Yet it seems to play nicely with a JProgressBar; my CPU is not working hard to run the program. How does JProgressBar or DefaultBoundedRangeModel do this? They seem to be smart about how much work it does to update the JProgressBar, so that as a user I don't have to worry about updating the BoundedRangeModel's value. package com.example.test.gui; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import javax.swing.BoundedRangeModel; import javax.swing.DefaultBoundedRangeModel; import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.JProgressBar; import javax.swing.Timer; public class BoundedRangeModelTest1 extends JFrame { final private BoundedRangeModel brm = new DefaultBoundedRangeModel(); final private Timer timer = new Timer(100, new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent arg0) { tick(); } }); public BoundedRangeModelTest1(String title) { super(title); JPanel p = new JPanel(); p.add(new JProgressBar(this.brm)); getContentPane().add(p); this.brm.setMaximum(1000000); this.brm.setMinimum(0); this.brm.setValue(0); } protected void tick() { for (int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) { microtick(); } } private void microtick() { this.brm.setValue(this.brm.getValue()+1); } public void start() { this.timer.start(); } static public void main(String[] args) { BoundedRangeModelTest1 f = new BoundedRangeModelTest1("BoundedRangeModelTest1"); f.pack(); f.setVisible(true); f.setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE); f.start(); } }

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• Wordpress Search Results in Order

  - by Brad Houston

  One of my clients websites, www.kevinsplants.co.uk is not showing the search results in alphabetical order, how do I go about ordering the results in alphabetical order? We are using the Shopp plugin and I believe its that plugin that is generating the results! Cheers, Brad case "orderby-list": if (isset($Shopp->Category->controls)) return false; if (isset($Shopp->Category->smart)) return false; $menuoptions = Category::sortoptions(); $title = ""; $string = ""; $default = $Shopp->Settings->get('default_product_order'); if (empty($default)) $default = "title"; if (isset($options['default'])) $default = $options['default']; if (isset($options['title'])) $title = $options['title']; if (value_is_true($options['dropdown'])) { if (isset($Shopp->Cart->data->Category['orderby'])) $default = $Shopp->Cart->data->Category['orderby']; $string .= $title; $string .= '<form action="'.esc_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'" method="get" id="shopp-'.$Shopp->Category->slug.'-orderby-menu">'; if (!SHOPP_PERMALINKS) { foreach ($_GET as $key => $value) if ($key != 'shopp_orderby') $string .= '<input type="hidden" name="'.$key.'" value="'.$value.'" />'; } $string .= '<select name="shopp_orderby" class="shopp-orderby-menu">'; $string .= menuoptions($menuoptions,$default,true); $string .= '</select>'; $string .= '</form>'; $string .= '<script type="text/javascript">'; $string .= "jQuery('#shopp-".$Shopp->Category->slug."-orderby-menu select.shopp-orderby-menu').change(function () { this.form.submit(); });"; $string .= '</script>'; } else { if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],"?") !== false) list($link,$query) = explode("\?",$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); $query = $_GET; unset($query['shopp_orderby']); $query = http_build_query($query); if (!empty($query)) $query .= '&'; foreach($menuoptions as $value => $option) { $label = $option; $href = esc_url($link.'?'.$query.'shopp_orderby='.$value); $string .= '<li><a href="'.$href.'">'.$label.'</a></li>'; } } return $string; break;

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• Repeating a object that only occurs couple of times and has different values with htmlagilitypack c#.

  - by dtd

  I have a problem I cant seem to solve here. Lets say I have some html like beneth here that I want to parse. All this html is within one list on the page. And the names repeat themself like in the example I wrote. <li class = "seperator"> a date </li> <li class = "lol"> some text </li> <li class = "lol"> some text </li> <li class = "lol"> some text </li> <li class = "seperator"> a new date </li> <li class = "lol"> some text </li> <li class = "seperator"> a nother new date </li> <li class = "lol"> some text </li> <li class = "lol"> some text </li> I did manage to use htmlagility pack to parse every li object seperate, and almost formating it how I want. My print atm looks something like this: "a date" "some text" "some text" "some text" "some text" "a new date" "some text" "a nother new date " "some text" "some text" "some text" What I want to achive: "a date" "some text" "a date" "some text" "a date" "some text" "a date" "some text" "a new date" "some text" "a nother new date " "some text" "a nother new date " "some text" "a nother new date " "some text" But the problem is that beneath every seperator, the count of every lol object may vary. So one day, the webpage may have one lol object beneth date 1, and the next day it may have 10 lol objects. So I am woundering if there is an smart/easy way to somehow count the number of lol objects in between the seperators. Or if there is another way to figure this out? Within for example htmlagilitypack. And yes, I need the correct date in front of every lol object, not just infront the first one. This would have been a pice of cake if the seperator class would have ended beneath the last lol object, but sadly that is not the case... I dont think that I need to paste my code here, but basicly what I do is to parse the page, extract the seperators and lol objects and add them to a list, where I split them up to seperator and lol objects. Then I print it out to a file and since the seperator only occure 3 times(in the example) I will only get out 3 seperate dates.

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• Is it possible to create a C++ factory system that can create an instance of any "registered" object

  - by chrensli

  Hello, I've spent my entire day researching this topic, so it is with some scattered knowledge on the topic that i come to you with this inquiry. Please allow me to describe what I am attempting to accomplish, and maybe you can either suggest a solution to the immediate question, or another way to tackle the problem entirely. I am trying to mimic something related to how XAML files work in WPF, where you are essentially instantiating an object tree from an XML definition. If this is incorrect, please inform. This issue is otherwise unrelated to WPF, C#, or anything managed - I solely mention it because it is a similar concept.. So, I've created an XML parser class already, and generated a node tree based on ObjectNode objects. ObjectNode objects hold a string value called type, and they have an std::vector of child ObjectNode objects. The next step is to instantiate a tree of objects based on the data in the ObjectNode tree. This intermediate ObjectNode tree is needed because the same ObjectNode tree might be instantiated multiple times or delayed as needed. The tree of objects that is being created is such that the nodes in the tree are descendants of a common base class, which for now we can refer to as MyBase. Leaf nodes can be of any type, not necessarily derived from MyBase. To make this more challenging, I will not know what types of MyBase derived objects might be involved, so I need to allow for new types to be registered with the factory. I am aware of boost's factory. Their docs have an interesting little design paragraph on this page: o We may want a factory that takes some arguments that are forwarded to the constructor, o we will probably want to use smart pointers, o we may want several member functions to create different kinds of objects, o we might not necessarily need a polymorphic base class for the objects, o as we will see, we do not need a factory base class at all, o we might want to just call the constructor - without #new# to create an object on the stack, and o finally we might want to use customized memory management. I might not be understanding this all correctly, but that seems to state that what I'm trying to do can be accomplished with boost's factory. But all the examples I've located, seem to describe factories where all objects are derived from a base type. Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time!

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• Can I Have Polymorphic Containers With Value Semantics in C++11?

  - by John Dibling

  This is a sequel to a related post which asked the eternal question: Can I have polymorphic containers with value semantics in C++? The question was asked slightly incorrectly. It should have been more like: Can I have STL containers of a base type stored by-value in which the elements exhibit polymorphic behavior? If you are asking the question in terms of C++, the answer is "no." At some point, you will slice objects stored by-value. Now I ask the question again, but strictly in terms of C++11. With the changes to the language and the standard libraries, is it now possible to store polymorphic objects by value in an STL container? I'm well aware of the possibility of storing a smart pointer to the base class in the container -- this is not what I'm looking for, as I'm trying to construct objects on the stack without using new. Consider if you will (from the linked post) as basic C++ example: #include <iostream> using namespace std; class Parent { public: Parent() : parent_mem(1) {} virtual void write() { cout << "Parent: " << parent_mem << endl; } int parent_mem; }; class Child : public Parent { public: Child() : child_mem(2) { parent_mem = 2; } void write() { cout << "Child: " << parent_mem << ", " << child_mem << endl; } int child_mem; }; int main(int, char**) { // I can have a polymorphic container with pointer semantics vector<Parent*> pointerVec; pointerVec.push_back(new Parent()); pointerVec.push_back(new Child()); pointerVec[0]->write(); pointerVec[1]->write(); // Output: // // Parent: 1 // Child: 2, 2 // But I can't do it with value semantics vector<Parent> valueVec; valueVec.push_back(Parent()); valueVec.push_back(Child()); // gets turned into a Parent object :( valueVec[0].write(); valueVec[1].write(); // Output: // // Parent: 1 // Parent: 2 }

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• How to use BCDEdit to dual boot Windows installations?

  - by Ian Boyd

  What are the bcdedit commands necessary to setup dual boot between different installations of Windows?5 Background i recently installed Windows 8 onto a separate hard drive1. Now that Windows 8 in installed i want to dual-boot back to Windows 7. i have my two2 hard drives: So you can see that i have my two disks, with the partitions containing Windows: Windows 7: \\PhysicalDisk0 (partition 03) Windows 8: \\PhysicalDisk2 (partition 1) What i'm trying to figure out how is how to use bcdedit to instruct the thing that boots Windows that there is another Windows installation out there. Running bcdedit now, it shows current configuration: C:\WINDOWS\system32>bcdedit Windows Boot Manager -------------------- identifier {bootmgr} device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2 description Windows Boot Manager locale en-US inherit {globalsettings} integrityservices Enable default {current} resumeobject {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} displayorder {current} toolsdisplayorder {memdiag} timeout 30 Windows Boot Loader ------------------- identifier {current} device partition=C: path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe description Windows 8 locale en-US inherit {bootloadersettings} recoverysequence {ce153eb9-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} integrityservices Enable recoveryenabled Yes allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075 osdevice partition=C: systemroot \WINDOWS resumeobject {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} nx OptIn bootmenupolicy Standard hypervisorlaunchtype Auto i cannot find any documentation on the difference between Windows Boot Manager and Windows Boot Loader. Documentation There is some documentation on Bcdedit: Technet: Command Line Reference - Bcdedit Technet: Windows Automated Installation Kit - BCDEdit Command Line Options Whitepaper - BCDEdit Commands for Boot Environment (Word Document) But they don't explain how edit the binary boot configuration data If i had to guess, i would think that a Windows Boot Manager instructs the BIOS what program it should run. That program would give the user a set of boot choices. That leaves Windows Boot Loader do be a particular boot choice, that represents a particular installation of Windows. If that is the case i would need to create a new Windows Boot Loader entry. This means i might want to use the /create parameter: /create Creates a new boot entry: bcdedit [/store filename] /create [id] /d description [/application apptype | /inherit [apptype] | /inherit DEVICE | /device] So i assume a syntax of: >bcdedit /create /d "The old Windows 7" /application osloader Where application can be one of the following types: Apptype Description BOOTSECTOR The boot sector application OSLOADER The Windows boot loader RESUME A resume application Unfortunately, the only documentation about osloader is "The Windows boot loader". i don't see how that can differentiate between Windows 8 on one hard drive, and Windows 7 on another. The other possible parameter when /create a boot loader is >bcdedit /create /D "Windows Vista" /device "The Quick Brown Fox" Unfortunately the documentation is missing for /device: /device Optional. If id is not set to a well-known identifier, the option that is used to specify the new boot entry as an additional device options entry. Since i did not set id to a well-known identifier, i must set /device to "the option that is used to specify the new boot entry as an additional device options entry". i know all those words; they're all English. But i have on idea what it is saying; those words in that order seem nonsensical. So i'm somewhat stymied. i don't want to be like Dan Stolts from Microsoft: I found no content that was particularly helpful when I hosed my machine by playing with BCDEdit. This post would have been ok if there was much more detail especially on the /set command OSDevice, etc. So once I got my machine fixed, I documented the solution and the information is here.... i mean, if a Microsoft guy can't even figure out how to use BCDEdit to edit his BCD, then what chance to i have? Bonus Reading BCDEdit Command-Line Options Bcdedit Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 System Will NOT Boot After Making Changes To Boot Manager Using BCDEdit Visual BCD Editor4 Windows 7 and Windows 8 RTM Dual Boot Setup Footnotes 1 Since the Windows 8 installer would have damaged my Windows 7 install, i decided to unplug my "main" hard drive during the install. Which is a long-winded explanation of why the Windows 8 installer didn't detect the existing Windows 7 install. Normally the installer would have automatically created the required entries for dual-boot. Not that the reason i'm asking the question is important. 2 Really there's three drives, but the third is just bulk storage. The existence of a 3rd hard drive is irrelevant to the question. i only mention it in case someone wants to know why the screenshot has 3 hard drives when i only mention two. 3 i arbitrarily started numbering partitions at "zero"; not to imply that partitions are numbered starting at zero. i only mention partitions because i don't see how any boot-loader could do its job without knowing which partition, and which folder, an installation of Windows is located in. 4 i'm asking about BCDEdit. i tried Visual BCD Editor. It seems to be a visual BCD editor. That is to say that it's a GUI, but still uses the same terminology as BCDEdit, and requires the same knowledge that BCD doesn't document. 5 For simplicity sake we'll assume that all installation of Windows i want to dual-boot between are Windows Vista or later, making them all compatible with the BCDEdit and the binary boot loader. The alternative would require delving into the intricacies of the old ntloader. Nor am i asking about dual booting to Linux; or how to boot to a Virtual Hard Drive (vhd) image. Just modern versions of Windows on existing hard drives in the same machine. Note: You can ignore everything after the word Background. It's all pointless exposition to satisfy some people's need for "research effort" before they'll consider being helpful. Some people have even been known to summarily close questions unless there is research effort. Some people have been know to close questions if there is too much research effort. Some people close questions when i put the note saying that they can ignore everything after the Background out of spite. Some people are just grumpy.

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• How do I install PyYAML into local install of Python?

  - by Daryl Spitzer

  I've installed Python 2.6.4 into (a subdirectory in) my home directory on a Linux machine with Python 2.3.4 pre-installed, because I need to run some code that I've decided would require too much work to make it run on 2.3.4. (I'm not on the sudoers list for that machine.) I was hoping I could run ~/Python-2.6.4/python setup.py install (from the PyYAML directory in my home directory, where I untarred the PyYAML sources) and it would be smart enough to install it into my local Python 2.6.4 install. But it's not. (See the P.S.) Is it possible to install PyYAML into my local Python install, so that "import yaml" will work when I invoke that Python? If so, how do I do that? P.S. Here's the output when I ran ~/Python-2.6.4/python setup.py install: running install running build running build_py creating build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6 creating build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/composer.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/nodes.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/dumper.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/resolver.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/events.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/emitter.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/error.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/loader.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/cyaml.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/scanner.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/__init__.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/serializer.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/reader.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/representer.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/constructor.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/tokens.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/parser.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml running build_ext creating build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6 checking if libyaml is compilable gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -I/home/dspitzer/Python-2.6.4/Include -I/home/dspitzer/Python-2.6.4 -c build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c -o build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.o build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:2:18: yaml.h: No such file or directory build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c: In function `main': build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: `yaml_parser_t' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: for each function it appears in.) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: syntax error before "parser" build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:6: error: `yaml_emitter_t' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_parser_initialize' build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: error: `parser' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:9: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_parser_delete' build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_emitter_initialize' build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: error: `emitter' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:12: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_emitter_delete' libyaml is not found or a compiler error: forcing --without-libyaml (if libyaml is installed correctly, you may need to specify the option --include-dirs or uncomment and modify the parameter include_dirs in setup.cfg) running install_lib creating /usr/local/lib/python2.6 error: could not create '/usr/local/lib/python2.6': Permission denied

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• Is the Cloud ready for an Enterprise Java web application? Seeking a JEE hosting advice.

  - by Jakub Holý

  Greetings to all the smart people around here! I'd like to ask whether it is feasible or a good idea at all to deploy a Java enterprise web application to a Cloud such as Amazon EC2. More exactly, I'm looking for infrastructure options for an application that shall handle few hundred users with long but neither CPU nor memory intensive sessions. I'm considering dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPSs) and EC2. I've noticed that there is a project called JBoss Cloud so people are working on enabling such a deployment, on the other hand it doesn't seem to be mature yet and I'm not sure that the cloud is ready for this kind of applications, which differs from the typical cloud-based applications like Twitter. Would you recommend to deploy it to the cloud? What are the pros and cons? The application is a Java EE 5 web application whose main function is to enable users to compose their own customized Product by combining the available Parts. It uses stateless and stateful session beans and JPA for persistence of entities to a RDBMS and fetches information about Parts from the company's inventory system via a web service. Aside of external users it's used also by few internal ones, who are authenticated against the company's LDAP. The application should handle around 300-400 concurrent users building their product and should be reasonably scalable and available though these qualities are only of a medium importance at this stage. I've proposed an architecture consisting of a firewall (FW) and load balancer supporting sticky sessions and https (in the Cloud this would be replaced with EC2's Elastic Load Balancing service and FW on the app. servers, in a physical architecture the load-balancer would be a HW), then two physical clustered application servers combined with web servers (so that if one fails, a user doesn't loose his/her long built product) and finally a database server. The DB server would need a slave backup instance that can replace the master instance if it fails. This should provide reasonable availability and fault tolerance and provide good scalability as long as a single RDBMS can keep with the load, which should be OK for quite a while because most of the operations are done in the memory using a stateful bean and only occasionally stored or retrieved from the DB and the amount of data is low too. A problematic part could be the dependency on the remote inventory system webservice but with good caching of its outputs in the application it should be OK too. Unfortunately I've only vague idea of the system resources (memory size, number and speed of CPUs/cores) that such an "average Java EE application" for few hundred users needs. My rough and mostly unfounded estimate based on actual Amazon offerings is that 1.7GB and a single, 2-core "modern CPU" with speed around 2.5GHz (the High-CPU Medium Instance) should be sufficient for any of the two application servers (since we can handle higher load by provisioning more of them). Alternatively I would consider using the Large instance (64b, 7.5GB RAM, 2 cores at 1GHz) So my question is whether such a deployment to the cloud is technically and financially feasible or whether dedicated/VPS servers would be a better option and whether there are some real-world experiences with something similar. Thank you very much! /Jakub Holy PS: I've found the JBoss EAP in a Cloud Case Study that shows that it is possible to deploy a real-world Java EE application to the EC2 cloud but unfortunately there're no details regarding topology, instance types, or anything :-(

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• Performance required to improve Windows Experience Index?

  - by Ian Boyd

  Is there a guide on the metrics required to obtain a certain Windows Experience Index? A Microsoft guy said in January 2009: On the matter of transparency, it is indeed our plan to disclose in great detail how the scores are calculated, what the tests attempt to measure, why, and how they map to realistic scenarios and usage patterns. Has that amount of transparency happened? Is there a technet article somewhere? If my score was limited by my Memory subscore of 5.9. A nieve person would suggest: Buy a faster RAM Which is wrong of course. From the Windows help: If your computer has a 64-bit central processing unit (CPU) and 4 gigabytes (GB) or less random access memory (RAM), then the Memory (RAM) subscore for your computer will have a maximum of 5.9. You can buy the fastest, overclocked, liquid-cooled, DDR5 RAM on the planet; you'll still have a maximum Memory subscore of 5.9. So in general the knee-jerk advice "buy better stuff" is not helpful. What i am looking for is attributes required to achieve a certain score, or move beyond a current limitation. The information i've been able to compile so far, chiefly from 3 Windows blog entries, and an article: Memory subscore Score Conditions ======= ================================ 1.0 < 256 MB 2.0 < 500 MB 2.9 <= 512 MB 3.5 < 704 MB 3.9 < 944 MB 4.5 <= 1.5 GB 5.9 < 4.0GB-64MB on a 64-bit OS Windows Vista highest score 7.9 Windows 7 highest score Graphics Subscore Score Conditions ======= ====================== 1.0 doesn't support DX9 1.9 doesn't support WDDM 4.9 does not support Pixel Shader 3.0 5.9 doesn't support DX10 or WDDM1.1 Windows Vista highest score 7.9 Windows 7 highest score Gaming graphics subscore Score Result ======= ============================= 1.0 doesn't support D3D 2.0 supports D3D9, DX9 and WDDM 5.9 doesn't support DX10 or WDDM1.1 Windows Vista highest score 6.0-6.9 good framerates (e.g. 40-50fps) at normal resoltuions (e.g. 1280x1024) 7.0-7.9 even higher framerates at even higher resolutions 7.9 Windows 7 highest score Processor subscore Score Conditions ======= ========================================================================== 5.9 Windows Vista highest score 6.0-6.9 many quad core processors will be able to score in the high 6 low 7 ranges 7.0+ many quad core processors will be able to score in the high 6 low 7 ranges 7.9 8-core systems will be able to approach 8.9 Windows 7 highest score Primary hard disk subscore (note) Score Conditions ======= ======================================== 1.9 Limit for pathological drives that stop responding when pending writes 2.0 Limit for pathological drives that stop responding when pending writes 2.9 Limit for pathological drives that stop responding when pending writes 3.0 Limit for pathological drives that stop responding when pending writes 5.9 highest you're likely to see without SSD Windows Vista highest score 7.9 Windows 7 highest score Bonus Chatter You can find your WEI detailed test results in: C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore e.g. 2011-11-06 01.00.19.482 Disk.Assessment (Recent).WinSAT.xml <WinSAT> <WinSPR> <DiskScore>5.9</DiskScore> </WinSPR> <Metrics> <DiskMetrics> <AvgThroughput units="MB/s" score="6.4" ioSize="65536" kind="Sequential Read">89.95188</AvgThroughput> <AvgThroughput units="MB/s" score="4.0" ioSize="16384" kind="Random Read">1.58000</AvgThroughput> <Responsiveness Reason="UnableToAssess" Kind="Cap">TRUE</Responsiveness> </DiskMetrics> </Metrics> </WinSAT> Pre-emptive snarky comment: "WEI is useless, it has no relation to reality" Fine, how do i increase my hard-drive's random I/O throughput? Update - Amount of memory limits rating Some people don't believe Microsoft's statement that having less than 4GB of RAM on a 64-bit edition of Windows doesn't limit the rating to 5.9: And from xxx.Formal.Assessment (Recent).WinSAT.xml: <WinSPR> <LimitsApplied> <MemoryScore> <LimitApplied Friendly="Physical memory available to the OS is less than 4.0GB-64MB on a 64-bit OS : limit mem score to 5.9" Relation="LT">4227858432</LimitApplied> </MemoryScore> </LimitsApplied> </WinSPR> References Windows Vista Team Blog: Windows Experience Index: An In-Depth Look Understand and improve your computer's performance in Windows Vista Engineering Windows 7 Blog: Engineering the Windows 7 “Windows Experience Index”

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• Remote host: can tracert, can telnet, can*not* browse: what gives?

  - by MacThePenguin

  One of my customers of the company I work for has made a change to their Internet connection, and now we can't connect to them any more from our LAN. To help me troubleshoot this issue, the network guy on the customer's site has configured their firewall so that a HTTPS connection to their public IP address is open to any IP. I should put https://<customer's IP> in my browser and get a web page. Well, it works from any network I've tried (even from my smartphone), just not from my company's LAN. I thought it may be an issue with our firewall (though I checked its rules and it allows outbound TCP port 443 to anywhere), so I just connected a PC directly to the network connection of our provider, bypassing out firewall completely, and still it didn't work (everything else worked). So I asked for help to our Internet provider's customer service, and they asked me to do a tracert to our customer's IP. The tracert is successful, as the final hop shown in the output is the host I want to reach. So they said there's no problem. :( I also tried telnet <customer's IP> 443 and that works as well: I get a blank page with the cursor blinking (I've tried using another random port and that gives me an error message, as it should). Still, from any browser of any PC in my LAN I can't open that URL. I tried checking the network traffic with Wireshark: I see the packages going through and answers coming back, thought the packets I see passing are far less than they are if I successfully connect to another HTTPS website. See the attached screenshot: I had to blur the IPs, anyway the longer string is my PC's local IP address, the shorter one is the customer's public IP. I don't know what else to try. This is the only IP doing this... Any idea what could I try to find a solution to this issue? Thanks, let me know if you need further details. Edit: when I say "it doesn't work" I mean: the page doesn't open, the browser keeps loading for a long time and eventually shows an error saying that the page cannot be opened. I'm not in my office now so I can't paste the exact message, but it's the usual message you get when the browser reaches its timeout. When I say "it works", I mean the browser loads and shows a webpage (it's the logon page for the customers' firewall admin interface: so there's the firewall brand's logo and there are fields to enter a user id and a password). Update 13/09/2012: tried again to connect to the customer's network through our Internet connection without a firewall. This is what I did: Run a Kubuntu 12.04 live distro on a spare laptop; Updated all the packages I could and installed WireShark; Attached it to my LAN and verified that I couldn't open https://<customer's IP>. Verified that the Wireshark trace for this attempt was the same as the one I've already posted; Verified that I could connect to another customer's host using rdesktop (it worked); Tried to rdesktop to <customer's IP>, here's the output: kubuntu@kubuntu:/etc$ rdesktop <customer's IP> Autoselected keyboard map en-us ERROR: recv: Connection reset by peer Disconnected the laptop from the LAN; Disconnected the firewall from the Extranet connection, connected the laptop instead. Set its network configuration so that I could access the Internet; Verified that I could connect to other websites in http and https and in RDP to other customers' hosts - it all worked as expected; Verified that I could still traceroute to <customer's IP>: I could; Verified that I still couldn't open https://<customer's IP> (same exact result as before); Checked the WireShark trace for this attempt and noticed a different behaviour: I could see packets going out to the customer's IP, but no replies at all; Tried to run rdesktop again, with a slightly different result: kubuntu@kubuntu:/etc/network$ rdesktop <customer's IP> Autoselected keyboard map en-us ERROR: <customer's IP>: unable to connect Finally gave up, put everything back as it was before, turned off the laptop and lost the WireShark traces I had saved. :( I still remember them very well though. :) Can you get anything out of it? Thank you very much. Update 12/09/2012 n.2: I followed the suggestion by MadHatter in the comments. From inside the firewall, this is what I get: user@ubuntu-mantis:~$ openssl s_client -connect <customer's IP>:443 CONNECTED(00000003) If I now type GET / the output pauses for several seconds and then I get: write:errno=104 I'm going to try the same, but bypassing the firewall, as soon as I can. Thanks. Update 12/09/2012 n.3: So, I think ISA Server is altering the results of my tests... I tried installing Wireshark directly on the firewall and monitoring the packets on the Extranet network card. When the destination is the customer's IP, whatever service I try to connect to (HTTPS, RDP or SAProuter), I can only see outbound packets and no response packets whatsoever from their side. It looks like ISA Server is "faking" the remote server's replies, that's why I get a connection using telnet or the openSSL client. This is the wireshark trace from inside our LAN: But this is the trace on the Extranet network card: This makes a bit more sense... I'll send this info to the customer's tech and see if he can make anything out of it. Thanks to all that took the time to read my question and post suggestions. I'll update this post again.

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• Windows 7 sometimes boots in VGA mode

  - by TuxRug

  I have an Asus G50VT-x5 laptop with nVidia GeForce9800M-GS graphics. Normally, Windows boots normally, but about 20% of the time (rough estimate), it will boot with the fallback VGA driver, maxing out at 800x600 with no Aero. I've checked the system logs and there is nothing indicating an error loading the nVidia driver. It even specifies in the logs that the Nvidia Display Driver service started successfully, even though it has booted in safe graphics mode. This has been happening for a while, but it's happening a little more often now than it was before. Since the first time my system exhibited this behavior, I have updated my graphics driver a handful of times. I used System Information for Windows to check for problems there, but the only thing that stood out was the following: Core Temperature 4486449 °C (8075639 °F) Shaders Temperature 1171513530 °C (2108724330 °F) I know this reading is incorrect, because my laptop is nowhere near the surface of the sun and my desk has not burst into flames. When it's opererating normally, I get a sane reading like [Core Temperature 58 °C (136 °F)] with no Shaders Temperature listed. All I have to do to resolve the issue is reboot. I have seen no stability issues with the graphics or anything else. A long time ago, I had an issue with this computer where my framerate would suddenly drop during a 3D game from 40fps to <1fps, but after looking at the temperature readout immediately after quitting a game, I removed the bottom panel and blew the dust out of the vent and heatsink. Since then I have no drops in framerate under any situation. I have uploaded a zip containing the SIW reports for when the problem is occurring and when the computer is operating normally. I don't have a paid account so it can only be downloaded 10 times, so please only download the reports if you think you can use them. If you try to download the reports and they are no longer available, please comment and I will re-upload them. If you want to look at the files, they are on Rapidshare. EDIT It happened again, and I looked a little deeper into the System logs. When this happens, there are a lot of errors about other device drivers unable to start. All of these errors are for PnP drivers. Also, my USB keyboard and mouse take a few moments before they actually start working, although this happens sometimes the first normal boot as well. I am quite sure this is related, so I am adding the pnp tag. Also, CHKDSK will not run on boot. Even if a check is scheduled or a volume is manually set as dirty, CHKDSK will be skipped entirely, not even leaving an entry in the System logs. I tried running CHKNTFS /D, which did not work. I then manually changed my HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager BootExecute value to the default listed on Microsoft's website. That did not work either. I ended up booting to repair mode and running CHKDSK there, which found a number of minor inconsistencies on my system drive, but none on my data drive. I have no idea if this is related. Some more information for those who don't download my SIW report file: Antivirus and Firewall are ESET Smart Security I have three different virutalization programs installed: VMware Player, Windows Virtual PC, and VirtualBox. The network adapters for these show up in the log of failed device starts. EDIT 2 I tried running sfc /scannow, which reported that it found corrupted files that could not be fixed. The CBS log is extremely cryptic. I tried booting to my install disk, launching repair mode, and doing an offline sfc from there, which produced the same result.

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