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• Google Analytics on Android

  - by pjv

  There is a specific and official analytics SDK for native Android apps (note that I'm not talking about webpages in apps on a phone). This library basically sends pages and events to Google Analytics and you can view your analytics in exactly the same dashboard as for websites. Since my background is apps rather than websites, and since a lot of the Google Analytics terminology seems particularly inapplicable to a native app, I need some pointers. Please discuss my remarks, provide some clarification where you think I'm off-track, and above all share good experiences! 1. Page Views Pages mostly can match different Activities (and Dialogs) being displayed. Activities can be visible behind non-full-screen Activities however, though only the top-level Activity can be interacted. This sort-off clashes with a "(page) view". You'd also want at least one page view for each visit and therefore put one page view tracker in the Application class. However this does not constitute a window or sorts. Usually an Activity will open at the same time, so the time spent on that page will have been 0. This will influence your "time spent" statistics. How are these counted anyway? Moreover, there is a loose coupling between the Activities, by means of Intents. A user can, much like on any website, step in at any Activity, although usually this then concerns resuming the application where he left off. This makes that the hierarchy of Activities usually is very flat. And since there are no url's involved. What meaning would using slashes in page titles have, such as "/Home"? All pages would appear on an equal level in the reports, so no content drilldown. Non-unique page views seem to be counted as some kind of indicator of successfulness: how often does the visitor revisit the page. When the user rotates the screen however usually an Activity resumes again, thus making it a new page view. This happens a lot. Maybe a well-thought-through placement of the call might solve this, or placing several, I'm not sure. How to deal with Page Views? 2. Events I'd say there are two sorts: A user event Something that happened, usually as an indirect consequence of the above. The latter particularly is giving me headaches. First of all, many events aren't written in code any more, but pieced logically together by means of Intents. This means that there is no place to put the analytics call. You'd either have to give up this advantage and start doing it the old-fashioned way in favor of good analytics, or, just be missing some events. Secondly, as a developer you're not so much interested in when a user clicks a button, but if the action that should have been performed really was performed and what the result was. There seems to be no clear way to get resulting data into Google Analytics (what's up with the integers? I want to put in Strings!). The same that applies to the flat pages hierarchy, also goes for the event categories. You could do "vertical" categories (topically, that is), but some code is shared "horizontally" and the tracking will be equally shared. Just as with the Intents mechanism, inheritance makes it hard for you to put the tracking in the right places at all times. And I can't really imagine "horizontal" categories. Unless you start making really small categories, such as all the items form the same menu in one category, I have a hard time grasping the concept. Finally, how do you deal with cancelling? Usually you both have an explicit cancel mechanism by ways of a button, as well as the implicit cancel when the "back"-button is pressed to leave the activity and there were no changes. The latter also applies to "saves", when the back button is pressed and there ARE changes. How are you consequently going to catch all these if not by doing all the "back"-button work yourself? How to deal with events? 3. Goals For goal types I have choice of: URL Destination, Time on Site, and Pages/Visit. Most apps don't have a funnel that leads the user to some "registration done" or "order placed" page. Apps have either already been bought (in which case you want to stimulate the user to love your app, so that he might bring on new buyers) or are paid for by in-app ads. So URL Destination is not a very important goal. Time on Site also seems troublesome. First, I have some doubt on how this would be measured. Second, I don't necessarily want my user to spend a lot of time in my already paid app, just be active and content. Equivalently, why not mention how frequent a user uses your app? Regarding Pages/Visit I already mentioned how screen orientation changes blow up the page view numbers. In an app I'd be most interested in events/visit to measure the user's involvement/activity. If he's intensively using the app then he must be loving it right? Furthermore, I also have some small funnels (that do not lead to conversion though) that I want to see streamlined. In my mind those funnels would end in events rather than page views but that seems not to be possible. I could also measure clickthroughs on in-app ads, but then I'd need to track those as Page Views rather than Events, in view of "URL Destination". What are smart goals for apps and how can you fit them on top of Analytics? 4. Optimisation Is there a smart way to manually do what "Website Optimiser" does for websites? Most importantly, how would I track different landing page designs? 5. Traffic Sources Referrals deal with installation time referrals, if you're smart enough to get them included. But perhaps I'd also want to get some data which third-party app sends users to my app to perform some actions (this app interoperability is possible via Intents). Many of the terminologies related to "Traffic Sources" seem totally meaningless and there is no possibility of connecting in AdSense. What are smart uses of this data? 6. Visitors Of the "Browser capabilities", "Network Properties" and "Mobile" tabs, many things are pointless as they have no influence on / relation with my mostly offline app that won't use flash anyway. Only if you drill down far enough, can you get to OS versions, which do matter a lot. I even forgot where you could check what exact Android devices visited. What are smart uses of this data? How can you make the relevant info more prominent? 7. Other No in-page analytics. I have to register my app as a web-url (What!?)?

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• Advice for a distracted, unhappy, recently graduated programmer? [closed]

  - by Re-Invent

  I graduated 4 months ago. I had offers from a few good places to work at. At the same time I wanted to stick to building a small software business of my own, still have some ideas with good potential, some half done projects frozen in my github. But due to social pressures, I chose a job, the pay is great, but I am half-passionate about it. A small team of smart folks building useful product, working out contracts across the world. I've started finding it extremely boring. Boring to the extent that I skip 2-3 days a week together not doing work. Neither do I spend that time progressing any of my own projects. Yes, I feel stupid at the way I'm wasting time, but I don't understand exactly why is it happening. It's as if all the excitement has been drained. What can I do about it? Long version: School - I was in third standard. Only students, 6th grade had access to computer labs. I once peeked into the lab from the little door opening. No hard-disks, MS DOS on 5 1/2 inch floppies. I asked a senior student to play some sound in BASIC. He used PLAY to compose a tune. Boy! I was so excited, I was jumping from within. Back home, asked my brother to teach me some programming. We bought a book "MODERN All About GW-BASIC for Schools & Colleges". The book had everything, right from printing, to taking input, file i/o, game programming, machine level support, etc. I was in 6th standard, wrote my first game - a wheel of fortune, rotated the wheel by manipulating 16 color palette's definition. Got internet soon, got hooked to QuickBasic programming community. Made some more games "007 in Danger", "Car Crush 2" for submission to allbasiccode archives. I was extremely excited about all this. My interests now swayed into "hacking" (computer security). Taught myself some perl, found it annoying, learnt PHP and a bit of SQL. Also taught myself Visual Basic one of the winters and wrote a pacman clone with Direct X. By the time I was in 10th standard, I created some evil tools using visual basic, php and mysql and eventually landed myself into an unpaid side-job at a government facility, building evil tools for them. It was a dream come true for crackers of that time. And so was I, still very excited. Things changed soon, last two years of school were not so great as I was balancing preps for college, work at govt. and studies for school at same time. College - College was opposite of all I had wished it to be. I imagined it to be a place where I'd spend my 4 years building something awesome. It was rather an epitome of rote learning, attendance, rules, busy schedules, ban on personal laptops, hardly any hackers surrounding you and shit like that. We had to take permissions to even introduce some cultural/creative activities in our annual schedule. The labs won't be open on weekends because the lab employees had to have their leaves. Yes, a horrible place for someone like me. I still managed to pull out a project with a friend over 2 months. Showed it to people high in the academia hierarchy. They were immensely impressed, we proposed to allow personal computers for students. They made up half-assed reasons and didn't agree. We felt frustrated. And so on, I still managed to teach myself new languages, do new projects of my own, do an intern at the same govt. facility, start a small business for sometime, give a talk at a conference I'm passionate about, win game-dev and hacking contest at most respected colleges, solve good deal of programming contest problems, etc. At the same time I was not content with all these restrictions, great emphasis on rote learning, and sheer wastage of time due to college. I never felt I was overdoing, but now I feel I burnt myself out. During my last days at college, I did an intern at a bigco. While I spent my time building prototypes for certain LBS, the other interns around me, even a good friend, was just skipping time. I thought maybe, in a few weeks he would put in some serious efforts at work assigned to him, but all he did was to find creative ways to skip work, hide his face from manager, engage people in talks if they try to question his progress, etc. I tried a few time to get him on track, but it seems all he wanted was to "not to work hard at all and still reap the fruits". I don't know how others take such people, but I find their vicinity very very poisonous to one's own motivation and productivity. Over that, the place where I come from, HRs don't give much value to what have you done past 4 years. So towards the end of out intern, we all were offered work at the bigco, but the slacker, even after not writing more than 200 lines of code was made a much better offer. I felt enraged instantly - "Is this how the corp world treats someone who does fruitful, if not extra-ordinary work form them for past 6 months?". Yes, I did try to negotiate and debate. The bigcos seem blind due to departmentalization of responsibilities and many layers of management. I decided not to be in touch with any characters of that depressing play. Probably the busy time I had at college, ignoring friends, ignoring fun and squeezing every bit of free time for myself is also responsible. Probably this is what has drained all my willingness to work for anyone. I find my day job boring, at the same time I with to maintain it for financial reasons. I feel a bit burnt out, unsatisfied and at the same time an urge to quit working for someone else and start finishing my frozen side-projects (which may be profitable). Though I haven't got much to support myself with food, office, internet bills, etc in savings. I still have my day job, but I don't find it very interesting, even though the pay is higher than the slacker, I don't find money to be a great motivator here. I keep comparing myself to my past version. I wonder how to get rid of this and reboot myself back to the way I was in school days - excited about it, tinkering, building, learning new things daily, and NOT BORED?

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• Projected Results

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Monica Mehta Yasser Mahmud has seen a revolution in project management over the past decade. During that time, the former Primavera product strategist (who joined Oracle when his company was acquired in 2008) has not only observed a transformation in the way IT systems support corporate projects but the role project portfolio management (PPM) plays in the enterprise. “15 years ago project management was the domain of project management office (PMO),” Mahmud recalls of earlier days. “But over the course of the past decade, we've seen it transform into a mission critical enterprise discipline, that has made Primavera indispensable in the board room. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, or a C-level executive you have direct and complete visibility into what’s kind of going on in the organization—at a level of detail that you're going to consume that information.” Now serving as Oracle’s vice president of product strategy and industry marketing, Mahmud shares his thoughts on how Oracle’s Primavera solutions have evolved and how best-in-class project portfolio management systems can help businesses stay competitive. Profit: What do you feel are the market dynamics that are changing project management today? Mahmud: First, the data explosion. We're generating data at twice the rate at which we can actually store it. The same concept applies for project-intensive organizations. A lot of data is gathered, but what are we really doing with it? Are we turning data into insight? Are we using that insight and turning it into foresight with analytics tools? This is a key driver that will separate the very good companies—the very competitive companies—from those that are not as competitive. Another trend is centered on the explosion of mobile computing. By the year 2013, an estimated 35 percent of the world’s workforce is going to be mobile. That’s one billion people. So the question is not if you're going to go mobile, it’s how fast you are going to go mobile. What kind of impact does that have on how the workforce participates in projects? What worked ten to fifteen years ago is not going to work today. It requires a real rethink around the interfaces and how data is actually presented. Profit: What is the role of project management in this new landscape? Mahmud: We recently conducted a PPM study with the Economist Intelligence Unit centered to determine how important project management is considered within organizations. Our target was primarily CFOs, CIOs, and senior managers and we discovered that while 95 percent of participants believed it critical to their business, only six percent were confident that projects were delivered on time and on budget. That’s a huge gap. Most organizations are looking for efficiency, especially in these volatile financial times. But senior management can’t keep track of every project in a large organization. As a result, executives are attempting to inventory the work being conducted under their watch. What is often needed is a very high-level assessment conducted at the board level to say, “Here are the 50 initiatives that we have underway. How do they line up with our strategic drivers?” This line of questioning can provide early warning that work and strategy are out of alignment; finding the gap between what the business needs to do and the actual performance scorecard. That’s low-hanging fruit for any executive looking to increase efficiency and save money. But it can only be obtained through proper assessment of existing projects—and you need a project system of record to get that done. Over the next decade or so, project management is going to transform into holistic work management. Business leaders will want make sure key projects align with corporate strategy, but also the ability to drill down into daily activity and smaller projects to make sure they line up as well. Keeping employees from working on tasks—even for a few hours—that don’t line up with corporate goals will, in many ways, become a competitive differentiator. Profit: How do all of these market challenges and shifting trends impact Oracle’s Primavera solutions and meeting customers’ needs? Mahmud: For Primavera, it’s a transformation from being a project management application to a PPM system in the enterprise. Also making that system a mission-critical application by connecting to other key applications within the ecosystem, such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, and CRM systems. Analytics have also become a huge component. Business analytics have made Oracle’s Primavera applications pertinent in the boardroom. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, a CXO, CIO, or CEO, you have direct visibility into what’s going on in the organization at a level that you're able to consume that information. In addition, all of this information pairs up really well with your financials and other data. Certainly, when you're an Oracle shop, you have that visibility that you didn’t have before from a project execution perspective. Profit: What new strategies and tools are being implemented to create a more efficient workplace for users? Mahmud: We believe very strongly that just because you call something an enterprise project portfolio management system doesn’t make it so—you have to get people to want to participate in the system. This can’t be mandated down from the top. It simply doesn’t work that way. A truly adoptable solution is one that makes it super easy for all types users to participate, by providing them interfaces where they live. Keeping that in mind, a major area of development has been alternative user interfaces. This is increasingly resulting in the creation of lighter weight, targeted interfaces such as iOS applications, and smartphones interfaces such as for iPhone and Android platform. Profit: How does this translate into the development of Oracle’s Primavera solutions? Mahmud: Let me give you a few examples. We recently announced the launch of our Primavera P6 Team Member application, which is a native iOS application for the iPhone. This interface makes it easier for team members to do their jobs quickly and effectively. Similarly, we introduced the Primavera analytics application, which can be consumed via mobile devices, and when married with Oracle Spatial capabilities, users can get a geographical view of what’s going on and which projects are occurring in various locations around the world. Lastly, we introduced advanced email integration that allows project team members to status work via E-mail. This functionality leverages the fact that users are in E-mail system throughout the day and allows them to status their work without the need to launch the Primavera application. It comes back to a mantra: provide as many alternative user interfaces as possible, so you can give people the ability to work, to participate, to raise issues, to create projects, in the places where they live. Do it in such a way that it’s non-intrusive, do it in such a way that it’s easy and intuitive and they can get it done in a short amount of time. If you do that, workers can get back to doing what they're actually getting paid for.

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• 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

  - by MarkPearl

  For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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• Alcatel-Lucent: Enterprise 2.0: The Top 5 Things I would Do Over

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Happy Monday! Does anyone else feel as if the weekend went entirely too quickly? At least for those of us in the United States, we have the 4th of July Holiday next week to look forward to This week on the blog, we are going to focus on "WebCenter by Example" and highlight best practices from customers and partners. I recently came across this article and I think this is a great example of how we can learn from one another when it comes to social collaboration adoption. Do you agree with Jem? What things or best practices have you learned in your organizations?  By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent  Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over? #5 Define your analytics solution from the start There is so much to do when you launch a community and initially growing it without complete chaos is quite a task.  It doesn’t take too long to get to a point where you want to focus your continued efforts in growing company collaboration.  Do people truly talk across regional boundaries or have we shifted siloed conversations to a new platform.  Is there one organization that doesn’t interact with another? If you are lucky you’ll have someone in your community team well versed in the world of databases and SQL queries, but it takes time to figure out what backend analytics data actually means. Professional support can be expensive and it may be hard to justify later as it typically has the community manager as the only main customer.  Figure out what you think you’ll want to know and how to get it early on. The sooner the better even if it doesn’t seem that critical at the time. #4 Lobbies guide you to the right places One piece of feedback that comes up more and more as we keep growing Engage is it’s hard to find stuff, or new people are not sure where to start. Something we’re doing now is defining some general topic areas of interest to be like “lobbies” into the platform and some common hashtags to go with them. I liken this to walking into a large medical or professional building for the first time.  There are hundreds of offices, and you look to a sign in the lobby to get guided to the right place for you.  We’re building that sign for members now, but again we missed the boat as the majority of the company has had their initial Engage experience. #3 Clean up, clean up, clean up Knowledge work and folksonomies are messy! The day we opened the doors to Engage I would have said we should keep everything ever created in Engage with an argument that it was a window into our collective knowledge so nothing should go.  Well, 6000+ groups and 200,000+ pieces of content later, I’ve changed my mind.  As previously mentioned, with too much “stuff” the system can be overwhelming to new members and it makes it harder to get what you’re looking for.   Do we need that help document about a tool we no longer have? NO!  Do we need that group that had 1 document and 2 discussions in the last two years? NO! Should we only have one group about a given topic instead of 4?  YES! Last fall, Engage defined a cleanup process for groups not used for a long time.  We also formed a volunteer cleaning army who are extra eyes on the hunt for “stuff” that should be updated, merged, or deleted.  It’s better late than never, but in line with what’s becoming a theme I wish these efforts had started earlier. #2 Communications & local community management One of the most important aspects of my job is to make sure people who should be talking to each other are actually doing it.  Connecting people to the other people they should know, the groups they should join, a piece of content that shouldn’t be missed.   I have worked both inside and outside of communications teams, and they are the best informed people in your company.  They know when something big is coming, how it impacts employees, how it fits with strategy, who else knows more, etc.  Having communications professionals who are power users can help scale up community management because they are already so well connected.  They also need to have the platform skills to pay attention without suffering email overload, how to grab someone’s attention, etc.  I wish I’d had figured this out much earlier.  If I had I would have groomed more communications colleagues into advocates and power members right at the start. #1 Grooming advocates vs. natural advocates I’ve just alluded to this above already. The very best advocates are those who naturally embrace your platform and automatically start to see new ways to work within it.  Those advocates seem to come out of the woodwork naturally since some of them are early adopters.  Not surprisingly, our best advocates today are those same people who were willing to come kick the tires when the community was completely empty.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get a global spread of those natural advocates.  I did ask around when we first launched for other people who might be good candidates, but didn’t push too hard as there were so many other things to get ready.  That was a mistake.  If I could get a redo I would have formally asked for people to be assigned where there were gaps and groomed them into an advocate.  Today as we find new advocates to fill the gaps, people are hesitant as the initial set has three years of practice are ahead of the curve power members; it definitely would have been easier earlier on. As fairly early adopters to corporate scale enterprise collaboration, there hasn’t been a roadmap to follow as we’ve grown Engage, which is part of the fun! It’s clear a lot of issues are more easily tackled the earlier you identify and begin to correct them, and I’ve identified the main five I wish I could redo.  In the spirit of collaboration, I hope someone else learns from my mistakes! View the original article by Jem here. 

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• General Policies and Procedures for Maintaining the Value of Data Assets

  Here is a general list for policies and procedures regarding maintaining the value of data assets. Data Backup Policies and Procedures Backups are very important when dealing with data because there is always the chance of losing data due to faulty hardware or a user activity. So the need for a strategic backup system should be mandatory for all companies. This being said, in the real world some companies that I have worked for do not really have a good data backup plan. Typically when companies tend to take this kind of approach in data backups usually the data is not really recoverable.  Unfortunately when companies do not regularly test their backup plans they get a false sense of security because they think that they are covered. However, I can tell you from personal and professional experience that a backup plan/system is never fully implemented until it is regularly tested prior to the time when it actually needs to be used. Disaster Recovery Plan Expanding on Backup Policies and Procedures, a company needs to also have a disaster recovery plan in order to protect its data in case of a catastrophic disaster.  Disaster recovery plans typically encompass how to restore all of a company’s data and infrastructure back to a restored operational status.  Most Disaster recovery plans also include time estimates on how long each step of the disaster recovery plan should take to be executed.  It is important to note that disaster recovery plans are never fully implemented until they have been tested just like backup plans. Disaster recovery plans should be tested regularly so that the business can be confident in not losing any or minimal data due to a catastrophic disaster. Firewall Policies and Content Filters One way companies can protect their data is by using a firewall to separate their internal network from the outside. Firewalls allow for enabling or disabling network access as data passes through it by applying various defined restrictions. Furthermore firewalls can also be used to prevent access from the internal network to the outside by these same factors. Common Firewall Restrictions Destination/Sender IP Address Destination/Sender Host Names Domain Names Network Ports Companies can also desire to restrict what their network user’s view on the internet through things like content filters. Content filters allow a company to track what webpages a person has accessed and can also restrict user’s access based on established rules set up in the content filter. This device and/or software can block access to domains or specific URLs based on a few factors. Common Content Filter Criteria Known malicious sites Specific Page Content Page Content Theme  Anti-Virus/Mal-ware Polices Fortunately, most companies utilize antivirus programs on all computers and servers for good reason, virus have been known to do the following: Corrupt/Invalidate Data, Destroy Data, and Steal Data. Anti-Virus applications are a great way to prevent any malicious application from being able to gain access to a company’s data.  However, anti-virus programs must be constantly updated because new viruses are always being created, and the anti-virus vendors need to distribute updates to their applications so that they can catch and remove them. Data Validation Policies and Procedures Data validation is very important to ensure that only accurate information is stored. The existence of invalid data can cause major problems when businesses attempt to use data for knowledge based decisions and for performance reporting. Data Scrubbing Policies and Procedures Data scrubbing is valuable to companies in one of two ways. The first can be used to clean data prior to being analyzed for report generation. The second is that it allows companies to remove things like personally Identifiable information from its data prior to transmit it between multiple environments or if the information is sent to an external location. An example of this can be seen with medical records in regards to HIPPA laws that prohibit the storage of specific personal and medical information. Additionally, I have professionally run in to a scenario where the Canadian government does not allow any Canadian’s personal information to be stored on a server not located in Canada. Encryption Practices The use of encryption is very valuable when a company needs to any personal information. This allows users with the appropriated access levels to view or confirm the existence or accuracy of data within a system by either decrypting the information or encrypting a piece of data and comparing it to the stored version.  Additionally, if for some unforeseen reason the data got in to the wrong hands then they would have to first decrypt the data before they could even be able to read it. Encryption just adds and additional layer of protection around data itself. Standard Normalization Practices The use of standard data normalization practices is very important when dealing with data because it can prevent allot of potential issues by eliminating the potential for unnecessary data duplication. Issues caused by data duplication include excess use of data storage, increased chance for invalidated data, and over use of data processing. Network and Database Security/Access Policies Every company has some form of network/data access policy even if they have none. These policies help secure data from being seen by inappropriate users along with preventing the data from being updated or deleted by users. In addition, without a good security policy there is a large potential for data to be corrupted by unassuming users or even stolen. Data Storage Policies Data storage polices are very important depending on how they are implemented especially when a company is trying to utilize them in conjunction with other policies like Data Backups. I have worked at companies where all network user folders are constantly backed up, and if a user wanted to ensure the existence of a piece of data in the form of a file then they had to store that file in their network folder. Conversely, I have also worked in places where when a user logs on or off of the network there entire user profile is backed up. Training Policies One of the biggest ways to prevent data loss and ensure that data will remain a company asset is through training. The practice of properly train employees on how to work with in systems that access data is crucial when trying to ensure a company’s data will remain an asset. Users need to be trained on how to manipulate a company’s data in order to perform their tasks to reduce the chances of invalidating data.

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• Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

  - by ScottGu

  The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities:     public class HomeController : Controller     {         LocationContext db = new LocationContext();           public async Task<ActionResult> Index()         {             var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync();               return View(locations);         }     } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class:         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>()                 .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5));           } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license.  Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {        modelBuilder.Configurations            .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Java EE 7 Survey Results!

  - by reza_rahman

  On November 8th, the Java EE EG posted a survey to gather broad community feedback on a number of critical open issues. For reference, you can find the original survey here. We kept the survey open for about three weeks until November 30th. To our delight, over 1100 developers took time out of their busy lives to let their voices be heard! The results of the survey were sent to the EG on December 12th. The subsequent EG discussion is available here. The exact summary sent to the EG is available here. We would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one the individuals who took the survey. It is very appreciated, encouraging and worth it's weight in gold. In particular, I tried to capture just some of the high-quality, intelligent, thoughtful and professional comments in the summary to the EG. I highly encourage you to continue to stay involved, perhaps through the Adopt-a-JSR program. We would also like to sincerely thank java.net, JavaLobby, TSS and InfoQ for helping spread the word about the survey. Below is a brief summary of the results... APIs to Add to Java EE 7 Full/Web Profile The first question asked which of the four new candidate APIs (WebSocket, JSON-P, JBatch and JCache) should be added to the Java EE 7 Full and Web profile respectively. As the following graph shows, there was significant support for adding all the new APIs to the full profile: Support is relatively the weakest for Batch 1.0, but still good. A lot of folks saw WebSocket 1.0 as a critical technology with comments such as this one: "A modern web application needs Web Sockets as first class citizens" While it is clearly seen as being important, a number of commenters expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a higher-level JSON data binding API as illustrated by this comment: "How come we don't have a Data Binding API for JSON" JCache was also seen as being very important as expressed with comments like: "JCache should really be that foundational technology on which other specs have no fear to depend on" The results for the Web Profile is not surprising. While there is strong support for adding WebSocket 1.0 and JSON-P 1.0 to the Web Profile, support for adding JCache 1.0 and Batch 1.0 is relatively weak. There was actually significant opposition to adding Batch 1. 0 (with 51.8% casting a 'No' vote). Enabling CDI by Default The second question asked was whether CDI should be enabled in Java EE environments by default. A significant majority of 73.3% developers supported enabling CDI, only 13.8% opposed. Comments such as these two reflect a strong general support for CDI as well as a desire for better Java EE alignment with CDI: "CDI makes Java EE quite valuable!" "Would prefer to unify EJB, CDI and JSF lifecycles" There is, however, a palpable concern around the performance impact of enabling CDI by default as exemplified by this comment: "Java EE projects in most cases use CDI, hence it is sensible to enable CDI by default when creating a Java EE application. However, there are several issues if CDI is enabled by default: scanning can be slow - not all libs use CDI (hence, scanning is not needed)" Another significant concern appears to be around backwards compatibility and conflict with other JSR 330 implementations like Spring: "I am leaning towards yes, however can easily imagine situations where errors would be caused by automatically activating CDI, especially in cases of backward compatibility where another DI engine (such as Spring and the like) happens to use the same mechanics to inject dependencies and in that case there would be an overlap in injections and probably an uncertain outcome" Some commenters such as this one attempt to suggest solutions to these potential issues: "If you have Spring in use and use javax.inject.Inject then you might get some unexpected behavior that could be equally confusing. I guess there will be a way to switch CDI off. I'm tempted to say yes but am cautious for this reason" Consistent Usage of @Inject The third question was around using CDI/JSR 330 @Inject consistently vs. allowing JSRs to create their own injection annotations. A slight majority of 53.3% developers supported using @Inject consistently across JSRs. 28.8% said using custom injection annotations is OK, while 18.0% were not sure. The vast majority of commenters were strongly supportive of CDI and general Java EE alignment with CDI as illistrated by these comments: "Dependency Injection should be standard from now on in EE. It should use CDI as that is the DI mechanism in EE and is quite powerful. Having a new JSR specific DI mechanism to deal with just means more reflection, more proxies. JSRs should also be constructed to allow some of their objects Injectable. @Inject @TransactionalCache or @Inject @JMXBean etc...they should define the annotations and stereotypes to make their code less procedural. Dog food it. If there is a shortcoming in CDI for a JSR fix it and we will all be grateful" "We're trying to make this a comprehensive platform, right? Injection should be a fundamental part of the platform; everything else should build on the same common infrastructure. Each-having-their-own is just a recipe for chaos and having to learn the same thing 10 different ways" Expanding the Use of @Stereotype The fourth question was about expanding CDI @Stereotype to cover annotations across Java EE beyond just CDI. A significant majority of 62.3% developers supported expanding the use of @Stereotype, only 13.3% opposed. A majority of commenters supported the idea as well as the theme of general CDI/Java EE alignment as expressed in these examples: "Just like defining new types for (compositions of) existing classes, stereotypes can help make software development easier" "This is especially important if many EJB services are decoupled from the EJB component model and can be applied via individual annotations to Java EE components. @Stateless is a nicely compact annotation. Code will not improve if that will have to be applied in the future as @Transactional, @Pooled, @Secured, @Singlethreaded, @...." Some, however, expressed concerns around increased complexity such as this commenter: "Could be very convenient, but I'm afraid if it wouldn't make some important class annotations less visible" Expanding Interceptor Use The final set of questions was about expanding interceptors further across Java EE... A very solid 96.3% of developers wanted to expand interceptor use to all Java EE components. 35.7% even wanted to expand interceptors to other Java EE managed classes. Most developers (54.9%) were not sure if there is any place that injection is supported that should not support interceptors. 32.8% thought any place that supports injection should also support interceptors. Only 12.2% were certain that there are places where injection should be supported but not interceptors. The comments reflected the diversity of opinions, generally supportive of interceptors: "I think interceptors are as fundamental as injection and should be available anywhere in the platform" "The whole usage of interceptors still needs to take hold in Java programming, but it is a powerful technology that needs some time in the Sun. Basically it should become part of Java SE, maybe the next step after lambas?" A distinct chain of thought separated interceptors from filters and listeners: "I think that the Servlet API already provides a rich set of possibilities to hook yourself into different Servlet container events. I don't find a need to 'pollute' the Servlet model with the Interceptors API"

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• Bind9 as a caching resolver fails with mismatch ID on localhost but not external IP

  - by argibbs

  I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a machine on my private network. I have bind9 installed (v9.8.1-P1) via aptitude, so it appears to have put all the bits in the right places and the service starts automatically. I plan on adding some zones later, but first I'm just trying to get it working as a caching resolver. I installed bind, configured it, and starting using it. Initially I thought it was working ok, but then I found some sites weren't being resolved. I've pinned it down to being linked to the size of the result and bind failing-over to TCP mode. So: I'm trying to find out why bind is failing when I query for domain info and the result is 512 bytes (causing a truncation and retry on TCP). Specifically it fails with ID mismatches if I point dig at localhost, but works when I query the machine's own IP (192.168.0.2). This appears to be backwards to the problem that most people have when using bind (fails on external ip, works on localhost). If I do dig @localhost google.com (which has a response of <512 bytes) then it works; I get no warnings, and plenty of output. $ dig @localhost google.com ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @localhost google.com [snip lots of output] ;; Query time: 39 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 17 23:08:34 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 495 If I do dig @localhost play.google.com (which has a larger response) then I get back something like: $ dig @localhost play.google.com ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ;; ERROR: ID mismatch: expected ID 3696, got 27130 This seems to be standard, documented behaviour - when the UDP response is large (here 'large' == 512 bytes) it falls back to TCP. The ID mismatch is not expected though. If I do dig @192.168.0.2 play.google.com then I still get the warning about using TCP mode, but it otherwise works $ dig @192.168.0.2 play.google.com ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @192.168.0.2 play.google.com [snip most of the output] ;; Query time: 5 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.0.2#53(192.168.0.2) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 17 23:05:55 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 521 At the moment I've not set up any zones in my local instance, so it's just acting as a caching resolver. My options config is pretty much unchanged from standard, I've got the following set: options { directory "/var/cache/bind"; allow-query { 192.168/16; 127.0.0.1; }; forwarders { 8.8.8.8; 8.8.4.4; }; dnssec-validation auto; edns-udp-size 4096 ; allow-transfer { any; }; auth-nxdomain no; # conform to RFC1035 listen-on-v6 { any; }; }; And my /etc/resolv.conf is just nameserver 127.0.0.1 search .local The problem definitely seems linked to the failover to TCP mode: if I do dig +bufsize=4096 @localhost play.google.com then it works; no warning about failover to TCP, no ID mismatch, and a standard looking result. To be honest, if there was a way to force bind to use a much larger UDP buffer, that'd probably be good enough for me, but all I've been able to find mention of is max-udp-size 4096 and that doesn't change the behaviour in any way. I've also tried setting edns-udp-size 512 in case the problem is some weird EDNS issue with my router (which seems unlikely since the +bufsize=4096 flag works fine). I've also tried dig +trace @localhost play.google.com; this works. No truncation/TCP warning, and a full result. I've also tried changing the servers used in the forwarder (e.g. to OpenDNS), but that makes no difference. There's one last data point: if I repetitively do dig @localhost play.google.com I don't always get an ID mismatch, but sometimes a REFUSED error. I'm much more likely to get a REFUSED error if I dig the non-localhost IP (192.168.0.2) first: $ dig @localhost play.google.com ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @localhost play.google.com ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 35104 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;play.google.com. IN A ;; Query time: 4 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 17 23:20:13 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 33 Any insights or things to try would be much appreciated.

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• Can connect to Samba server but cannot access shares?

  - by jlego

  I have setup a stand-alone box running Fedora 16 to use as a file-sharing and web development server. Needs to be able to share files with a PC running Windows 7 and a Mac running OSX Snow Leopard. I've setup Samba using the Samba configuration GUI tool. Added users to Fedora and connected them as Samba users (which are the same as the Windows and Mac usernames and passwords). The workgroup name is the same as the Windows workgroup. Authentication is set to User. I've allowed Samba and Samba client through the firewall and set the ethernet to a trusted port in the firewall. Both the Windows and Mac machines can connect to the server and view the shares, however when trying to access the shares, Windows throws error 0x80070035 " Windows cannot access \SERVERNAME\ShareName." Windows user is not prompted for a username or password when accessing the server (found under "Network Places"). This also happens when connecting with the IP rather than the server name. The Mac can also connect to the server and see the shares but when choosing a share gives the error "The original item for ShareName cannot be found." When connecting via IP, the Mac user is prompted for username and password, which when authenticated gives a list of shares, however when choosing a share to connect to, the error is displayed and the user cannot access the share. Since both machines are acting similarly when trying to access the shares, I assume it is an issue with how Samba is configured. smb.conf: [global] workgroup = workgroup server string = Server log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m max log size = 50 security = user load printers = yes cups options = raw printcap name = lpstat printing = cups [homes] comment = Home Directories browseable = no writable = yes [printers] comment = All Printers path = /var/spool/samba browseable = yes printable = yes [FileServ] comment = FileShare path = /media/FileServ read only = no browseable = yes valid users = user1, user2 [webdev] comment = Web development path = /var/www/html/webdev read only = no browseable = yes valid users = user1 How do I get samba sharing working? UPDATE: Before this box I had another box with the same version of fedora installed (16) and samba working for these same computers. I started up the old machine and copied the smb.conf file from the old machine to the new one (editing the share definitions for the new shares of course) and I still get the same errors on both client machines. The only difference in environment is the hardware and the router. On the old machine the router received a dynamic public IP and assigned dynamic private IPs to each device on the network while the new machine is connected to a router that has a static public IP (still dynamic internal IPs though.) Could either one of these be affecting Samba? UPDATE 2: As the directory I am trying to share is actually an entire internal disk, I have tried to things: 1.) changing the owner of the mounted disk from root to my user (which is the same username as on the Windows machine) 2.) made a share that only included one of the folders on the disk instead of the entire disk with my user again as the owner. Both tests failed giving me the same errors regarding the network address. UPDATE 3: Not sure exactly what I did, but now whenever I try to connect to the share on the Windows 7 client I am prompted for my username and password. When I enter the correct credentials I get an access denied message. However I did notice that under the login box "domain: WINDOWS-PC-NAME" is listed. I believe this could very well be the problem. Any suggestions? UPDATE 4: So I've completely reinstalled Fedora and Samba now. I've created a share on the first harddrive (one fedora is installed on) and I can access that fine from Windows. However when I try to share any data on the second disk, I am receiving the same error. This I believe is the problem. I think I need to change some things in fstab or fdisk or something. UPDATE 5: So in fstab I mapped the drive to automount in a folder which works correctly. I also added the samba_share_t SElinux label to the mountpoint directory which now allows me to access the shares on the Windows machine, however I cannot see any of the files in the directory on the windows machine. (They are there, I can see them in the fedora file browser locally) UPDATE 6: Figured it out. See answer below

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• Autodetect/mount SDCards and run script for them on Linux

  - by Brendan

  Hey Everyone, I'm currently running SME Server, and need to have a script run upon the attachment of SD Cards to my server. The script itself works fine (it copies the contents of the cards), but the automounting and execution of the script is where I'm having issues. The I have a USB hub consisting of 10 USB ports; that shows up as: [root@server ~]# lsusb Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 055: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. Bus 001 Device 051: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. Bus 001 Device 050: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 (The hub is the TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC entries) As I cannot plug SD Cards directly into the server; I use a USB to SD card attachement (10 of them) plugged into the hub to read the cards. Upon pluggig the 10 attachments (without cards) into the hub; lsusb yields the following: [root@server ~]# lsusb Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 073: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 072: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 071: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 070: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 069: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 068: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 067: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 066: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 065: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 064: ID 05e3:0723 Genesys Logic, Inc. Bus 001 Device 055: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. Bus 001 Device 051: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. Bus 001 Device 050: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 As you can see, the readers are the "Gensys Logic, Inc" entries. Plugging in an SD card to a reader doesn't affect lsusb (it reads exactly as above), however my system recognises the cards fine; as indicated by dmesg: Attached scsi generic sg11 at scsi54, channel 0, id 0, lun 0, type 0 USB Mass Storage device found at 73 SCSI device sdd: 31388672 512-byte hdwr sectors (16071 MB) sdd: Write Protect is on sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00 sdd: assuming drive cache: write through SCSI device sdd: 31388672 512-byte hdwr sectors (16071 MB) sdd: Write Protect is on sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00 sdd: assuming drive cache: write through sdd: sdd1 SCSI device sdd: 31388672 512-byte hdwr sectors (16071 MB) sdd: Write Protect is on sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00 sdd: assuming drive cache: write through SCSI device sdd: 31388672 512-byte hdwr sectors (16071 MB) sdd: Write Protect is on sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00 sdd: assuming drive cache: write through sdd: sdd1 SCSI device sdd: 31388672 512-byte hdwr sectors (16071 MB) sdd: Write Protect is on sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00 sdd: assuming drive cache: write through SCSI device sdd: 31388672 512-byte hdwr sectors (16071 MB) sdd: Write Protect is on sdd: Mode Sense: 03 00 80 00 sdd: assuming drive cache: write through sdd: sdd1 If I manually mount sdd1 (mount /dev/sdd1 /somedirectory/) this works fine. What I'm really after is a solution that automounts each of the cards as they are inputted into the reader; and executes a script for them (this will involve copying their contents to another directory). My problem is that I don't know how to do this; I don't think udev will work as the USB devices don't change; if I could somehow get udev working with /dev/disk/by-path/ however I think this is doable (it seems to keep constant entries). ls /dev/disk returns: pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.1.1:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.1.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.1.3:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.1.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.3:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.1.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.3:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1 pci-0000:0b:01.0-scsi-0:0:1:0 pci-0000:0b:01.0-scsi-0:0:1:0-part1 pci-0000:0b:01.0-scsi-0:0:1:0-part2 From above, we can see I have only one card plugged into the reader (pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:4.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1). Going mount /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000\:00\:1d.7-usb-0\:4.4\:1.0-scsi-0\:0\:0\:0-part1 Works and places the card under /media/usbdisk/, however: mount /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000\:00\:1d.7-usb-0\:4.4\:1.0-scsi-0\:0\:0\:0-part1 slot1/ doesn't work, and returns "mount: can't get address for /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000" Any ideas and solutions would be great, I've seen the knowledge of a lot of the guys on here before so I'm hopeful someone can help me out. Thanks

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• I can connect to Samba server but cannot access shares.

  - by jlego

  I'm having trouble getting samba sharing working to access shares. I have setup a stand-alone box running Fedora 16 to use as a file-sharing and web development server. It needs to be able to share files with a Windows 7 PC and a Mac running OSX Snow Leopard. I've setup Samba using the Samba configuration GUI tool on Fedora. Added users to Fedora and connected them as Samba users (which are the same as the Windows and Mac usernames and passwords). The workgroup name is the same as the Windows workgroup. Authentication is set to User. I've allowed Samba and Samba client through the firewall and set the ethernet to a trusted port in the firewall. Both the Windows and Mac machines can connect to the server and view the shares, however when trying to access the shares, Windows throws error: 0x80070035 " Windows cannot access \\SERVERNAME\ShareName." Windows user is not prompted for a username or password when accessing the server (found under "Network Places"). This also happens when connecting with the IP rather than the server name. The Mac can also connect to the server and see the shares but when choosing a share gives the error: The original item for ShareName cannot be found. When connecting via IP, the Mac user is prompted for username and password, which when authenticated gives a list of shares, however when choosing a share to connect to, the error is displayed and the user cannot access the share. Since both machines are acting similarly when trying to access the shares, I assume it is an issue with how Samba is configured. smb.conf: [global] workgroup = workgroup server string = Server log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m max log size = 50 security = user load printers = yes cups options = raw printcap name = lpstat printing = cups [homes] comment = Home Directories browseable = no writable = yes [printers] comment = All Printers path = /var/spool/samba browseable = yes printable = yes [FileServ] comment = FileShare path = /media/FileServ read only = no browseable = yes valid users = user1, user2 [webdev] comment = Web development path = /var/www/html/webdev read only = no browseable = yes valid users = user1 How do I get samba sharing working? UPDATE: I Figured it out, it was because I was sharing a second hard drive. See checked answer below. Speculation 1: Before this box I had another box with the same version of fedora installed (16) and samba working for these same computers. I started up the old machine and copied the smb.conf file from the old machine to the new one (editing the share definitions for the new shares of course) and I still get the same errors on both client machines. The only difference in environment is the hardware and the router. On the old machine the router received a dynamic public IP and assigned dynamic private IPs to each device on the network while the new machine is connected to a router that has a static public IP (still dynamic internal IPs though.) Could either one of these be affecting Samba? Speculation 2: As the directory I am trying to share is actually an entire internal disk, I have tried these things: 1.) changing the owner of the mounted disk from root to my user (which is the same username as on the Windows machine) 2.) made a share that only included one of the folders on the disk instead of the entire disk with my user again as the owner. Both tests failed giving me the same errors regarding the network address. Speculation 3: Whenever I try to connect to the share on the Windows 7 client I am prompted for my username and password. When I enter the correct credentials I get an access denied message. However I did notice that under the login box "domain: WINDOWS-PC-NAME" is listed. I believe this could very well be the problem. Speculation 4: So I've completely reinstalled Fedora and Samba now. I've created a share on the first harddrive (one fedora is installed on) and I can access that fine from Windows. However when I try to share any data on the second disk, I am receiving the same error. This I believe is the problem. I think I need to change some things in fstab or fdisk or something. Speculation 5: So in fstab I mapped the drive to automount in a folder which works correctly. I also added the samba_share_t SElinux label to the mountpoint directory which now allows me to access the shares on the Windows machine, however I cannot see any of the files in the directory on the windows machine. (They are there, I can see them in the fedora file browser locally)

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• Split a long JSON string into lines in Ruby

  - by David J.

  First, the background: I'm writing a Ruby app that uses SendGrid to send mass emails. SendGrid uses a custom email header (in JSON format) to set recipients, values to substitute, etc. SendGrid's documentation recommends splitting up the header so that the lines are shorter than 1,000 bytes. My question, then, is this: given a long JSON string, how can I split it into lines < 1,000 so that lines are split at appropriate places (i.e., after a comma) rather than in the middle of a word? This is probably unnecessary, but here's an example of the sort of string I'd like to split: X-SMTPAPI: {"sub": {"pet": ["dog", "cat"]}, "to": ["[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]"]} Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

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• optimizing iPhone OpenGL ES fill rate

  - by NateS

  I have an Open GL ES game on the iPhone. My framerate is pretty sucky, ~20fps. Using the Xcode OpenGL ES performance tool on an iPhone 3G, it shows: Renderer Utilization: 95% to 99% Tiler Utilization: ~27% I am drawing a lot of pretty large images with a lot of blending. If I reduce the number of images drawn, framerates go from ~20 to ~40, though the performance tool results stay about the same (renderer still maxed). I think I'm being limited by the fill rate of the iPhone 3G, but I'm not sure. My questions are: How can I determine with more granularity where the bottleneck is? That is my biggest problem, I just don't know what is taking all the time. If it is fillrate, is there anything I do to improve it besides just drawing less? I am using texture atlases. I have tried to minimize image binds, though it isn't always possible (drawing order, not everything fits on one 1024x1024 texture, etc). Every frame I do 10 image binds. This seem pretty reasonable, but I could be mistaken. I'm using vertex arrays and glDrawArrays. I don't really have a lot of geometry. I can try to be more precise if needed. Each image is 2 triangles and I try to batch things were possible, though often (maybe half the time) images are drawn with individual glDrawArrays calls. Besides the images, I have ~60 triangles worth of geometry being rendered in ~6 glDrawArrays calls. I often glTranslate before calling glDrawArrays. Would it improve the framerate to switch to VBOs? I don't think it is a huge amount of geometry, but maybe it is faster for other reasons? Are there certain things to watch out for that could reduce performance? Eg, should I avoid glTranslate, glColor4g, etc? I'm using glScissor in a 3 places per frame. Each use consists of 2 glScissor calls, one to set it up, and one to reset it to what it was. I don't know if there is much of a performance impact here. If I used PVRTC would it be able to render faster? Currently all my images are GL_RGBA. I don't have memory issues. Here is a rough idea of what I'm drawing, in this order: 1) Switch to perspective matrix. 2) Draw a full screen background image 3) Draw a full screen image with translucency (this one has a scrolling texture). 4) Draw a few sprites. 5) Switch to ortho matrix. 6) Draw a few sprites. 7) Switch to perspective matrix. 8) Draw sprites and some other textured geometry. 9) Switch to ortho matrix. 10) Draw a few sprites (eg, game HUD). Steps 1-6 draw a bunch of background stuff. 8 draws most of the game content. 10 draws the HUD. As you can see, there are many layers, some of them full screen and some of the sprites are pretty large (1/4 of the screen). The layers use translucency, so I have to draw them in back-to-front order. This is further complicated by needing to draw various layers in ortho and others in perspective. I will gladly provide additional information if reqested. Thanks in advance for any performance tips or general advice on my problem!

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• How to fix notifyDataSetChanged/ListView problems in dynamic Adapter wrapper Android

  - by ipaterson

  Summary: Trying to dynamically add heading rows to a ListView via a custom adapter wrapper. ListView is having trouble keeping the scroll position in sync. Runnable demo project provided. I would like to dynamically add items to a list based on the values in a CursorAdapter, several positions ahead of what the user is currently viewing. To do this, I have an adapter that wraps the CursorAdapter and keeps the new content indexed in a SparseArray. The ListView needs to be updated when items are added to the custom adapter, but I have met a lot of pitfalls trying to get that to work and would love some advice. The demo project can be downloaded here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15334423/DynamicSectionedList.zip In the demo, the headings are added dynamically by looking ahead 10 places to find the correct position where the list items switch to the next letter. Each implementation of notifyDataSetChanged has problems as described: Demo 1 This demo shows the importance of notifyDataSetChanged(). On clicking anything, the app will crash. This is due to some sanity checking in ListView... mItemCount != adapter.getItemCount(). Moral is, we need to notify the list that data has changed. Demo 2 The natural next step is to notify the ListView of changes when changes occur. Unfortunately, doing so while the ListView is scrolling firmly breaks all touch interaction until the app switches out of touch mode. You will need to "fling scroll" far enough to generate new headings in order to notice this. Tapping the screen will not cause the scroll to stop, and once stopped none of the list items will be clickable. This is due to some if (!mDataChanged) { /* do very important stuff */ } code in AbsListView.onTouchEvent(). Demo 3 To fix this, Demo 3 introduces a pendingChanges flag and the custom Adapter gains a notifyDataSetChangedIfNeeded() which can be called by the ListView once it has entered a "safe" state for changes. The first point where changes must be notified is in ListView.layoutChildren(), so I overrode that method to first notify of changes if needed, then call through. Fling past at least one heading then click a list item. This doesn't quite work right, though I'm not totally sure why. Tapping or selecting an item with the keyboard/trackball causes the list to refresh without properly syncing the old position. It scrolls to the top of the list which is not acceptable. Demo 4 The scroll problem in Demo 3 can be conquered, at least in touch mode. By adding a call to notifyDataSetChangedIfNeeded() on touch down, the data change happens to take place at such a time that all touch interaction works as expected and the list position is properly synced. However, I can't find an analog for that when the device is not in touch mode, not to mention the fact that it definitely seems like a hack. The list almost always scrolls back to the top, I can't find out what causes it to occasionally maintain the correct position. Since Android is fighting me at each step of the way, I feel like there should be a better approach. Please try the demo, if any fixes can be applied to get it working that would be great! Many thanks to anyone who can look into this, hopefully if we can get the code working it will be useful for others trying to accomplish the same optimization for lists with headings.

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• Assigning an event or command to a DataTemplate in ResourceDictionary

  - by Scott

  I have the following class: public class Day { public int Date { get; set; } public String DayName { get; set; } public Day() { } public Day(int date, string dayName) { Date = date; DayName = dayName; CommandManager.RegisterClassCommandBinding(typeof(Day), new CommandBinding(DayClick, new ExecutedRoutedEventHandler(OnExecutedDayClick), new CanExecuteRoutedEventHandler(OnCanExecuteDayClick))); } public static readonly RoutedCommand DayClick = new RoutedCommand("DayClick", typeof(Day)); private static void OnCanExecuteDayClick(object sender, CanExecuteRoutedEventArgs e) { ((Day)sender).OnCanExecuteDayClick(e); } private static void OnExecutedDayClick(object sender, ExecutedRoutedEventArgs e) { ((Day)sender).OnExecutedDayClick(e); } protected virtual void OnCanExecuteDayClick(CanExecuteRoutedEventArgs e) { e.CanExecute = true; e.Handled = false; } protected virtual void OnExecutedDayClick(ExecutedRoutedEventArgs e) { string content = String.Format("Day {0}, which is {1}, was clicked.", Date.ToString(), DayName); MessageBox.Show(content); e.Handled = true; } } I am using the following DataTemplate (that is in a ResourceDictionary) to render it: <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type local:Day}"> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition/> <ColumnDefinition/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Rectangle Grid.ColumnSpan="2" x:Name="rectHasEntry" Fill="WhiteSmoke"/> <TextBlock Grid.Column="0" x:Name="textBlockDayName" Text="{Binding DayName}" FontFamily="Junction" FontSize="11" Background="Transparent" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,2,0,0"/> <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" x:Name="textBlockDate" Text="{Binding Date}" FontFamily="Junction" FontSize="11" Background="Transparent" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" Margin="0,2,0,0"/> <Rectangle Grid.ColumnSpan="2" x:Name="rectMouseOver" Fill="#A2C0DA" Opacity="0" Style="{StaticResource DayRectangleMouseOverStyle}"> </Rectangle> </Grid> </DataTemplate> No problems so far, I can get it on screen. What I want to be able to do is assign a Command, or use an event, so that when the user clicks on the Day it will notify the parent of the Day object that it has been clicked. I've tried the following: <Rectangle.CommandBindings> <CommandBinding Command="{x:Static local:Day.NextDay}" Executed="{x:Static local:Day.OnExecutedDayClick}" CanExecute="{x:Static local:Day.OnCanExecuteDayClick}"/> </Rectangle.CommandBindings> to try and bind the commands that are in the Day class but it didn't work. I got an error stating: 'ResourceDictionary' root element requires a x:Class attribute to support event handlers in the XAML file. Either remove the event handler for the Executed event, or add a x:Class attribute to the root element. Which I think means that there is no code-behind file for a ResourceDictionary, or something to that effect. In any event, I'm not sure if I should be using Commands here, or somehow tying events to the Rectangle in question, or if this is even possible. I've seen various places where it sure looks like it's possible, I'm just unable to translate what I'm seeing into something that actually works, hence this post. Thanks in advance.

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• Windows CE Programming Serial Port - Getting Garbled Output

  - by user576639

  I am programming a Windows CE 6 device (Motorola MC3100 scanner Terminal). Using Lazarus FPC to compile it. After 3 weeks work I reluctantly post here in the hope someone can suggest why I am getting garbled output from the serial port. The code I am using is posted below. This is the standard code I have found from several places. The OpenPort works OK. When I send the string using SendString('ABCDEF') I get garbled input to the PC Serial port such as: 4[#131][#26][#0][#0][#0][#0] (the bracketed data indicates that it is a non-printable character ASCII Code) Obviously it is connecting to the port OK AND it is sending the correct no of characters (7). I have tried all combinations of Baud Rate, Data Bits, Parity and Stop Bits without any joy. Also tried changing cable, on a different PC etc. Could it be I need to set something else in the DCB? Any help or suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated. unit Unit1; {$mode objfpc}{$H+} interface uses Classes, SysUtils, FileUtil, Forms, Controls, Graphics, Dialogs, StdCtrls, ExtCtrls, Windows, LResources; type { TForm1 } TForm1 = class(TForm) Button1: TButton; Button2: TButton; Label1: TLabel; procedure Button1Click(Sender: TObject); procedure Button2Click(Sender: TObject); function OpenPort(ComPort:String;BaudRate,ByteSize,Parity,StopBits:integer):String; procedure SendString(str:String); private { private declarations } public { public declarations } end; var Form1: TForm1; cc:TCOMMCONFIG; Connected:Boolean; implementation {$R *.lfm} var F: TextFile; var hComm: THandle; str: String; lrc: LongWord; { TForm1 } function OpenPort(ComPort:String;BaudRate,ByteSize,Parity,StopBits:integer):String; var cc:TCOMMCONFIG; SWide:WideString; Port:LPCWSTR; begin SWide:=ComPort; Port:=PWideChar(SWide); result:=''; if (1=1) then begin Connected:=False; hComm:=CreateFile(Port, GENERIC_READ or GENERIC_WRITE,0, nil,OPEN_EXISTING,0,0); if (hComm = INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) then begin ShowMessage('Fail to Open'); exit; end; GetCommState(hComm,cc.dcb); cc.dcb.BaudRate:=BaudRate; cc.dcb.ByteSize:=ByteSize; cc.dcb.Parity:=Parity; cc.dcb.StopBits:=StopBits; if not SetCommState(hComm, cc.dcb) then begin result:='SetCommState Error!'; CloseHandle(hComm); exit; end; Connected:=True; end; end; procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); begin OpenPort('COM1:',9600,8,0,0); end; procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject); begin SendString('ABCDEFG'); end; procedure TForm1.SendString(str:String); var lrc:LongWord; begin if (hComm=0) then exit; try if not PurgeComm(hComm, PURGE_TXABORT or PURGE_TXCLEAR) then raise Exception.Create('Unable to purge com: '); except Exit; end; WriteFile(hComm,str,Length(str), lrc, nil); end; end.

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• A couple of pattern matching issues with pattern matching in Lua

  - by Josh

  I'm fairly new to lua programming, but I'm also a quick study. I've been working on a weather forecaster for a program that I use, and it's working well, for the most part. Here is what I have so far. (Pay no attention to the zs.stuff. That is program specific and has no bearing on the lua coding.) if not http then http = require("socket.http") end local locale = string.gsub(zs.params(1),"%s+","%%20") local page = http.request("http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=" .. locale .. "&wuSelect=WEATHER") local location = string.match(page,'title="([%w%s,]+) RSS"') --print("Gathering weather information for " .. location .. ".") --local windspeed = string.match(page,'<span class="nobr"><span class="b">([%d.]+)</span>&nbsp;mph</span>') --print(windspeed) local condition = string.match(page, '<td class="vaM taC"><img src="http://icons-ecast.wxug.com/i/c/a/[%w_]+.gif" width="42" height="42" alt="[%w%s]+" class="condIcon" />') --local image = string.match(page, '<img src="http://icons-ecast.wxug.com/i/c/a/(.+).gif" width="42" height="42" alt="[%w%s]+" class="condIcon" />') local temperature = string.match(page,'pwsvariable="tempf" english="&deg;F" metric="&deg;C" value="([%d.]+)">') local humidity = string.match(page,'pwsvariable="humidity" english="" metric="" value="(%d+)"') zs.say(location) --zs.say("image ./Images/" .. image .. ".gif") zs.say("<color limegreen>Condition:</color> <color white>" .. condition .. "</color>") zs.say("<color limegreen>Temperature: </color><color white>" .. temperature .. "F</color>") zs.say("<color limegreen>Humidity: </color><color white>" .. humidity .. "%</color>") My main issue is this: I changed the 'condition' and added the 'image' variables to what they are now. Even though the line it's supposed to be matching comes directly from the webpage, it fails to match at all. So I'm wondering what it is I'm missing that's preventing this code from working. If I take out the <td class="vaM taC">< img src="http://icons-ecast.wxug.com/i/c/a/[%w_]+.gif" it'll match condition flawlessly. (For whatever reason, I can't get the above line to display correctly, but there is no space between the `< and img) Can anyone point out what is wrong with it? Aside from the pattern matching, I assure you the line is verbatim from the webpage. Another question I had is the ability to match across line breaks. Is there any possible way to do this? The reason why I ask is because on that same page, a few of the things I need to match are broken up on separate lines, and since the actual pattern I'm wanting to match shows up in other places on the page, I need to be able to match across line breaks to get the exact pattern. I appreciate any help in this matter!

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• Resons why I'm using php rather then asp.net [closed]

  - by spirytus

  I have basic idea of how asp .Net works, but finds all framework hard to use if you are a newbie. I found compiling, web applications vs websites and all that stuff you should know to program in asp .net a bit tedious and so personally I go with php to create small, to medium applications for my clients. There are couple of reasons for it: php is easy scripting language, top to bottom and you done. You still can create objects, classes and if you have idea of MVC its fairly easy to create basic structure yourself so you can keep you presentation layer "relatively" clean. Although I find myself still mixing basic logic in my view's, I am trying to stick to booleans, and for each loops. ASP .net keeps it cleaner as far as I know and I agree that this is great. Heaps of free stuff for php and lots of help everywhere Although choice of IDE's for php is very limited, I still don't have to be stuck with VisualStudio. Lets be honest.. you can program in whatever you like but does anyone uses anything else other than VS? For basic applications I create, Visual Studio doesn't come even close to notepad :) / phpEdit (or similar) combination. It lacks of many features I constantly use, although armies of developers are using it and it must be for good reason. Personally not a big fan of VS though. Being on the market for that long should make editing much easier. I know .Net comes with awesome set of controls, validators etc. which is truly awesome. For me the problem starts if I want my validator to behave slightly different way and lets say fade in/out error messages. I know its possible to extend it behavior, plug into lifecycle and output different JS to the client and so on. I just never see it happen in places I work, and honestly, I don't even think most of .net developers I worked with during last couple of years would know how to do that. In php I have to grab some plugin for jQuery and use it for validation, which is fairly easy task once you had done it before. Again I'm sure its easy for .net gurus, but for newbie like me its almost impossible. I found that many asp .net programmers are very limited in what they are able to do and basically whack together .net applications using same lame set of controls, not even bothering in looking into how it works and what if? Now I don't want to anger anyone :) I know there is huge number of excellent .Net developers who know their stuff and are able to extend controls and do all that magic in no time. I found it a bit annoying though that many of them stick to what is provided without even trying to make it better. Nothing against .net here, just a thought really :) I remember when asp.net came out the idea was that front-end people will not be able to screw anything up and do their fron-end stuff without worrying what happens behind. Now its never that easy and I always tend to get server side people to fix this and that during development. Things like ID's assigned to controls can very easily make your application break and if someone is pure HTML guy using VS its easy to break something. Thats my thoughs on php and .net and reasons why for my work I go with php. I know that once learned asp .net is awesome technology and summing all up php doesn't even come close to it. For someone like me however, individually developing small basic applications for clients, php seems to work much better. Please let me know your thoughts on the above :)

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• Launching Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent not working on saved image file

  - by Savvas Dalkitsis

  First of all let me say that this questions is slightly connected to another question by me. Actually it was created because of that. I have the following code to write a bitmap downloaded from the net to a file in the sd card: // Get image from url URL u = new URL(url); HttpGet httpRequest = new HttpGet(u.toURI()); HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpResponse response = (HttpResponse) httpclient.execute(httpRequest); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); BufferedHttpEntity bufHttpEntity = new BufferedHttpEntity(entity); InputStream instream = bufHttpEntity.getContent(); Bitmap bmImg = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(instream); instream.close(); // Write image to a file in sd card File posterFile = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath()+"/Android/data/com.myapp/files/image.jpg"); posterFile.createNewFile(); BufferedOutputStream out = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(posterFile)); Bitmap mutable = Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(bmImg,bmImg.getWidth(),bmImg.getHeight(),true); mutable.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, out); out.flush(); out.close(); // Launch default viewer for the file Intent intent = new Intent(); intent.setAction(android.content.Intent.ACTION_VIEW); intent.setDataAndType(Uri.parse(posterFile.getAbsolutePath()),"image/*"); ((Activity) getContext()).startActivity(intent); A few notes. I am creating the "mutable" bitmap after seeing someone using it and it seems to work better than without it. And i am using the parse method on the Uri class and not the fromFile because in my code i am calling these in different places and when i am creating the intent i have a string path instead of a file. Now for my problem. The file gets created. The intent launches a dialog asking me to select a viewer. I have 3 viewers installed. The Astro image viewer, the default media gallery (i have a milstone on 2.1 but on the milestone the 2.1 update did not include the 3d gallery so it's the old one) and the 3d gallery from the nexus one (i found the apk in the wild). Now when i launch the 3 viewers the following happen: Astro image viewer: The activity launches but i see nothing but a black screen. Media Gallery: i get an exception dialog shown "The application Media Gallery (process com.motorola.gallery) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again" with a force close option. 3D gallery: Everything works as it should. When i try to simply open the file using the Astro file manager (browse to it and simply click) i get the same option dialog but this time things are different: Astro image viewer: Everything works as it should. Media Gallery: Everything works as it should. 3D gallery: The activity launches but i see nothing but a black screen. As you can see everything is a complete mess. I have no idea why this happens but it happens like this every single time. It's not a random bug. Am i missing something when i am creating the intent? Or when i am creating the image file? Any ideas?

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• Maze not being random.

  - by Matt Habel

  Hey there, I am building a program that generates a maze so I can later translate the path to my graphical part. I have most of it working, however, every time you can just take the east and south routes, and you'll get to the end. Even if I set the width as high as 64, so the maze is 64*64, I'm able to choose those 2 options and get to the end every time. I really don't understand why it is doing that. The code is below, it's fairly easy to understand. import random width = 8 def check(x,y): """Figures out the directions that Gen can move while""" if x-1 == -1: maze[x][y][3] = 0 if x+1 == width + 1: maze[x][y][1] = 0 if y+1 == width + 1: maze[x][y][2] = 0 if y-1 == -1: maze[x][y][0] = 0 if x + 1 in range(0,width) and visited[x+1][y] == False: maze[x][y][1] = 2 if x - 1 in range(0,width) and visited[x-1][y] == False: maze[x][y][3] = 2 if y + 1 in range(0,width) and visited[x][y+1] == False: maze[x][y][2] = 2 if y - 1 in range(0,width) and visited[x][y-1] == False: maze[x][y][0] = 2 def possibleDirs(x,y): """Figures out the ways that the person can move in each square""" dirs = [] walls = maze[x][y] if walls[0] == 1: dirs.append('n') if walls[1] == 1: dirs.append('e') if walls[2] == 1: dirs.append('s') if walls[3] == 1: dirs.append('w') return dirs def Gen(x,y): """Generates the maze using a depth-first search and recursive backtracking.""" visited[x][y] = True dirs = [] check(x,y) if maze[x][y][0] == 2: dirs.append(0) if maze[x][y][1] == 2: dirs.append(1) if maze[x][y][2] == 2: dirs.append(2) if maze[x][y][3] == 2: dirs.append(3) print dirs if len(dirs): #Randonly selects a derection for the current square to move past.append(current[:]) pos = random.choice(dirs) maze[x][y][pos] = 1 if pos == 0: current[1] -= 1 maze[x][y-1][2] = 1 if pos == 1: current[0] += 1 maze[x+1][y][3] = 1 if pos == 2: current[1] += 1 maze[x][y+1][0] = 1 if pos == 3: current[0] -= 1 maze[x-1][y][1] = 1 else: #If there's nowhere to go, go back one square lastPlace = past.pop() current[0] = lastPlace[0] current[1] = lastPlace[1] #Build the initial values for the maze to be replaced later maze = [] visited = [] past = [] #Generate empty 2d list with a value for each of the xy coordinates for i in range(0,width): maze.append([]) for q in range(0, width): maze[i].append([]) for n in range(0, 4): maze[i][q].append(4) #Makes a list of falses for all the non visited places for x in range(0, width): visited.append([]) for y in range(0, width): visited[x].append(False) dirs = [] print dirs current = [0,0] #Generates the maze so every single square has been filled. I'm not sure how this works, as it is possible to only go south and east to get to the final position. while current != [width-1, width-1]: Gen(current[0], current[1]) #Getting the ways the person can move in each square for i in range(0,width): dirs.append([]) for n in range(0,width): dirs[i].append([]) dirs[i][n] = possibleDirs(i,n) print dirs print visited pos = [0,0] #The user input part of the maze while pos != [width - 1, width - 1]: dirs = [] print pos if maze[pos[0]][pos[1]][0] == 1: dirs.append('n') if maze[pos[0]][pos[1]][1] == 1: dirs.append('e') if maze[pos[0]][pos[1]][2] == 1: dirs.append('s') if maze[pos[0]][pos[1]][3] == 1: dirs.append('w') print dirs path = raw_input("What direction do you want to go: ") if path not in dirs: print "You can't go that way!" continue elif path.lower() == 'n': pos[1] -= 1 elif path.lower() == 'e': pos[0] += 1 elif path.lower() == 's': pos[1] += 1 elif path.lower() == 'w': pos[0] -= 1 print"Good job!" As you can see, I think the problem is at the point where I generate the maze, however, when I just have it go until the current point is at the end, it doesn't fill every maze and is usually just one straight path. Thanks for helping. Update: I have changed the for loop that generates the maze to a simple while loop and it seems to work much better. It seems that when the for loop ran, it didn't go recursively, however, in the while loop it's perfectly fine. However, now all the squares do not fill out.

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• Using ASP.NET MVC 2 with Ninject 2 from scratch

  - by Rune Jacobsen

  I just did File - New Project last night on a new project. Ah, the smell of green fields. I am using the just released ASP.NET MVC 2 (i.e. no preview or release candidate, the real thing), and thought I'd get off to a good start using Ninject 2 (also released version) with the MVC extensions. I downloaded the MVC extensions project, opened it in VS2008Sp1, built it in release mode, and then went into the mvc2\build\release folder and copied Ninject.dll and Ninject.Web.Mvc.dll from there to the Libraries folder on my project (so that I can lug them around in source control and always have the right version everywhere). I didn't include the corresponding .xml files - should I? Do they just provide intellisense, or some other function? Not a big deal I believe. Anyhoo, I followed the most up-to-date advice I could find; I referenced the DLLs in my MVC2 project, then went to work on Global.asax.cs. First I made it inherit from NinjectHttpApplication. I removed the Application_Start() method, and overrode OnApplicationStarted() instead. Here is that method: protected override void OnApplicationStarted() { base.OnApplicationStarted(); AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); // RegisterAllControllersIn(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()); } And I also followed the advice of VS and implemented the CreateKernel method: protected override Ninject.IKernel CreateKernel() { // RegisterAllControllersIn(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()); return new StandardKernel(); } That is all. No other modifications to the project. You'll notice that the RegisterAllControllersIn() method is commented out in two places above. I've figured I can run it in three different combinations, all with their funky side effects; Running it like above. I am then presented with the standard "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC" page in all its' glory. However, after this page is displayed correctly in the browser, VS shows me an exception that was thrown. It throws in NinjectControllerFactory.GetControllerInstance(), which was called with a NULL value in the controllerType parameter. Notice that this happens after the /Home page is rendered - I have no idea why it is called again, and by using breakpoints I've already determined that GetControllerInstance() has been successfully called for the HomeController. Why this new call with controllerType as null? I really have no idea. Pressing F5 at this time takes me back to the browser, no complaints there. Uncommenting the RegisterAllControllersIn() method in CreateKernel() This is where stuff is really starting to get funky. Now I get a 404 error. Some times I have also gotten an ArgumentNullException on the RegisterAllControllersIn() line, but that is pretty rare, and I have not been able to reproduce it. Uncommenting the RegisterAllControllers() method in OnApplicationStarted() (And putting the comment back on the one in CreateKernel()) Results in behavior that seems exactly like that in point 1. So to keep from going on forever - is there an exact step-by-step guide on how to set up an MVC 2 project with Ninject 2 (both non-beta release versions) to get the controllers provided by Ninject? Of course I will then start providing some actual stuff for injection (like ISession objects and repositories, loggers etc), but I thought I'd get this working first. Any help will be highly appreciated! (Also posted to the Ninject Google Group)

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• How to pre-load all deployed assemblies for an AppDomain

  - by Andras Zoltan

  Given an App Domain, there are many different locations that Fusion (the .Net assembly loader) will probe for a given assembly. Obviously, we take this functionality for granted and, since the probing appears to be embedded within the .Net runtime (Assembly._nLoad internal method seems to be the entry-point when Reflect-Loading - and I assume that implicit loading is probably covered by the same underlying algorithm), as developers we don't seem to be able to gain access to those search paths. My problem is that I have a component that does a lot of dynamic type resolution, and which needs to be able to ensure that all user-deployed assemblies for a given AppDomain are pre-loaded before it starts its work. Yes, it slows down startup - but the benefits we get from this component totally outweight this. The basic loading algorithm I've already written is as follows. It deep-scans a set of folders for any .dll (.exes are being excluded at the moment), and uses Assembly.LoadFrom to load the dll if it's AssemblyName cannot be found in the set of assemblies already loaded into the AppDomain (this is implemented inefficiently, but it can be optimized later): void PreLoad(IEnumerable<string> paths) { foreach(path p in paths) { PreLoad(p); } } void PreLoad(string p) { //all try/catch blocks are elided for brevity string[] files = null; files = Directory.GetFiles(p, "*.dll", SearchOption.AllDirectories); AssemblyName a = null; foreach (var s in files) { a = AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(s); if (!AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().Any( assembly => AssemblyName.ReferenceMatchesDefinition( assembly.GetName(), a))) Assembly.LoadFrom(s); } } LoadFrom is used because I've found that using Load() can lead to duplicate assemblies being loaded by Fusion if, when it probes for it, it doesn't find one loaded from where it expects to find it. So, with this in place, all I now have to do is to get a list in precedence order (highest to lowest) of the search paths that Fusion is going to be using when it searches for an assembly. Then I can simply iterate through them. The GAC is irrelevant for this, and I'm not interested in any environment-driven fixed paths that Fusion might use - only those paths that can be gleaned from the AppDomain which contain assemblies expressly deployed for the app. My first iteration of this simply used AppDomain.BaseDirectory. This works for services, form apps and console apps. It doesn't work for an Asp.Net website, however, since there are at least two main locations - the AppDomain.DynamicDirectory (where Asp.Net places it's dynamically generated page classes and any assemblies that the Aspx page code references), and then the site's Bin folder - which can be discovered from the AppDomain.SetupInformation.PrivateBinPath property. So I now have working code for the most basic types of apps now (Sql Server-hosted AppDomains are another story since the filesystem is virtualised) - but I came across an interesting issue a couple of days ago where this code simply doesn't work: the nUnit test runner. This uses both Shadow Copying (so my algorithm would need to be discovering and loading them from the shadow-copy drop folder, not from the bin folder) and it sets up the PrivateBinPath as being relative to the base directory. And of course there are loads of other hosting scenarios that I probably haven't considered; but which must be valid because otherwise Fusion would choke on loading the assemblies. I want to stop feeling around and introducing hack upon hack to accommodate these new scenarios as they crop up - what I want is, given an AppDomain and its setup information, the ability to produce this list of Folders that I should scan in order to pick up all the DLLs that are going to be loaded; regardless of how the AppDomain is setup. If Fusion can see them as all the same, then so should my code. Of course, I might have to alter the algorithm if .Net changes its internals - that's just a cross I'll have to bear. Equally, I'm happy to consider SQL Server and any other similar environments as edge-cases that remain unsupported for now. Any ideas!?

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• Where to Store the Protection Trial Info for Software Protection Purpose

  - by Peter Lee

  It might be duplicate with other questions, but I swear that I googled a lot and search at StackOverflow.com a lot, and I cannot find the answer to my question: In a C#.Net application, where to store the protection trial info, such as Expiration Date, Number of Used Times? I understand that, all kinds of Software Protection strategies can be cracked by a sophiscated hacker (because they can almost always get around the expiration checking step). But what I'm now going to do is just to protect it in a reasonable manner that a "common"/"advanced" user cannot screw it up. OK, in order to proof that I have googled and searched a lot at StackOverflow.com, I'm listing all the possible strategies I got: 1. Registry Entry First, some users might not have the access to even read the Registry table. Second, if we put the Protection Trial Info in a Registry Entry, the user can always find it out where it is by comparing the differences before and after the software installation. They can just simply change it. OK, you might say that we should encrypt the Protection Trial Info, yes we can do that. But what if the user just change their system date before installing? OK, you might say that we should also put a last-used date, if something is wrong, the last-used date could work as a protection guide. But what if the user just uninstall the software and delete all Registry Entries related to this software, and then reinstall the software? I have no idea on how to deal with this. Please help. A Plain File First, there are some places to put the plain file: 2.a) a simple XML file under software installation path 2.b) configuration file Again, the user can just uninstall the software and remove these plain file(s), and reinstall the software. - The Software Itself If we put the protection trial info (Expiration Date, we cannot put Number of Used Times) in the software itself, it is still susceptible to the cases I mentioned above. Furthermore, it's not even cool to do so. - A Trial Product-Key It works like a licensing process, that is, we put the Trial info into an RSA-signed string. However, it requires too many steps for a user to have a try of using the software (they might lose patience): 4.a) The user downloads the software; 4.b) The user sends an email to request a Trial Product-Key by providing user name (or email) or hardware info; 4.c) The server receives the request, RSA-signs it and send back to the user; 4.d) The user can now use it under the condition of (Expiration Date & Number of Used Times). Now, the server has a record of the user's username or hardware info, so the user will be rejected to request a second trial. Is it legal to collection hardware info? In a word, the user has to do one more extra step (request a Trial Product Key) just for having a try of using the software, which is not cool (thinking myself as a user). NOTE: This question is not about the Licensing, instead, it's about where to store the TRIAL info. After the trial expires, the user should ask for a license (CD-Key/Product-Key). I'm going to use RSA signature (bound to User Hardware)

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• UI android question/problem with Listview

  - by user309554

  Hi, I'm trying to recreate the UI screen called 'My Places' that is used in the Weather Channel app. I'd attach a screenshot of the screen, but I can't seem to do it here. It seems they're using two listviews one on top of the other, but I'm not sure for certain. Could anybody confirm this for me? If they are doing this, how is this done? I've tried to implement this, but without full success. My top listview 'Add a place' 'comes up correctly, but the bottom listview will not appear/populate for me? I shall attach my code so far...... Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Simon header_row.xml ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" ImageView android:id="@+id/icon" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:layout_marginRight="6dip" android:src="@drawable/ic_menu_add" / LinearLayout android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="0dip" android:layout_weight="1" android:layout_height="fill_parent" TextView android:id="@+id/caption" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="0dip" android:layout_weight="1" android:gravity="center_vertical" android:text="Add a place"/ /LinearLayout /LinearLayout main.xml ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="?android:attr/listPreferredItemHeight" android:padding="6dip" ListView android:id="@+id/header" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content"/ LinearLayout android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" ListView android:id="@+id/list" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"/ /LinearLayout /LinearLayout public class ListViewTest extends Activity { private static String[] items={"lorem", "ipsum", "dolor", "sit", "amet", "consectetuer", "adipiscing", "elit", "morbi", "vel", "ligula", "vitae", "arcu", "aliquet", "mollis", "etiam", "vel", "erat", "placerat", "ante", "porttitor", "sodales", "pellentesque", "augue", "purus"}; private ListView Header; private ListView List; private ArrayList caption = null; private CaptionAdapter adapter; private ArrayAdapter listAdapter; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); caption = new ArrayList(); Caption cap = new Caption(); cap.setCaption("Add a place"); caption.add(cap); this.adapter = new CaptionAdapter(this, R.layout.header_row, caption); Header = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.header); Header.setAdapter(adapter); //Log.d("ListViewTest", "caption size is:" + caption.size()); adapter.notifyDataSetChanged(); List = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.list); listAdapter = new ArrayAdapter(this, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1, items); List.setAdapter(listAdapter); listAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged(); //setListAdapter(new ArrayAdapter(this, //android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1, //items)); } private class CaptionAdapter extends ArrayAdapter { private ArrayList caption; public CaptionAdapter(Context context, int textViewResourceId, ArrayList caption) { super(context, textViewResourceId, caption); this.caption = caption; } @Override public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) { View v = convertView; if (v == null) { LayoutInflater vi = (LayoutInflater)getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE); v = vi.inflate(R.layout.header_row, null); } Caption c = caption.get(position); if (c != null) { TextView caption = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.caption); if (caption != null) { caption.setText(c.getCaption()); } } return v; } } }

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