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• Bind two images together to be dragged

  - by Ryan Beaulieu

  I'm looking for some help with a script to drag two images together at once. I currently have a script that allows me to drag thumbnail images into a collection bin to be saved later. However, some of my thumbnails have an image positioned over the top of them to represent these thumbnail images as "unknown" plants. I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction as to how I would go about binding these two images together to be dragged. Here is my code: $(document).ready(function() { var limit = 16; var counter = 0; $("#mainBin1, #mainBin2, #mainBin3, #mainBin4, #mainBin5, #bin_One_Hd, #bin_Two_Hd, #bin_Three_Hd, #bin_Four_Hd, #bin_Five_Hd").droppable({ accept: ".selector, .plant_Unknown", drop: function(event, ui) { counter++; if (counter == limit) { $(this).droppable("disable"); } $(this).append($(ui.draggable).clone()); $("#cbOptions").show(); $(".item").draggable({ containment: "parent", grid: [72,72], }); } }); $(".selector").draggable({ helper: "clone", revert: "invalid", revertDuration: 700, opacity: 0.75, }); $(".plant_Unknown").draggable({ helper: "clone", revert: "invalid", revertDuration: 700, opacity: 0.75, }); }); Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. EDIT: Website

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• Building a calendar navigation in Rails (controller and view links)

  - by user532339

  Trying to get the next month when clicking the link_to. I've done the following in the view. <%= form_tag rota_days_path, :method => 'get' do %> <p> <%= hidden_field_tag(:next_month, @t1) %> <%= link_to 'Next Month', rota_days_path(:next_month => @next_month)%> </p> <% end %> class RotaDaysController < ApplicationController # GET /rota_days # GET /rota_days.json # load_and_authorize_resource respond_to :json, :html def index @rota_days = RotaDay.all @hospitals = Hospital.all @t1 = Date.today.at_beginning_of_month @t2 = Date.today.end_of_month @dates = (@t1..@t2) #Concat variable t1 + t2 together # @next_month = Date.today + 1.month(params[: ??? ] #Old if params[:next_month] # @next_month = Date.today >> 1 @next_month = params[:next_month] + 1.month @t1 = @next_month.at_beginning_of_month @t2 = @next_month.end_of_month @dates = (@t1..@t2) end @title = "Rota" respond_to do |format| format.html # index.html.erb format.json { render json: @rota_days } end end I have identified that the reason why this may not be working is in because of the following in my controller @next_month = params[:next_month] + 1.month the last two called methods is defined only on time/date objects. but not on fixnum/string objects. I understand I am missing something from this Update I have found that the actual issue is that the `params[:next_month] is a string and I am trying to add a date to to it. Which means I need to convert the string to a date/time object. Console output: Started GET "/rota_days" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-12-14 22:14:36 +0000 Processing by RotaDaysController#index as HTML User Load (0.0ms) SELECT `users`.* FROM `users` WHERE `users`.`id` = 1 LIMIT 1 RotaDay Load (0.0ms) SELECT `rota_days`.* FROM `rota_days` Hospital Load (1.0ms) SELECT `hospitals`.* FROM `hospitals` Rendered rota_days/index.html.erb within layouts/application (23.0ms) Role Load (0.0ms) SELECT `roles`.* FROM `roles` INNER JOIN `roles_users` ON `roles`.`id` = `roles_users`.`role_id` WHERE `roles_users`.`user_id` = 1 AND `roles`.`name` = 'Administrator' LIMIT 1 Completed 200 OK in 42ms (Views: 39.0ms | ActiveRecord: 1.0ms)

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• sortable list using jquery ui not passing updated list order

  - by Matthew Berman

  I am following the sortable lists railscast and got everything working except when I sort, the same (original) order gets passed to the update method each time, so it doesn't update the true order. Here's the code: In the view: %tbody#lineup{"data-update-url" => sort_lineups_url} - @lineup.pieces.each_with_index do |piece, index| = content_tag_for :tr, piece do = render 'piece', :piece => piece, :index => index and pieces.js.coffee: jQuery -> $('#lineup').sortable( axis: 'y' update: -> $.post($(this).data('update-url'), $(this).sortable('serialize')) ); sort and show methods of lineupscontroller: def show @lineup = Lineup.find_by_user_id(current_user.id) @pieces = @lineup.pieces.order("position") end def sort params[:piece].each_with_index do |id, index| current_user.lineup.pieces.update_all({position: index+1}, {id: id}) end render nothing: true end and the update request: Started POST "/lineups/sort" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-06-24 20:06:14 -0700 Processing by LineupsController#sort as */* Parameters: {"piece"=>["8", "2", "1", "4", "3", "7"]} User Load (0.4ms) SELECT `users`.* FROM `users` WHERE `users`.`id` = 2 LIMIT 1 Lineup Load (0.6ms) SELECT `lineups`.* FROM `lineups` WHERE `lineups`.`user_id` = 2 LIMIT 1 SQL (2.9ms) UPDATE `pieces` INNER JOIN `piece_lineups` ON `pieces`.`id` = `piece_lineups`.`piece_id` SET `position` = 1 WHERE `piece_lineups`.`lineup_id` = 3 AND `pieces`.`id` = 8 SQL (0.6ms) UPDATE `pieces` INNER JOIN `piece_lineups` ON `pieces`.`id` = `piece_lineups`.`piece_id` SET `position` = 2 WHERE `piece_lineups`.`lineup_id` = 3 AND `pieces`.`id` = 2 SQL (0.6ms) UPDATE `pieces` INNER JOIN `piece_lineups` ON `pieces`.`id` = `piece_lineups`.`piece_id` SET `position` = 3 WHERE `piece_lineups`.`lineup_id` = 3 AND `pieces`.`id` = 1 SQL (0.5ms) UPDATE `pieces` INNER JOIN `piece_lineups` ON `pieces`.`id` = `piece_lineups`.`piece_id` SET `position` = 4 WHERE `piece_lineups`.`lineup_id` = 3 AND `pieces`.`id` = 4 SQL (0.6ms) UPDATE `pieces` INNER JOIN `piece_lineups` ON `pieces`.`id` = `piece_lineups`.`piece_id` SET `position` = 5 WHERE `piece_lineups`.`lineup_id` = 3 AND `pieces`.`id` = 3 SQL (0.5ms) UPDATE `pieces` INNER JOIN `piece_lineups` ON `pieces`.`id` = `piece_lineups`.`piece_id` SET `position` = 6 WHERE `piece_lineups`.`lineup_id` = 3 AND `pieces`.`id` = 7 Rendered text template (0.0ms) so each time i drag+drop the list, it sends the same order again. what am I doing wrong that the params isn't passing the right, updated order? Completed 200 OK in 2757ms (Views: 1.0ms | ActiveRecord: 6.7ms)

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• expected identifier or '(' before '{' token in Flex

  - by user1829177

  I am trying to use Flex to parse 'C' source code. Unfortunately I am getting the error "expected identifier or '(' before '{' token" on lines 1,12,13,14... . Any ideas why? %{ %} digit [0-9] letter [a-zA-Z] number (digit)+ id (letter|_)(letter|digit|_)* integer (int) character (char) comma [,] %% {integer} {return INT;} {character} {return CHAR;} {number} {return NUM;} {id} {return IDENTIFIER;} {comma} {return ',';} [-+*/] {return *yytext;} . {} %% main() { yylex(); } The corresponding flex file is as shown below: %{ #include <ctype.h> #include <stdio.h> #include "myhead.h" #include "mini.l" #define YYSTYPE double # undef fprintf %} %token INT %token CHAR %token IDENTIFIER %token NUM %token ',' %left '+' '-' %left '*' '/' %right UMINUS %% lines:lines expr '\n' {printf("%g\n",$2);} |lines '\n' |D | ; expr :expr '*' expr {$$=$1*$3;} |expr '/' expr {$$=$1/$3;} |expr '+' expr {$$=$1+$3;} |expr '-' expr {$$=$1+$3;} |'(' expr ')' {$$=$2;} |'-' expr %prec UMINUS {$$=-$2;} |IDENTIFIER {} |NUM {} ; T :INT {} |CHAR {} ; L :L ',' IDENTIFIER {} |IDENTIFIER {} ; D :T L {printf("T is %g, L is %g",$1,$2);} ; %% /*void yyerror (char *s) { fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", s); } */ I am compiling the generated code using the command: gcc my_file.c -ly

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• dividing two array elements

  - by pradeep

  main() { int prime_array[2339],prime1_count=0,mul1_count=0; int i, prime, lim_up, lim_low, n,j=0; int mul,count=0; int mul_count[65026]={0},number[7096]; printf("\n ENTER THE LOWER LIMIT…: "); scanf("%d", &lim_low); printf("\n ENTER THE UPPER LIMIT…: "); scanf("%d", &lim_up); for(n=lim_low+1; n<lim_up; n++) { prime = 1; for(i=2; i<n; i++) if(n%i == 0) { prime = 0; break; } if(prime) { prime_array[j]=n; j++; } } for(i=1;i<=255;i++) { for(j=1;j<=255;j++) { mul = j*i; mul_count[mul]++; } } for(i=1;i<=65025;i++) if( mul_count[i]!=2 && mul_count[i]!=0 ) { number[count]=i; count++; } for(prime1_count=0;prime1_count<2339;prime1_count++) { printf("\nprime number used is:%d",prime_array[prime1_count]); for(mul1_count=0;mul1_count<7096;mul1_count++) { printf("\n%d\t",number[mul1_count] % prime_array[prime1_count]); } } } I want to find the modulus of (number[mul1_count] % prime_array[prime1_count] ), but the output which I get is wrong. What is the mistake here. The prime number should be in the range 40000 to 65025. What changes should i make here?

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• Boolean comparison of array of strings in Ruby

  - by Kyle Kaitan

  I've got an array in Ruby that essentially represents a square boolean matrix. Dots represent zeroes, while any other character represents ones. Example: irb(main):044:0> g => [".b", "m."] # This grid has two '1' values and two '0' values. I'd like to perform a specified logical operation (say, OR) on this array with another similar array to get a third result. For example, if h is ["q.", "r."], then something akin to g.perform_or(h) should yield a new array ["qb", "r."]. (The choice of r to represent the result of 'm' || 'r' is arbitrary and not relevant; any other non-'.' character can be there.) How might I do this? Edit: I made an error in my example. Apologies!

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• What is my error in a map in java?

  - by amveg

  Hello everyone I am trying to solve this problem: http://www.cstutoringcenter.com/problems/problems.php?id=4, but I cant figure out why my code doesnt solve this, I mean in the "for" how can I can multiply the letters? what is my error?, It just tell always 7, but I want to multiple all the letters, I hope you can help me enter code here public class ejercicio3 { public static void main(String args[]) { Map<Character, Integer> telefono = new HashMap<Character, Integer>(); telefono.put('A', 2); telefono.put('B', 2); telefono.put('C', 2); telefono.put('D', 3); telefono.put('E', 3); telefono.put('F', 3); telefono.put('G', 4); telefono.put('H', 4); telefono.put('I', 4); telefono.put('J', 5); telefono.put('K', 5); telefono.put('L', 5); telefono.put('M', 6); telefono.put('N', 6); telefono.put('O', 6); telefono.put('P', 7); telefono.put('R', 7); telefono.put('S', 7); telefono.put('T', 8); telefono.put('U', 8); telefono.put('V', 8); telefono.put('W', 9); telefono.put('X', 9); telefono.put('Y', 9); String mensaje = "Practice"; int producto = 1; for (char c : mensaje.toCharArray()) { if (telefono.containsKey(c)) { producto = telefono.get(c) * producto; System.out.println(producto); } } } }

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• Length of a string in pixels

  - by Rose

  Guys, I'm populating a dropDownList with arrayCollection of strings. I want the width of the drop down list control to match with the size (in pixels) of the longest string in the array collection. The problem I'm facing is: the font width of the strings in the collection are different e.g. 'W' looks wider than 'l'. So I estimated the width of a character to be 8 pixels but that's not pretty neat. If a string that has many 'W' and 'M' is encountered the estimation is wrong. So I want precise pixel width of strings. How can i get the exact length of a string in pixels?? My solution that estimates all character to be 8 pixels wide is given below: public function populateDropDownList():void{ var array:Array = new Array("o","two","three four five six seven eight wwww"); var sampleArrayCollection:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection(array); var customDropDownList:DropDownList = new DropDownList(); customDropDownList.dataProvider=sampleArrayCollection; customDropDownList.prompt="Select ..."; customDropDownList.labelField="Answer Options:"; //calculating the max width var componentWidth=10; //default for each(var answerText in array){ Alert.show("Txt size: "+ answerText.length + " pixels: " + answerText.length*9); if(answerText.length * 8 > componentWidth){ componentWidth=answerText.length * 8; } } customDropDownList.width=componentWidth; answers.addChild(customDropDownList); } Any idea or solution is highly valued. Thanks

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• txt file read/overwrite/append. Is this feasible? (Visual C#)

  - by Arcadian

  Hi, I'm writing a program for some data entry I have to periodically do. I have begun testing a few things that the program will have to do but i'm not sure about this part. What i need this part to do is: read a .txt file of data take the first 12 characters from each line take the first 12 characters from each line of the data that has been entered in a multi-line text box compare the two lists line by line if one of the 12 character blocks from the multi-line text box match one of the blocks in the .txt file then overwrite that entire line (only 17 characters in total) if one of the 12 character blocks from the multi-line text box DO NOT match any of the blocks in the.txt file then append that entire line to the file thats all it has to do. i'll do an example: TXT FILE: G01:78:08:32 JG05 G08:80:93:10 JG02 G28:58:29:28 JG04 MULTI-LINE TEXT BOX: G01:78:08:32 JG06 G28:58:29:28 JG03 G32:10:18:14 JG01 G32:18:50:78 JG07 RESULTING TXT FILE: G01:78:08:32 JG06 G08:80:93:10 JG02 G28:58:29:28 JG03 G32:10:18:14 JG01 G32:18:50:78 JG07 as you can see lines 1 and 3 were overwriten, line 2 was left alone as it did not match any blocks in the text box, lines 4 and 5 were appended to the file. thats all i want it to do. How do i go about this? Thanks in advance

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• PHP download script for "processes running limited" hosting (eg. hostgator)

  - by Joe

  I am currently with HostGator on a shared hosting plan. I have a new website I'm trying to setup with a download.php script. The issue I am having is that, while someone is "downloading" a file through the download.php script, it counts as a "process" and my hosting plan limits the processes that can be running at the same time to 25 at present. My question is, what options do I have? a). Move to new web hosting that doesn't limit processes running. b). Change the way files are downloaded. I would like to choose option b), however it occurs to me that I need to have the file accessed through PHP in order to restrict the number of downloads and to track download statistics, as well as protecting against hotlinking. If there was a way to have the PHP script send them the file so that the process doesn't need to be running the whole time the file is being downloaded, I would eliminate the problem, however to my knowledge that isn't possible. Should I make the move to a new hosting company? I really enjoy HostGator as they have provided the best hosting experience for me thus far, except for this one issue of course, so I don't want to go on the hunt for another decent shared hosting company that doesn't limit processes running, only to find out there is another restriction or "catch" to the shared hosting deal.

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• How do you protect yourself from runaway memory consumption bringing down the PC?

  - by romkyns

  Every now and again I find myself doing something moderately dumb that results in my program allocating all the memory it can get and then some. This kind of thing used to cause the program to die fairly quickly with an "out of memory" error, but these days Windows will go out of its way to give this non-existent memory to the application, and in fact is apparently prepared to commit suicide doing so. Not literally of course, but it will starve itself of usable physical RAM so badly that even running the task manager will require half an hour of swapping (after all the runaway application is still allocating more and more memory all the time). This doesn't happen too often, but when it does it's disastrous. I usually have to reset my machine, causing data loss from time to time and generally a lot of inconvenience. Do you have any practical advice on making the consequences of such a mistake less dire? Perhaps some registry tweak to limit the max amount of virtual memory an app is allowed to allocate? Or some CLR flag that will limit this only for the current application? (It's usually in .NET that I do this to myself.) ("Don't run out of RAM" and "Buy more RAM" are no use - the former I have no control over, and the latter I've already done.)

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• why is Active Record firing extra query when I use Includes method to fetch data

  - by riddhi_agrawal

  I have the following model structure: class Group < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :group_products, :dependent => :destroy has_many :products, :through => :group_products end class Product < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :group_products, :dependent => :destroy has_many :groups, :through => :group_products end class GroupProduct < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :group belongs_to :product end I wanted to minimize my database queries so I decided to use includes.In the console I tried something like, groups = Group.includes(:products) my development logs show the following calls, Group Load (403.0ms) SELECT `groups`.* FROM `groups` GroupProduct Load (60.0ms) SELECT `group_products`.* FROM `group_products` WHERE (`group_products`.group_id IN (1,3,14,15,16,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,33,42,49,51)) Product Load (22.0ms) SELECT `products`.* FROM `products` WHERE (`products`.`id` IN (382,304,353,12,63,103,104,105,262,377,263,264,265,283,284,285,286,287,302,306,307,308,328,335,336,337,340,355,59,60,61,247,309,311,66,30,274,294,324,350,140,176,177,178,64,240,327,332,338,380,383,252,254,255,256,257,325,326)) Product Load (10.0ms) SELECT `products`.* FROM `products` WHERE (`products`.`id` = 377) LIMIT 1 I could analyze the initial three calls were necessary but don't get the reason why the last database call is made, Product Load (10.0ms) SELECT `products`.* FROM `products` WHERE (`products`.`id` = 377) LIMIT 1 Any idea why this is happening? Thanks in advance. :)

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• Limiting number of text lines in a table cell

  - by Kuzco

  I have a table cell where I need to limit the text to a max of two lines. I tried achieving this by placing an inner div with a limited height: div { border: 1px solid #EECCDD; width: 100px; height: 40px; overflow: hidden; } <div> <p>bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla</p> </div> <div> <p>bla bla bla bla</p> </div> However, in this case the cells which have only one line of text are not vertically aligned to the middle. I know there are ways to vertically align a text within a div, but most of the ones I found seemed a bit complicated and/or hacky (like this one), and felt like a bit of an overkill. Is there a different way to effectively limit the number of lines inside the cell, or a simple way to align the text in the way I did it?

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• How can I get size in bytes of an object sent using RMI?

  - by Lucas Batistussi

  I'm implementing a cache server with MongoDB and ConcurrentHashMap java class. When there are available space to put object in memory, it will put at. Otherwise, the object will be saved in a mongodb database. Is allowed that user specify a size limit in memory (this should not exceed heap size limit obviously!) for the memory cache. The clients can use the cache service connecting through RMI. I need to know the size of each object to verify if a new incoming object can be put into memory. I searched over internet and i got this solution to get size: public long getObjectSize(Object o){ try { ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(bos); oos.writeObject(o); oos.close(); return bos.size(); } catch (Exception e) { return Long.MAX_VALUE; } } This solution works very well. But, in terms of memory use doesn't solve my problem. :( If many clients are verifying the object size at same time this will cause stack overflow, right? Well... some people can say: Why you don't get the specific object size and store it in memory and when another object is need to put in memory check the object size? This is not possible because the objects are variable in size. :( Someone can help me? I was thinking in get socket from RMI communication, but I don't know how to do this...

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• What's wrong with this inner query (MySQL)...

  - by stuboo

  ...besides the fact that I am a total amateur? My table is set up like this: CREATE TABLE `messages` ( `id` int(6) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `patient_id` int(6) unsigned NOT NULL, `message` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `savedate` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `senddate` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `SmsSid` varchar(40) NOT NULL COMMENT 'where we store the cookies from twilio', `sendorder` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL COMMENT 'the order we want the msg sent in', `sent` tinyint(1) NOT NULL COMMENT '0=queued, 1=sent, 2=sent-unqueued,4=rec-unread,5=recd-read', PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=143 ; I need a query that will SELECT * FROM `messages` WHERE `senddate` < $now AND `sent` = 0 (AND LIMIT TO ONLY ONE RECORD PER `patient_id`) I've tried the following: SELECT * FROM `messages` WHERE `senddate` IN (SELECT `patient_id`, max(`senddate`) GROUP by `patient_id`) AND `senddate` < $now AND `sent` = 0 ; But I get this error: MySQL client version: 5.1.37 `#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'GROUP by patient_id) AND senddate < 1270093898 AND sent = 0 LIMIT 0, 30' at line 5

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• Rails using plural table names even though I told it to use singular

  - by Jason Swett

  I tried to run rake test:profile and I got this error: ... Table 'mcif2.accounts' doesn't exist: DELETE FROM `accounts` I know accounts doesn't exist. It's called account. I know Rails uses plural table names by default but here's what my config/environment.rb looks like: # Load the rails application require File.expand_path('../application', __FILE__) # Initialize the rails application McifRails::Application.initialize! ActiveRecord::Base.pluralize_table_names = false And here's what db/schema.rb looks like: ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version => 0) do create_table "account", :force => true do |t| t.integer "customer_id", :limit => 8, :null => false t.string "account_number", :null => false t.integer "account_type_id", :limit => 8 t.date "open_date", :null => false So I don't understand why Rails still wants to call it accounts sometimes. Any ideas? If it helps give any clues at all, here are the results of grep -ir 'accounts' *.

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• SQL Server: Why use shorter VARCHAR(n) fields?

  - by chryss

  It is frequently advised to choose database field sizes to be as narrow as possible. I am wondering to what degree this applies to SQL Server 2005 VARCHAR columns: Storing 10-letter English words in a VARCHAR(255) field will not take up more storage than in a VARCHAR(10) field. Are there other reasons to restrict the size of VARCHAR fields to stick as closely as possible to the size of the data? I'm thinking of Performance: Is there an advantage to using a smaller n when selecting, filtering and sorting on the data? Memory, including on the application side (C++)? Style/validation: How important do you consider restricting colunm size to force non-sensical data imports to fail (such as 200-character surnames)? Anything else? Background: I help data integrators with the design of data flows into a database-backed system. They have to use an API that restricts their choice of data types. For character data, only VARCHAR(n) with n <= 255 is available; CHAR, NCHAR, NVARCHAR and TEXT are not. We're trying to lay down some "good practices" rules, and the question has come up if there is a real detriment to using VARCHAR(255) even for data where real maximum sizes will never exceed 30 bytes or so. Typical data volumes for one table are 1-10 Mio records with up to 150 attributes. Query performance (SELECT, with frequently extensive WHERE clauses) and application-side retrieval performance are paramount.

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• php parsing csv with ftell

  - by Robert82

  I have a 500mb csv file with over 500,000 lines, each with 80 fields. I am using fget to process the file line by line. $col1 = array(); while (($row = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE) { $col1[] = $row[0]; } Because of an execution time limit on the PHP file by my hosting provider (120 seconds), I can't process the whole file in one run. I tried using ftell() and fseek() to remember the last position for restart. The trouble is, sometimes the ftell() position is in the middle of a row, and resuming means missing the first half of the row. Is there an elegant way to know the last line successfully processed, and resume from the one after it? I realize I can do a simple counter, and then loop through to that point again, but that would produce diminishing returns on the rows I can process towards the end of the file. Is there something like ftell() and fseek() that would work in my case? Or a way to limit ftell() to return the pointer for the end of the previous line?

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• Identify words with ascending characters from text file

  - by user2914000

  I am having a fair amount of trouble trying to write a program that counts the amount of ascending words (words in which each character is larger than the previous character) in a text file. I have tried a few different methods to solve this but cannot seem to get it working. If anyone could help me revise the code to work properly it would be appreciated. The code will print about 5 of the words from the list of nearly 20000, but none considered are ascending (the file does have many ascending words) and it sometimes prints the same word twice. I am printing theWord to the console simply to see if the code works. import java.util.Scanner; import java.io.*; public class { public static void main (String [] args) throws FileNotFoundException{ String theWord; Scanner inputFile = new Scanner(new File("file.txt")); boolean ascending = true; int i = 1; while(inputFile.hasNextLine()){ theWord = inputFile.nextLine(); if(theWord.length() >= 2){ while(i < theWord.length() - 1){ if(theWord.charAt(i) <= theWord.charAt(i + 1)){ ascending = true; System.out.println("+ " + theWord); totalNum = totalNum + 1; } else{ ascending = false; System.out.println("= " + theWord); } i++; } } }

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• Allowing user to type only one "."

  - by Tartar

  I am trying to implement a simple javascript-html calculator. What i want to do is,typing only one '.' by the user. How can i control this ? Here is the code that i tried. I can already find the number of '.' but i'am confused now also this replaceAll function is not replacing '.' with empty string. String.prototype.replaceAll = function(search, replace) { //if replace is null, return original string otherwise it will //replace search string with 'undefined'. if(!replace) return this; return this.replace(new RegExp('[' + search + ']', 'g'), replace); }; function calculate(){ var value = document.calculator.text.value; var valueArray = value.split(""); var arrayLenght = valueArray.length; var character = "."; var charCount = 0; for(i=0;i<arrayLenght;i++){ if (valueArray[i]===character) { charCount += 1; } } if(charCount>1){ var newValue=value.replaceAll(".",""); alert(newValue); } }

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. 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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 10, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 10, 2010Popular ReleasesFree Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.UserVoice Helper for WebMatrix: UserVoice Helper v0.9: This version will work with ASP.NET WebPages and ASP.NET MVC ApplicationsDNN Simple Article: DNNSimpleArticle Module V00.00.03: The initial release of the DNNSimpleArticle module (labelled V00.00.03) There are C# and VB versions of this module for this initial release. No promises that going forward there will be packages for both languages provided for future releases. This module provides the following functionality Create and display articles Display a paged list of articles Articles get created as DNN ContentItems Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy SEO functionality for article display providi...UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionCouchDB.NET: CouchDB.NET 0.1: CouchDB.NET ------- Libraries and providers to use CouchDB features from .NET This distribution includes the following projects: - MachineKeyGenerator: Command line tool to generate a machine key string for use in App.Config and Web.Config files. - CouchDB.NET: Library to facilitate the use of CouchDB features. It uses Hadi Hariri's EasyHttp library to communicate with the CouchDB server. More info at: https://github.com/hhariri/EasyHttp - CouchDb.ASP.NET: ASP.NET Membership Provider and ASP...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration valueCslaGenFork: CslaGenFork 4.0 CTP 2: The version is 4.0.1 CTP2 and was released 2010 December 7 and includes the following files: CslaGenFork 4.0.1-2010-12-07 Setup.msi Templates-2010-10-07.zip For getting started instructions, refer to How to section. Overview of the changes Since CTP1 there were 53 work items closed (28 features, 24 issues and 1 task). During this 60 days a lot of work has been done on several areas. First the stereotypes: EditableRoot is OK EditableChild is OK EditableRootCollection is OK Editable...My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.0 ALPHA: 2.2.0 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated En...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...MiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????New ProjectsAccountingGuid: for testing onlyChinese Nag Screen: This is a simple but effective program for learning to recognize Mandarin characters. The application sits in the system tray and displays a character random through your day. You can only get rid of it by typing in the pinyin.CouchDB.NET: .NET libraries to use CouchDB from .NET. Included are Membership and Roles provider so that you may use CouchDB as your integrated DB backend on your ASP.NET projects. Please see the readme.txt file for instructions.DataSetMapper: The idea behind DataSetMapper is to provide support for the automatic mapping of legacy DataSet based structures to proper domain objects. In essence the aim is to create the Mapping aspect of an ORM without the persistence concerns.EasyXnaAudio: EasyXnaAudio is a simple component for use in XNA Game Studio 3.1/4.0 projects that provides an easy interface to load, play, and manage songs and sounds in your game.FixMailboxSD - Exchange Mailbox Security Descriptor Canonicalizer: This is a small utility to fix mailbox security descriptors in Microsoft Exchange that have become non-canonical. It must be run on a machine with Exchange System Manager for Exchange 2003 installed, but it will work against mailboxes on 2003 or 2007 (not 2010).GearSynth Plugin: a plugin for graphsynth that makes gear trainsGroceryList: TBD with first versionIBMS Suite Build on the Associate Platform: A new way of approaching Information Systems. From the UI, users of the IS will be able to build and manipulate the IS to whatever way fits their needs. We have simplified development, removed the chasm between management and IT and give the power of simplification to the user!Ivy Nasha Framework: A PHP FrameworkjQuery helpers for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC: jQuery helpers makes it easier for ASP.NET developers to build jQuery scripts. It's developed in C#. JSTest.NET: JSTest.NET enabled JavaScript unit tests to be run directly in the test framework of your choice (MSTest, NUnit, xUnit, etc) and all without the need for a web browser. JSTest.NET utilizes the Windows Script Host (CScript) to run fast, fully debuggable JavaScript unit tests!Multicore Task Framework: MTF is a visual tool to simplify building robust component based .NET applications. MTF is designed to make full use of the power of multi-core processors.Nazha Script On DLR: NazhaPascalESE - a Delphi/Pascal class library for Microsoft ESENT database API: This pascal class library, primarily written for Delphi's Object Pascal, provides a lightweight and easy-to-use wrapper around the ESENT API. Perpetuum Hangar: A Character planner for the online game "Perpetuum"Projeto Exemplo: Projeto exemplo para a atividade 3 da disciplina.PSiteCode: PSiteCode Manager rScript Engine: rScript scripting engine is a managed script engine wrote in C# that supports Visual Basic and C# syntax based scripts. It provides Type's for dynamically getting and setting properties, invoking methods and run-time compilation of scripts.SharePoint 2010 User Profile WebPart: This webpart shows all user profile properties and values of the properties for a particular user profile. The results are shown in a table containing the display and technical name together with the user value.SHC: shriSHMTools: SHMTools is set of compatible software tools (mostly Matlab based) for structural health monitoring (SHM) research. This includes algorithms for system design, modeling, data acquisition, feature extraction, classification, and prognosis.SwapWin: SwapWin is a tiny and handy tool which swaps windows on different screens. Developed in C# and .NET 3.5.Teachers Diary: Teachers diary is application realizing electronic teacher's notepad with student marks. Current localization of the application is in czech language only.VkApp: Vk app for downloadingWebSpirit: A lightweighted web server implemented by C# which supports sufficient extendible feature. By zjuWPF & MEF Studio: WPF & MEF Studio

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 27, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 27, 2011Popular ReleasesSQL Compact Bulk Insert Library: beta 2.0: Update, with ColumnMappings and support for IEnumerable implemented (for most data types, anyway).MiniTwitter: 1.71: MiniTwitter 1.71 ???? ?? OAuth ???????????? ????????、??????????????????? ???????????????????????SizeOnDisk: 1.0.10.0: Fix: issue 327: size format error when save settings Fix: some UI bindings trouble (sorting, refresh) Fix: user settings file deletion when corrupted Feature: TreeView virtualization (better speed with many folders) Feature: New file type DataGrid column Feature: In KByte view, show size of file < 1024B and > 0 with 3 decimal Feature: New language: Italian Task: Cleanup for speedRawr: Rawr 4.2.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailer.net Downloader 1.86: This version implements a new config flag "ConsiderTheatricalandNumberedTrailersasIdentical" that for the purposes of Exclusions only Teaser Trailer and one Trailer (named Trailer, Theatrical Traler Trailer No. 1, Trailer 1, Trailer No. 2, etc) will be downloaded. This also includes a bug fix where the .nfo file did not include the -trailer if configured for XBMC.N2 CMS: 2.2: * Web platform installer support available ** Nuget support available What's newDinamico Templates (beta) - an MVC3 & Razor based template pack using the template-first! development paradigm Boilerplate CSS & HTML5 Advanced theming with css comipilation (concrete, dark, roadwork, terracotta) Template-first! development style Content, news, listing, slider, image sizes, search, sitemap, globalization, youtube, google map Display Tokens - replaces text tokens with rendered content (usag...TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v4.0 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: Version 4.0 Changelog Continued support for Terraria v1.0.5 Fixed image display problem (Major Issue) Added Buff tabs to allowed editing character buffs Added support for displays whose DPI is set to 120 (Major Issue) Added support for screen resolutions that are horizontally smaller than 1280 (Major Issue) Changed the way users will select replacement items on multiple tabs Added items that were missing in the latest Terraria update Fixed various other bugsCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.4.2: All color pickers can have value set now and UX updates Bunch of fixes - see check-in notes and associated bugsMosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha Build 256: - Improved support for HTML widgets - Added options support for HTML widgets - Added hubs support for all widgets - Added Lock widget which shows Windows 8 like lock screen when you click on it - Added HTML Today widget (by Daniel Steiner)NCalc - Mathematical Expressions Evaluator for .NET: NCalc - 1.3.7: Fixing overflow when comparing long values Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram v0.5 Beta: New in this release: New components: Ammeter (meter) Voltmeter (meter) Undo/redo functionality for placing/moving components Choose resolution when exporting PNG image New logothinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.12): Features Added a new AutoSetSpecifiedPropertiesDecorator to automatically set the _Specified property to true when setter on matching property is called. Obviously this will only work when the Properties option is used. Bug Fixes Reduced the number of times menu visibility is updated in the SelectionEvents.OnChange event to help prevent OutOfMemoryException inside EnvDTE. Fixed NullReferenceException in OnTypeNameChanged method of MessageContractConverter. Improved validation of namespac....Net Image Processor: v1.0: Initial release of the library containing the core architecture and two filters. To install, extract the library to somewhere sensible then reference as a file from your project in Visual Studio.KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.Media Companion: MC 3.409b-1 Weekly: This weeks release is part way through a major rewrite of the TVShow code. This means that a few TV related features & functions are not fully operational at the moment. The reason for this release is so that people can see if their particular issue has been fixed during the week. Some issues may not be able to be fully checked due to the ongoing TV code refactoring. So, I would strongly suggest that you put this version into a separate folder, copy your settings folder across & test MC that...Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5CuttingEdge.Conditions: CuttingEdge.Conditions v1.2: CuttingEdge.Conditions is a library that helps developers to write pre- and postcondition validations in their C# 3.0 and VB.NET 9 code base. Writing these validations is easy and it improves the readability and maintainability of code. This release adds IsNullOrWhiteSpace and IsNotNullOrWhiteSpace extension methods for string arguments and a adds a WithExceptionOnFailure<TException>() method on the Condition class which allows users to specify the type of exception that will be thrown. Fo...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.00.00 Beta: Beta 1 (Build 2300) includes many important enhancements to the user experience. The control panel has been updated for easier access to the most important features and additional forms have been adapted to the new pattern. This release also includes many bug fixes that make it more stable than previous CTP releases. Beta ForumsAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta7: ??AcDown???????????????，?????????????????????。????????????????????，??Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、?????，???????????、???????。 AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 AcDown???????C#??，?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ??v3.0 Beta7 ????????????? ???? ?? ????????????????? "??????"?????"?...New Projects.Net Micro Framework Contrib Library: Contrib library for the .Net Micro Framework..NET Notepad: this is my version of notepadAntLifeISEN: Projet de Découverte MISN P54 Simulation du comportement des fourmisApuracao AG: Estudos asp.net com MCV3apuracaoIK: estudos asp.net desenvolvimento manual;Bikirom BikiSoft: BikiRom BikiSoft windows interface to the BikiRom Megaboard series of real-time ecu retuning hardware.BlogSource: Blog Source.Carmilla Learning: Lessons for Camille Dollé, sup in Epita.Debug Single Thread: This Visual Studio 2010 extension adds two shortcuts and toolbar buttons to allow developers to easily focus on single threads while debugging multi-threaded applications. It dramatically reduces the need to manually go into the Threads window to freeze/thaw all threads but the one that needs to be followed, and therefore helps improve productivity. Features: - Restrict further execution to the current thread only. Will freeze all other threads. Shortcut: CTRL+T+T or snowflake button. -...Excel Viewer: Excel Viewer is a .net component that allows programmers to load excel application and also excel spreadsheets in our windows form. This component is useful for viewing excel reports in applications. This component is written in C# 2.0.Image Processor: The Image Processor in C#jQuery Mobile Extensions for ASP.Net MVC: jQMvc is a collection of extensions built on jQuery Mobile (currently in beta) that can be used with ASP.Net MVC to produce HTML5 based mobile applications. With jQMvc we'll be able to do the neat and powerful MVC stuff but for the emerging world of mobile HTML5 applications.just Think: This is about how to use ***** data for make a application on *****.Kinkuma Framework F# (Prism based F# MVVM Support Library): Kinkuma Framework?????F#?ViewModel?Model??????????????????????。Leuphana MyStudy Mobile: MyStudy schedule at your finger tips. Brings your Leuphana MyStudy schedule to your windows phone 7.maxtor1234test: this is my testMayhemModules: This project contains the modules from the Mayhem repository.PlaOrganizer: PLA Organizer helps create and manage playlist that is based on the PLA format. PowerSys: My Super PowerSystemSilverlight out-of-browser Contoso Dashboard: This is a small demonstration of the capabilities of Silverlight's out of browser mode. This projet includes : - Notification Windows - Unrestricted access to network (netTcpBinding) - Automatic updates (provided that you create your own trusted certificate) - Excel and Outlook Interop - Access to file system - Fullscreen modeSimple Binding Framework: Simple binding frameworkSimply BackUp Tool: A simple tool for backing up personal folders that is built in .Net with WPF. The tool will be updated for using latest techniques and technologies. In partnership with: http://www.ganahtech.comSoftware Botany Ivy - String Utils with CSV, Delimited, & Positional Text Parser: The Software Botany Ivy project is a library containing various string utilities. Included in the library are fluent APIs for parsing and creating delimited and fixed width positional text. Quoted CSV is supported. The library is built on .NET 4.0 using the C# language.Software Botany Sunlight - Word Aligned Hybrid Bit Vector Search Framework: The Software Botany Sunlight project is a search framework built using Word Aligned Hybrid Bit Vectors. Its sole purpose is to provide high performance in-memory searching of data using unknown combinations of indices. It is developed with .NET 4.0 using C#.Torrent file parsing, editing, and writing library: A fully functional library for reading and parsing bencode'd files (ie .torrent) into a fully editable DOM. Work with custom bencode'd file formats, or use strongly typed torrent file reading, modification, and writing. Written in C#.Tweeting Attendant: The Tweeting Attendant is a project created for the Adafruit Make It Tweet Challenge.UBL Larsen: UBL Larsen is a C# .NET 4.0 Class Library for reading/writing Universal Business Language (UBL) xml documents. No xml parsing is required. XmlSerializer will take care of the streaming for you. The library is custom generated from the "UBL 2.0 updated" xsd files to resemble the layout of the Oasis xsd file hierarchy. Some optimizations have been made in order to improve streaming speed and ease the job of for the developer. All of the types in Common Basic Components have been replaced. O...WenbianAsk: Ask system using WPF WP7 Transfer Data Tool: This tool is used to transfer data from PC to WP7. ???????: ?????

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• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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