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  • How can I get sessions to work if I'm using Google App Engine + Django 1.1?

    - by user341642
    Is there a way for me to get sessions working? I know Django has built in session management, and GAE has some tools for it if you're using their watered down version of Django 0.96, but is there a way to get sessions to work if you're trying to use GAE w/ Django 1.1 (i.e. use_library() call). I assume using a db-backed session doesn't work, and a file system backed one won't work b/c we don't have access to the filesystem if we deploy to the Google production servers. This kinda worked (as in didn't crap out) when I used SessionMiddleware backed by a local-memory backed cache and a non-persistent cache (i.e. setting SESSION_ENGINE to django.contrib.sessions.backends.cache). But the session never seems to persist in this case, no matter how I set the timeouts. A new session key is generated on every page reload. Maybe this is b/c the GAE assumes complete statelessness with each request and blows away my local cache? Apologies in advance, I'm pretty new to Python. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Calling a constructor to reinitialize variables doesn't seem to work?

    - by Matt
    I wanted to run 1,000 iterations of a program, so set a counter for 1000 in main. I needed to reinitialize various variables after each iteration, and since the class constructor had all the initializations already written out - I decided to call that after each iteration, with the result of each iteration being stored in a variable in main. However, when I called the constructor, it had no effect...it took me a while to figure out - but it didn't reinitialize anything! I created a function exactly like the constructor - so the object would have its own version. When I called that, it reinitialized everything as I expected. int main() { Class MyClass() int counter = 0; while ( counter < 1000 ) { stuff happens } Class(); // This is how I tried to call the constructor initially. // After doing some reading here, I tried: // Class::Class(); // - but that didn't work either /* Later I used... MyClass.function_like_my_constructor; // this worked perfectly */ } ...Could someone try to explain why what I did was wrong, or didn't work, or was silly or what have you? I mean - mentally, I just figured - crap, I can call this constructor and have all this stuff reinitialized. Are constructors (ideally) ONLY called when an object is created?

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  • int foo(type& bar); is a bad practice?

    - by Earlz
    Well, here we are. Yet another proposed practice that my C++ book has an opinion on. It says "a returning-value(non-void) function should not take reference types as a parameter." So basically if you were to implement a function like this: int read_file(int& into){ ... } and used the integer return value as some sort of error indicator (ignoring the fact that we have exceptions) then that function would be poorly written and it should actually be like void read_file(int& into, int& error){ } Now to me, the first one is much clearer and nice to use. If you want to ignore the error value, you do so with ease. But this book suggests the later. Note that this book does not say returning value functions are bad. It rather says that you should either only return a value or you should only use references. What are your thoughts on this? Is my book full of crap? (again)

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  • 100% width div scrollbar

    - by Cpu86
    I'm making a webpage with a fixed background and a scrollable centered text. I first set the html and body style: html, body { margin: 0; padding: 0; height: 100%; width: 100%; } and then comes the page: <body> <div style="position:absolute; top:0; left:0; right:0; bottom:0; width:100%; height:100%; z-index:0;"> <img src="background.jpg" align="center" width="100%" height="100%" /> </div> <div style="position:absolute; left:0; top:0; right:0; bottom:0; width:100%; height:100%; overflow:auto; z-index:1;"> Under Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera works great. Under IE8 (i don't have the chance, neither i do really want, to test under IE7, IE9 and so on...) are displayed two vertical scrollbars one next to the other: Is there a solution to this crap?

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  • Guest Post: Christian Finn: Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success?

    - by Michael Snow
    12.00 Print 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}  Since we have a number of new members of the WebCenter Evangelist team - I thought it would be appropriate to close the week with the newest hire and leader of the global WebCenter Evangelists, Christian Finn, who has just joined the Red team after many years with the small technology company up in Redmond, WA. He gave an intro to himself in an earlier post this morning but his post below is a great example of how customer engagement takes on a life of its own in our global online connected and social digital ecosystem. Is Facebook About to Become a Victim of its Own Success? What if I told you that your brand could advertise so successfully, you wouldn’t have to pay for the ads? A recent campaign by Ford Motor Company for the Ford Focus featuring Doug the spokespuppet (I am not making this up) did just that—and it raises some interesting issues for marketers and social media alike in the brave new world of customer engagement that is the Social Web. Allow me to elaborate. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week—“Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay” tells the story of Ford’s recently concluded online campaign for the 2012 Ford Focus. (Ford, by the way, under the leadership of people such as Scott Monty, has been a pioneer of effective social campaigns.) The centerpiece of the campaign was the aforementioned Doug, who appeared as a character on Facebook in videos and via chat. (If you are not familiar with Doug, you can see him in action here, and read the WSJ story here.) You may be thinking puppet ads are a sign of Internet Bubble 2.0 and want to stop now, but bear with me. The Journal reported that Ford spent about $95M on its overall Ford Focus campaign, with TV accounting for over $60M of that spend. The Internet buy for the campaign was just over $10M, which included ad buys to drive traffic to Facebook for people to meet and ‘Like’ Doug and some amount on Facebook ads, too, to promote Doug and by extension, the Ford Focus. So far, a fairly straightforward consumer marketing story in the Internet Era. Yet here’s the curious thing: once Doug reached 10,000 fans on Facebook, Ford stopped paying for Facebook ads. Doug had gone viral with people sharing his videos with one another; once critical mass was reached there was no need to buy more ads on Facebook. Doug went on to be Liked by over 43,000 people, and 61% of his fans said they would be more likely to consider buying a Focus. According to the article, Ford says Focus sales are up this year—and increasing sales is every marketer’s goal. And so in effect, Ford found its Facebook campaign so successful that it could stop paying for it, instead letting its target consumers communicate its messages for fun—and for free. Not only did they get a 3X increase in fans beyond their paid campaign, they had thousands of customers sharing their messages in video form for months. Since free advertising is the Holy Grail of marketing both old and new-- and it appears social networks have an advantage in generating that buzz—it seems reasonable to ask: what would happen to brands’ advertising strategies—and the media they use to engage customers, if this success were repeated at scale? It seems logical to conclude that, at least initially, more ad dollars would be spent with social networks like Facebook as brands attempt to replicate Ford’s success. Certainly Facebook ad revenues are on the rise—eMarketer expects Facebook’s ad revenues to quintuple by 2012 compared with 2009 levels, to nearly 2.9B. That’s bad news for TV and the already battered print media and good news for Facebook. But perhaps not so over the longer run. With TV buys, you have to keep paying to generate impressions. If Doug the spokespuppet is any guide, however, that may not be true for social media campaigns. After an initial outlay, if a social campaign takes off, the audience will generate more impressions on its own. Thus a social medium like Facebook could be the victim of its own success when it comes to ad revenue. It may be there is an inherent limiting factor in the ad spend they can capture, as exemplified by Ford’s experience with Dough and the Focus. And brands may spend much less overall on advertising, with as good or better results, than they ever have in the past. How will these trends evolve? Can brands create social campaigns that repeat Ford’s formula for the Focus with effective results? Can social networks find ways to capture more spend and overcome their potential tendency to make further spend unnecessary? And will consumers become tired and insulated from social campaigns, much as they have to traditional advertising channels? These are the questions CMOs and Facebook execs alike will be asking themselves in the brave new world of customer engagement. As always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

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  • SanjayP&rsquo;s venture after Microsoft involves no Microsoft

    - by eddraper
    When I was at Microsoft, I always found Sanjay Parthasarathy to be a bright and passionate leader.  While he was a bit disconnected at times with what was really going on out in the trenches, I always thought he was true believer in what we in Developer Platform and Evangelism (DPE) were doing.  He got it.  He had started DPE and kicked a lot of doors down up in Redmond to make it happen.  Back in the early 2000s, battles over platform choices at large customers was trench warfare… bayonets and hand grenades at the P-Code level.  This model was not at all suited to Microsoft’s org structure at the time.  While there were plenty of people fully able to have competitive conversations around Windows Server, or AD, or Exchange, or the desktop, there weren’t many that could have deep technical conversations around Java vs .NET and the platform “stack” as a cohesive, unified unit of value.  This task fell to DPE. Sanjay ended up leaving Microsoft a number of months before me in 2009 and I remember thinking these exact words: “holy shit, SanjayP left Microsoft.”  When SanjayP left DPE years before that,  Sheila Gulati had stepped into his shoes and I thought we where starting to miss a beat.  Sheila had built an amazing business at Microsoft India, but I don’t recall being inspired by her as a leader.  SanjayP’s talks felt like the opening scene of “Patton” with George C. Scott pacing in front of the American flag.  Sheila was a voice on a con-call.  When she moved on in 2007, Walid Abu-Hadba was given the reigns.  Personally, I don’t ever recall even seeing his face.  I think I might recall hearing his voice on some con-calls, but for all intents and purposes he was invisible to me.  Perhaps this was the beginning of my carelessness around seeking “visibility.” Fast forward to Build 2011.  First off, we have no PDC – we have Build.  Microsoft had made an 11 year investment by this time in building an organization to make its technology relevant to developers.  One would think such an org would be in the driver’s seat of such an event, but we see Windows product group people on the podiums.  Watching, I could see the messaging unfold… but no story.  It was like the old days.  Demos and PowerPoints by team members building the tech, and in many cases VPs.  The ensuing confusion is almost legendary now.  Windows 8 was, and is, a pretty big deal… but who is telling the story – not just features and benefits, but the story around how it all fits together. Having been out of Microsoft for two years now, and looking in, I can only conclude that the “DPE of old” has at best been emasculated, and at worst been completely marginalized by internal politics, or perhaps the eternal march of the corporate entropy generator that resides at all large companies.  I don’t think this is a good thing for anyone. And now, back to Sanjay who is the father of Microsoft DPE… I noticed that he has moved back to India and is doing start-up work.  His current company Indix looks to be doing some interesting things with “big data” and here’s their stack: Nary a trace of anything Microsoft.  What could account for this?  I wonder….  Better availability of labor and expertise in India for this stack?  Donno, but even in India, leet R and Hadoop skills have to be hard to find. Technical superiority?  This, I sincerely doubt. This stack, with SanjayP’s name as CEO leaves me with an unsettling feeling.  If he did believe, he no longer does.  One doesn’t place bets with real money on things they don’t believe in.  Perhaps he never did believe, and was a corporate creature seeking to find a niche for himself after which he manipulated me and others.  Or perhaps… anger… be it passive aggression or an outright “in your face F*** you” to his former masters. I guess in the end, only he knows the true reason… But I have my theory...

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  • Partition Wise Joins

    - by jean-pierre.dijcks
    Some say they are the holy grail of parallel computing and PWJ is the basis for a shared nothing system and the only join method that is available on a shared nothing system (yes this is oversimplified!). The magic in Oracle is of course that is one of many ways to join data. And yes, this is the old flexibility vs. simplicity discussion all over, so I won't go there... the point is that what you must do in a shared nothing system, you can do in Oracle with the same speed and methods. The Theory A partition wise join is a join between (for simplicity) two tables that are partitioned on the same column with the same partitioning scheme. In shared nothing this is effectively hard partitioning locating data on a specific node / storage combo. In Oracle is is logical partitioning. If you now join the two tables on that partitioned column you can break up the join in smaller joins exactly along the partitions in the data. Since they are partitioned (grouped) into the same buckets, all values required to do the join live in the equivalent bucket on either sides. No need to talk to anyone else, no need to redistribute data to anyone else... in short, the optimal join method for parallel processing of two large data sets. PWJ's in Oracle Since we do not hard partition the data across nodes in Oracle we use the Partitioning option to the database to create the buckets, then set the Degree of Parallelism (or run Auto DOP - see here) and get our PWJs. The main questions always asked are: How many partitions should I create? What should my DOP be? In a shared nothing system the answer is of course, as many partitions as there are nodes which will be your DOP. In Oracle we do want you to look at the workload and concurrency, and once you know that to understand the following rules of thumb. Within Oracle we have more ways of joining of data, so it is important to understand some of the PWJ ideas and what it means if you have an uneven distribution across processes. Assume we have a simple scenario where we partition the data on a hash key resulting in 4 hash partitions (H1 -H4). We have 2 parallel processes that have been tasked with reading these partitions (P1 - P2). The work is evenly divided assuming the partitions are the same size and we can scan this in time t1 as shown below. Now assume that we have changed the system and have a 5th partition but still have our 2 workers P1 and P2. The time it takes is actually 50% more assuming the 5th partition has the same size as the original H1 - H4 partitions. In other words to scan these 5 partitions, the time t2 it takes is not 1/5th more expensive, it is a lot more expensive and some other join plans may now start to look exciting to the optimizer. Just to post the disclaimer, it is not as simple as I state it here, but you get the idea on how much more expensive this plan may now look... Based on this little example there are a few rules of thumb to follow to get the partition wise joins. First, choose a DOP that is a factor of two (2). So always choose something like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on... Second, choose a number of partitions that is larger or equal to 2* DOP. Third, make sure the number of partitions is divisible through 2 without orphans. This is also known as an even number... Fourth, choose a stable partition count strategy, which is typically hash, which can be a sub partitioning strategy rather than the main strategy (range - hash is a popular one). Fifth, make sure you do this on the join key between the two large tables you want to join (and this should be the obvious one...). Translating this into an example: DOP = 8 (determined based on concurrency or by using Auto DOP with a cap due to concurrency) says that the number of partitions >= 16. Number of hash (sub) partitions = 32, which gives each process four partitions to work on. This number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on your data and system. In this case my main reasoning is that if you get more room on the box you can easily move the DOP for the query to 16 without repartitioning... and of course it makes for no leftovers on the table... And yes, we recommend up-to-date statistics. And before you start complaining, do read this post on a cool way to do stats in 11.

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  • Silverlight Cream for January 11, 2011 -- #1024

    - by Dave Campbell
    1,000 blogposts is quite a few, but to die-hard geeks, 1000 isn't the number... 1K is the number, and today is my 1K blogpost! I've been working up to this for at least 11 months. Way back at MIX10, I approached some vendors about an idea I had. A month ago I contacted them and others, and everyone I contacted was very generous and supportive of my idea. My idea was not to run a contest, but blog as normal, and whoever ended up on my 1K post would get some swag... and I set a cut-off at 13 posts. So... blogging normally, I had some submittals, and then ran my normal process to pick up the next posts until I hit a total of 13. To provide a distribution channel for the swag, everyone on the list, please send me your snail mail (T-shirts) and email (licenses) addresses as soon as possible.   I'd like to thank the following generous sponsors for their contributions to my fun (in alphabetic order): and Rachel Hawley for contributing 4 Silverlight control sets First Floor Software and Koen Zwikstra for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Spy and Sara Faatz/Jason Beres for contributing 13 licenses for Silverlight Data Visualization controls and Svetla Stoycheva for contributing T-Shirts for everyone on the post and Ina Tontcheva for contributing 13 licenses for RadControls for Silverlight + RadControls for Windows Phone and Charlene Kozlan for contributing 1 combopack standard, 2 DataGrid for Silverlight, and 2 Listbox for Silverlight Standard And now finally...in this Issue: Nigel Sampson, Jeremy Likness, Dan Wahlin, Kunal Chowdhurry, Alex Knight, Wei-Meng Lee, Michael Crump, Jesse Liberty, Peter Kuhn, Michael Washington, Tau Sick, Max Paulousky, Damian Schenkelman Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties" Dan Wahlin WP7: "Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers" Nigel Sampson Expression Blend: "PathListBox: making data look cool" Alex Knight From SilverlightCream.com: Using Windows Phone Gestures as Triggers Nigel Sampson blogged about WP7 Gestures, the Toolkit, and using Gestures as Triggers, and actually makes it looks simple :) Jounce Part 9: Static and Dynamic Module Management Jeremy Likness has episode 9 of his explanation of his MVVM framework, Jounce, up... and a big discussion of Modules and Module Management from a Jounce perspective. Demystifying Silverlight Dependency Properties Dan Wahlin takes a page from one of his teaching opportunities, and shares his knowledge of Dependency Properties with us... beginning with what they are, defining them in code, and demonstrating their use. Customizing Silverlight ChildWindow Style using Blend Kunal Chowdhurry has a great post up about getting your Child Windows to match the look & feel of the rest of youra app... plus a bunch of Blend goodness thrown in. PathListBox: making data look cool File this post by Alex Knight in the 'holy crap' file along with the others in this series! ... just check out that cool Ticker Style Path ListBox at the top of the blog... too cool! Web Access in Windows Phone 7 Apps Wei-Meng Lee has the 3rd part of his series on WP7 development up and in this one is discussing Web Access... I mean *discussing* it... tons of detail, code, and explanation... great post. Prevent your Silverlight XAP file from caching in your browser. Michael Crump helps relieve stress on Silverlight developers everywhere by exploring how to avoid caching of your XAP in the browser... (WPFS) MVVM Light Toolkit: Soup To Nuts Part I Jesse Liberty continues his Windows Phone from Scratch series with a new segment exploring Laurent Bugnion's MVVMLight Toolkit beginning with acquiring and installing the toolkit, then proceeds to discuss linking the View and ViewModel, the ViewModel Locator, and page navigation. Silverlight: Making a DateTimePicker Peter Kuhn attacks a problem that crops up on the forums a lot -- a DateTimePicker control for Silverlight... following the "It's so simple to build one yourself" advice, he did so, and provides the code for all of us! Windows Phone 7 Animated Button Press Michael Washington took exception to button presses that gave no visual feedback and produced a behavior that does just that. Using TweetSharp in a Windows Phone 7 app Tau Sick demonstrates using TweetSharp to put a twitter feed into a WP7 app, as he did in "Hangover Helper"... all the instructions from getting Tweeetshaprt to the code necessary. Bindable Application Bar Extensions for Windows Phone 7 Max Paulousky has a post discussing some real extensions to the ApplicationBar for WP7.. he begins with a bindable application bar by Nicolas Humann that I've missed, probably because his blog is in French... and extends it to allow using DelegateCommand. How to: Load Prism modules packaged in a separate XAP file in an OOB application Damian Schenkelman posts about Prism, AppModules in separate XAPs and running OOB... if you've tried this, you know it's a hassle.. Damian has the solution. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • CentOS 5.5 : Postfix, Dovecot & MySQL

    - by GruffTech
    I'm hoping someone has seen this issue before because I'm at quite a loss. We're building a new outbound smtp server for our clients that features anti-spam scanning and virus scanning for outbound emails, something we had not previously done. So with CentOS 5.5 x64, Installed and patched completely. Postfix & Dovecot both installed via base repo. [grufftech@outgoing postfix]# rpm -qa | grep postfix postfix-2.3.3-2.1.el5_2 [grufftech@outgoing postfix]# rpm -qa | grep dovecot dovecot-1.0.7-7.el5 [grufftech@outgoing ~]# dovecot --build-options Build options: ioloop=poll notify=inotify ipv6 openssl SQL drivers: mysql postgresql Passdb: checkpassword ldap pam passwd passwd-file shadow sql Userdb: checkpassword ldap passwd prefetch passwd-file sql static /etc/dovecot.conf auth default { mechanisms = plain login digest-md5 cram-md5 passdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf } userdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf } userdb prefetch { } user = nobody socket listen { master { path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master mode = 0660 user = postfix group = postfix } client { path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth mode = 0660 user = postfix group = postfix } } } All the server is doing is auth for postfix, so no reason to have imap / pop / dict. /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf driver = mysql connect = host=10.0.32.159 dbname=mail user=****** password=******** default_pass_scheme = plain user_query = select 1 password_query = select password from users where username = '%n' and domain = '%d' So drop in my configuration, (which is working on another server identical to this one.) [grufftech@outgoing ~]# /etc/init.d/dovecot start Starting Dovecot Imap: [ OK ] Sweet. Booted up nicely, thats good.... (incoming problem in 3....2....1....) May 21 08:09:01 outgoing dovecot: Dovecot v1.0.7 starting up May 21 08:09:02 outgoing dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connect failed to 10.0.32.159 (mail): Can't connect to MySQL server on '10.0.32.159' (13) - waiting for 1 seconds before retry well what the crap. went and checked permissions on my MySQL database, and its fine. [grufftech@outgoing ~]# mysql vpopmail -h 10.0.32.159 -u ****** -p Enter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 127828558 Server version: 4.1.22 Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer. mysql>\q So! My server can talk to my database server. but dovecot, for whatever reason, isn't able to. I've fiddled with it for the last six hours, grabbed slightly-older copies of the RPM (ones that matched our production server exactly) to test those, copied configs, searched google, searched server fault, chatted in IRC, banged my head against the table, I've done it all. Surely I'm doing something wrong or forgetting something, can anyone tell me what the elephant in the room is? This stuff is supposed to work.

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  • Why Does Wireless Gear Degrade Over Time?

    - by bahamat
    I saw this originally posted on slashdot, but their comment format is not conducive to actually getting a correct answer. Having directly experienced this phenomenon myself, I'm now asking here where I think I can actually get an educated answer. Here's the original question verbatim: Lately I have replaced several home wireless routers because the signal strength has been found to be degraded. These devices, when new (2+ years ago) would cover an entire house. Over the years, the strength seems to decrease to a point where it might only cover one or two rooms. Of the three that I have replaced for friends, I have not found a common brand, age, etc. It just seems that after time, the signal strength decreases. I know that routers are cheap and easy to replace but I'm curious what actually causes this. I would have assumed that the components would either work or not work; we would either have a full signal or have no signal. I am not an electrical engineer and I can't find the answer online so I'm reaching out to you. Can someone explain how a transmitter can slowly go bad? Common (incorrect, but repeated) answers from slashdot include: Back then your neighbors didn't have wifi, now they do. They drowning you out. I don't think this is likely because replacing the access point with a new one and using the same frequencies solves the problem. Older devices had low transmit power. Crank that baby. As mentioned by a FreeBSD wireless developer this violates regulations and can physically damage the equipment. It was also mentioned that higher power in one direction is not necessarily reciprocated. This shows higher bars, but not necessarily a better connection. Manufacturers make cheap crap designed to wear out. This one actually may be legitimate although it is overly broad. What specifically causes damage over time? Heat? Excessive power? So can anyone provide an informed answer on this? Is there any way to fix these older access points?

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  • OCZ Vertex 2 not recognized by Ubuntu installer

    - by Zsub
    As I boot into the Ubuntu 10.10 (or 11.04, doesn't matter) live environment or installer, it just refuses to recognise my Vertex 2. It reports the disk as ATA and not supporting smart, shows no serial number, and doesn't list the size correctly. All fdisk tells me is Unable to read /dev/sda (it's the only storage in the PC). I'm now running a temporary install of Windows 7 off of it, which worked like a charm, so where am I going wrong with Ubuntu... Specs: Asus M4N68T-M LE V2 (BIOS 0702, most recent) OCZ Vertex 2 SSD 60 GB Amd Athlon II X4 640 Patriot PSD34G13332 4GB DDR3 ram (two banks) EDIT I installed a second drive, installed Ubuntu on that and booted, it recognised the SSD just fine. I'm now trying to apt-get upgrade the live-environment. I wonder if there is any way to sort of install Ubuntu from Ubuntu (I boot into the working install on the other drive, install it on the SSD and then boot from the SSD). EDIT2 Ok, so that doesn't work. The install detects the SSD, however, it cannot format it. EDIT3 After a fresh boot I can read out SMART-data and even perform a read-benchmark, but if I try to format it, or do a write-bench, it'll crap out and after that it says SMART is not supported. So basically it seems I can't write to the disk, as it will stop working when I do, I will try to run repeated read-benchmarks to see if that has any effect. EDIT4 I'm running several read benchmarks on the drive right now, they give results that are to be expected from an SSD. If the read-benches don't fail, I can use fdisk on the disk, but it is now stuck trying to re-read the partition table after issueing the 'w' command. EDIT5 Parted Magic did recognize the drive and with hdparm -I even could tell me the drive was in a frozen state. I powercycled it (just pull out the plug from the SSD and plug it back in) and it wasn't frozen anymore. After that I could upgrade the firmware on the drive (still using Parted Magic) and format it to Ext4. After I rebooted into the Ubuntu installer, it wouldn't get recognized and hdparm didn't want to talk to it saying HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid exchange. EDIT6 For some reason if I enable one of the RAID controllers (the one the SSD is connected to, obviously) Ubuntu will let me format it, mount it and write to it. The installer also recognizes it. However if the raid controller is enabled but no array is defined the motherboard can't boot from it :(

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  • OpenVPN, Great on Windows, VERY slow on Mac...

    - by Phsion
    Hello, I'm not really an IT Pro, but this seemed like the best place to ask this question... I have setup VPN networks in the past, for fun, and everything was great, but now I've set one up for my boss, and while my computers all work great, his Mac machines are almost too slow to work with. Its pretty much vanilla configs all around, anyone have any ideas? Its a TUN routing setup over UDP. Back Story: My boss travels a lot, and wants to be able to access all his files from the road, and is also pretty paranoid about security (even though knows almost nothing about computers). SO i figured a VPN would be the answer. I went with OpenVPN, but there are some other issues. The only ISP we can get in our area besides Dial-UP is a crappy Satellite provider, that doesn't offer public IPs unless your willing to pay, so while the computers and VPN setup are pretty vanilla, the routing and structure is strange to get around this limitation. Specs: Its OpenVPN2, and there are six machines using it (only three actually use it, the rest are my test machines), one Windows 7 laptop, two XP Desktops, one OS X 10.5 Desktop, one 10.6 Desktop, and one 10.6 Laptop. One XP Desktop sits at my house and acts as the server (6Mbs/2Mbs FIOS connection). One XP desktop sits at the office and hosts a webpage that will wake up the Main Mac Desktop from sleep, and also ping all the machines on the VPN and show their status. The main office mac (10.6) stays in sleep mode until it gets the Wake-On-Lan packet from the Office XP, and then it auto connects to the VPN and opens itself up. The reason for all this is the Satellite private IP crap means i cant directly access the office machines outside of the LAN, so everyone connects to my house first, then they talk to each other from there. The Wake On Lan weirdness is because my boss doesn't want to leave the main Mac on all the time, and making a quick and dirty webpage was the easiest way to send a Magic Packet from inside the LAN without confusing my boss. The VPN uses Client Config files to make static IPs for the client. The only thing i found in google was some changes to the VPN MTU settings (down to 1400) but no real help. Oh, and i forgot...all the windows machines just have OpenVPN start as a service. The Mac laptop uses tunnelblick (an OpenVPN GUI) and the Mac Desktops use OpenVPN in normal command line mode. Server Config: tun-mtu 1500 fragment 1450 mssfix 1450 management localhost #### port #### proto udp dev tun ca ####### cert ####### key ###### dh ###### server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt client-config-dir ccd route 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.252 client-to-client keepalive 10 120 comp-lzo persist-key persist-tun status openvpn-status log Client Configs (all are simple variations on this) tun-mtu 1500 fragment 1450 mssfix 1450 client dev tun proto udp remote ######## #### resolv-retry infinite nobind persist-key presist-tun ca ##### cert ##### key ##### ns-cert-type server comp-lzo verb 3

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  • Looking for a new backup solution to replace dying tape drive

    - by E3 Group
    We're running Windows Server 2003 SBS and another machine with Server 2003 Standard on it. The SBS server is about 7 years old running pretty much 24/7 - a HP server of some description. We have an Ultrium 448 cycling LTO2 400GB tapes daily and incrementally backing up approximately 100gb worth of data (20gb C:\ and system state, 40gb exchange, 40gb database for some crap marketing software) on BackupExec 10D. As of 5 months ago, the backups have been consistently failing with IO errors, bad reads and some write errors. When I say consistent, I mean every time and we haven't had a proper backup for the entire 5 months - So if the server explodes tomorrow, 7 years worth of data will just cease to exist. I've only just recently rejoined the company and am looking at rectifying the more concerning problems, so the first thing I did was try a backup to an USB2.0 external drive. It was excruciatingly slow. In fact it was so slow it took 40 hours and it still wasn't finished. I ended up cancelling it and reconfiguring the selections again to reduce file size. This, however, isn't a permanent solution. I concluded that the IO error was either from a faulty tape drive (which has a tape stuck in there right now and not coming out) or from a dying SCSI controller. Neither of them are good news and both are extremely expensive to fix. I'm operating on an extremely low budget so have been looking at outsourcing the backups. A company in Sydney (where I'm located) offer incremental online backups via a NAS. It costs almost double a new tape drive but offers monthly repayments which will let us get through times when cash flow is minimal. It seems like a sweet deal but it is still a little bit pricey. So I'm looking for a cheaper, yet reliable solution. Maybe some in-house NAS or something offsite? The idea is to avoid using tapes. Are there any recommendations for rectifying my current situation? Or are tapes the only way to go? I'm concerned that the server will die one day in the near future and I must be able to restore it to another server with different hardware.

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  • UPS vs Solar Power in case of power failure for a server [on hold]

    - by Zen 8000k
    I am looking for a low power, low end pc able to run 24/7 without overheating and a way to support it in case of power failure. Power failures can be up to 72 hours. The pc dosen't need a monitor or keyboard. A modem must also be protected in case of power failure. When i say low end, i don't mean crap. The cpu needs to be x86 and have at least 1k cpu in this chart: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/index.php What's the best way to do this? EDIT: more info. I need to run a home server. The server will perform light tasks mainly. A x86 cpu sadly is the only route for my use. I want to be able to run the server and the router/modem in case of power failure. Now, regarding how long the power will fail: 1) 1 hours is OK for most situations. (say 90%) 2) 3 hours is OK (say 98%) 3) 6 hours is more thank OK. (say 99.5%) 4) On extreme cases the power might fail days. I believe this is very unlikely to happen. More is great but, really, how ofter power will fail more than 3 hours? I believe once every year at best. Well, that's too rare to care about. Given the above, I am looking for a cost effective way to archive 1-3 hour power or 6 hour if possible. Solutions: You guys give me great ideas. 1) Power generator: no good as power will fail for 10 seconds before returning. Also I read online, "clean" power generators cost 1.5k+, so it's out of budged. Non clean generator might damage electronics, right? 2) Solar power: i don't know for sure about this. Sounds like a great idea, too good to be true, honestly. For only 200$ i get 100+w? What are the drawbacks here? 3) UPS: This seems to be the best. The only problem is the cost. Cost < 200$ = great 400$ = budged limit

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  • What's the best way to do user profile/folder redirect/home directory archiving?

    - by tpederson
    My company is in dire need of a redesign around how we handle user account administration. I've been tasked with automating the process. The end goal is to have the whole works triggered by the business, and IT only looking in when there's an error reported. The interim phase is going to be semi-manual. That is a level 2 tech inputs the user's info and supervises the process. The current hurdle I'm facing is user profile archiving. Our security team requires us to archive the profile directories for any terminated user for 60 days in case the legal team requires access to their files. Our AD is as much a mess as everything else, so there are some users with home directories and some with profiles. Anyone who has a profile dir in AD also has a good deal of their profile redirected to our file servers over DFS. In order to complete the process manually you find the user in AD, disable them, find their home/profile dir, go there and take ownership, create an archive folder, move all their files over, then delete the old dir. Some users have many many gigs of nonsense and this can take quite some time. Even automated the process would not be a quick one. I'm thinking that I need to have a client side C# GUI for the quick stuff and some server side batch script or console app to offload this long running process. I have a batch script that works decently using takeown and robocopy, but I wonder if a C# console app would do a better job. So, my question at long last is, what do you think is the best way to handle this? I can't imagine this is a unique problem, how do other admins get this done? The last place I worked was easily 10x larger than the place I'm in now. If we would have been doing this manual crap there, they'd have needed a team of at least 30 full time workers to keep up. I have decent skills in C#.net and batch scripting, but am a quick study and I have used most every language once or twice. Thank you for reading this and I look forward to seeing what imaginative solutions you all can come up with.

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  • Why doesn't video run smoothly on my laptop anymore?

    - by andygrunt
    This might be an impossible question to answer remotely but I figure there may be some common causes that people can suggest so I think it's worth asking... Video no longer plays smoothly on my laptop. It used to but not for a while now. For example, playing a video on YouTube is pretty typical: I press play (making sure it's not on HD or even HQ) and the video buffers a little then starts to play. At first it plays fine then the video starts to stutter, turning into a slideshow while the sound continues to play smoothly. If I try playing the same video on my Playstation 3 (which is linked to the same network) it plays smoothly so it can't be the connection. Another example is streaming DivX videos. Again, I wait while it buffers and it starts but very soon, instead of a slideshow, this time the video just plays slowly while the sound continues as normal (instantly getting out of sync). Even if I let the video fully load before pressing play (i.e. it's no longer streaming), it still behaves the same way. I can even let it load 100% then save the file to hard disk and use VLC player to view it, and the same thing happens. I'm using an old laptop running Windows XP. For the past several years it's been connected to the router via Wi-Fi but in the past few days I've changed that to a network cable (like my PS3) but that hasn't helped. Yes, I regularly install various bits and pieces of software but nothing that I can identify as being the cause. So, are there known causes of this sort of behaviour and if so, what can I do to fix it? Thanks. Update to answer a few questions... Laptop Spec' (note: video has played back fine for the majority of time I've had the laptop) Toshiba Satellite 1900-603 (possibly called something else outside the UK) Intel Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz Processor Originally had 512Mb memory but recently doubled that to 1 Gig of memory Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon 16Mb DDR VRAM Windows XP SP3 (Home edition) Over the years I've done several things to speed it up (disabling indexing etc) and am generally happy with the performance. I also regularly have a clear out of old software (if for no other reason than the laptop only has a 40Gb hard disk) and use CCleaner and Glary Utilities to strip out much of the crap from my system. Also recently (after doubling the memory), I've tried a few new things which might be likely candidates for slowing the video down such as Rocketdock, Jingle keyboard (which gives an old style 'clacky' typewriter sound when I type - love it), SugarSync, Taskbar Shuffle. However, the video doesn't play smoothly even when I try quit all these apps.

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  • Change Logon DPI setting in Windows 8.1

    - by jmc302005
    I love how M$ keeps making decisions for me about how I want my desktop to look. Now they have added per-user dpi settings. The problem this has created is that there is no adjustable dpi setting for the Lock/Logon screen. Let me explain. you can change the dpi setting to be the same across all displays and this does affect the icons and font on the lock/logon screen. However it does not affect any app/program that can run on the lock/logon screen. Ex. I use a 44" flat screen tv for my monitor on my desktop. Big enough for me to sit in my recliner and use my comp. But I don't have a wireless keyboard. And it sucks having the wire from the keyboard running across the floor. Plus I really don't want to keep a keyboard next to me. So I use the on screen keyboard for logging in and quick typing (search, web address, etc.) So the problem is that with the new dpi setup my on screen keyboard takes up nearly half the screen. Does M$ think we are all blind? Oh no I remember they think desktops should look like tablets and phones. I tried looking through the registry to see if I could find a setting for it. In the key HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop there is a string value named "LogicalDPIOverride" with a value of -1. I have a feeling this is where I can fix the issue. I tried changing the value to 0 and to 1 with no change in the result. Instead I noticed that after logging out and back in the -1 value was back in the registry. So now M$ has also added a way for us to not be able to change a setting in the registry. They are making it harder and harder for us power users to be able to do anything with the settings in windows. Soon we will all have the same exact Windows with absolutely no customization. ok sorry for the quick rant. The real question here is. How can I change this defualt dpi crap? Can I use the LogPixels string that worked for dpi in Windows 7? Here are 2 Screen shots 1 of the Lock Screen and 1 of the Logon Screen http://i.imgur.com/6RM5ufE.jpg http://i.imgur.com/cnY5bmm.jpg Please any help will be appreciated.

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  • Windows 7 Home hangs at "Welcome" screen

    - by White Phoenix
    I'm asking on behalf of a friend who's currently having problems with his machine. Windows 7 Home 32-bit. He's too far away for me to help by going over to his house - I'm helping him over the Internet. This is his current machine: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883227134 The only two changes he made to that machine is to swap out the gfx card for a EVGA GTX 460 and the PSU for a Corsair TX650. Here's what happened: He was playing a computer game (fairly CPU/GPU intensive) and had some music going in the background in foobar while playing. Suddenly, he notices the music stopped playing, so he switches to foobar to try to close it, but it freezes up (window won't respond). So he figures it's just foobar having a bad day and force quits that program. Suddenly, his game won't respond, so he force quits that, then the entire computer just went to crap at that point, so he hits the restart button on his machine. Computer POSTS fine, but now he gets stuck at the Windows "welcome" screen (his account is set to auto-login). HD activity light is solid yellow but he doesn't hear HDD activity. He tried booting into Safe Mode - gets stuck at the "welcome screen". Tried a STartup Repair within Windows 7, it found a few problems, but still gets stuck at welcome. I advised him to boot off the DVD - sfc /scannow found nothing (couldn't use the regular /scannow option; says there's a repair pending, had to use use offbootdir/offwindir command switches). Ran startup repair 3 times - found nothing. My friend runs virus/malware scans on a regular basis, so he's fairly sure it's not that either. Right now I'm having my friend run chkdsk /R on the computer while in this Startup Recovery mode - so far it's caught a few bad sectors. However at this point I'm kinda wondering which way to go if chkdsk doesn't fix it. Quick Google search said someone had success by booting Windows with bootlogging on - some others have success with running the aforemented chkdsk, etc. The fact that Windows cannot even boot into Safe Mode concerns me. While we're waiting for chkdsk /R to finish, are there any other options I can give my friend short of reinstalling Windows 7? He has his data on a separate partition so that's not a major problem (though it'll be an annoyance for him). I suspect his hard drive may be having some issues, but my main concern is getting him back up and running before we start diagnosing the hard drive (I may have him run some sort of SMART test utility later).

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  • Model M Keyboard inputs incorrect characters after logging in to Fedora

    - by mickburkejnr
    I recently bought a 24 year old IBM Model M keyboard. From what I gather, it'd been left on a shelf for the last 5 years, so you can imagine the amount of dust dirt and crap that was on it. Before cleaning it, I plugged it in to my laptop (running Fedora 17) using a PS/2 to USB adapter. What I found was, while it still works, the keys I press don't correspond to what is displayed on the screen. So for example, when I type S on the keyboard, I get ß display on the screen instead. At the time, I put this down to the adapter not working properly. Since then, I stripped the keys off the keyboard and cleaned the whole thing. It looks like it's just come out of a box! I then plugged it in to my computer (also running Fedora 17) via a standard PS/2 plug. The computer loaded up to the login screen, and I typed in my password. Pressed enter, and I logged straight in to my machine. At this point, I opened up a text editor and started typing some stuff. To my horror, the keystrokes I was entering weren't coming up as intended. What came up instead were characters that would map to the pressed key but only under a different keyboard language setting. I opened up a program to see what keyboard language had been selected, and the correct one for the keyboard was selected (which is UK in my case). I opened up a window that would show what characters mapped to what keys, and I pressed every single key on the keyboard, and every corresponding block representing each key lit up. I went back to the text editor to try again, but I was still getting these random characters. Whats more is that the backspace key would not work, although in the other utility it would flash when pressed. What I know is that at the login screen the keyboard must have entered the correct characters, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to log in. Further more, keys that don't respond while using a text editor as sending signals to the computer, as illustrated in that keyboard utility. The question is why random characters are displayed when they really shouldn't be? Would this be a hardware fault or a software issue?

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  • Reliable file copy (move) process - mostly Unix/Linux

    - by mfinni
    Short story : We have a need for a rock-solid reliable file mover process. We have source directories that are often being written to that we need to move files from. The files come in pairs - a big binary, and a small XML index. We get a CTL file that defines these file bundles. There is a process that operates on the files once they are in the destination directory; that gets rid of them when it's done. Would rsync do the best job, or do we need to get more complex? Long story as follows : We have multiple sources to pull from : one set of directories are on a Windows machine (that does have Cygwin and an SSH daemon), and a whole pile of directories are on a set of SFTP servers (Most of these are also Windows.) Our destinations are a list of directories on AIX servers. We used to use a very reliable Perl script on the Windows/Cygwin machine when it was our only source. However, we're working on getting rid of that machine, and there are other sources now, the SFTP servers, that we cannot presently run our own scripts on. For security reasons, we can't run the copy jobs on our AIX servers - they have no access to the source servers. We currently have a homegrown Java program on a Linux machine that uses SFTP to pull from the various new SFTP source directories, copies to a local tmp directory, verifies that everything is present, then copies that to the AIX machines, and then deletes the files from the source. However, we're finding any number of bugs or poorly-handled error checking. None of us are Java experts, so fixing/improving this may be difficult. Concerns for us are: With a remote source (SFTP), will rsync leave alone any file still being written? Some of these files are large. From reading the docs, it seems like rysnc will be very good about not removing the source until the destination is reliably written. Does anyone have experience confirming or disproving this? Additional info We will be concerned about the ingestion process that operates on the files once they are in the destination directory. We don't want it operating on files while we are in the process of copying them; it waits until the small XML index file is present. Our current copy job are supposed to copy the XML file last. Sometimes the network has problems, sometimes the SFTP source servers crap out on us. Sometimes we typo the config files and a destination directory doesn't exist. We never want to lose a file due to this sort of error. We need good logs If you were presented with this, would you just script up some rsync? Or would you build or buy a tool, and if so, what would it be (or what technologies would it use?) I (and others on my team) are decent with Perl.

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  • Server side Xforms form validation and integration into ASP.NET

    - by Nigel
    I have recently been investigating methods of creating web-based forms for an ASP.NET web application that can be edited and managed at runtime. For example an administrator might wish to add a new validation rule or a new set of fields. The holy grail would provide a means of specifying a form along with (potentially very complex) arbitrary validation rules, and allocation of data sources for each field. The specification would then be used to update the deployed form in the web application which would then validate submissions both on the client side and on the server side. My investigations led me to Xforms and a number of technologies that support it. One solution appears to be IBM Lotus Forms, but this requires a very large investment in terms of infrastructure, which makes it infeasible, although the forms designer may be useful as a stand-alone tool for creating the forms. I have also discounted browser plug-ins as the form must be publicly visible and cross-browser compliant. I have noticed that there are numerous javascript libraries that provide client side implementations given an Xforms schema. These would provide a partial solution but server side validation is still a requirement. Another option seems to involve the use of server side solutions such as the Java application Orbeon. Orbeon provides a tool for specifying the forms (although not as rich as Lotus Forms Designer), but the most interesting point is that it can translate an XForms schema into an XHTML form complete with validation. The fact that it is written in Java is not a big problem if it is possible to integrate with the existing ASP.NET application. So my question is whether anyone has done this before. It sounds like a problem that should have been solved but is inherently very complex. It seems possible to use an off-the-shelf tool to design the form and export it to an Xforms schema and xhtml form, and it seems possible to take that xforms schema and form and publish it using a client side library. What seems to be difficult is providing a means of validating the form submission on the server side and integrating the process nicely with .NET (although it seems the .NET community doesn't involve themselves with XForms; please correct me if I'm wrong on this count). I would be more than happy if a product provided something simple like a web service that could validate a submission against a schema. Maybe Orbeon does this but I'd be grateful if somebody in the know could point me in the right direction before I research it further. Many thanks.

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  • Is MVVM pointless?

    - by joebeazelman
    Is orthodox MVVM implementation pointless? I am creating a new application and I considered Windows Forms and WPF. I chose WPF because it's future-proof and offer lots of flexibility. There is less code and easier to make significant changes to your UI using XAML. Since the choice for WPF is obvious, I figured that I may as well go all the way by using MVVM as my application architecture since it offers blendability, separation concerns and unit testability. Theoretically, it seems beautiful like the holy grail of UI programming. This brief adventure; however, has turned into a real headache. As expected in practice, I’m finding that I’ve traded one problem for another. I tend to be an obsessive programmer in that I want to do things the right way so that I can get the right results and possibly become a better programmer. The MVVM pattern just flunked my test on productivity and has just turned into a big yucky hack! The clear case in point is adding support for a Modal dialog box. The correct way is to put up a dialog box and tie it to a view model. Getting this to work is difficult. In order to benefit from the MVVM pattern, you have to distribute code in several places throughout the layers of your application. You also have to use esoteric programming constructs like templates and lamba expressions. Stuff that makes you stare at the screen scratching your head. This makes maintenance and debugging a nightmare waiting to happen as I recently discovered. I had an about box working fine until I got an exception the second time I invoked it, saying that it couldn’t show the dialog box again once it is closed. I had to add an event handler for the close functionality to the dialog window, another one in the IDialogView implementation of it and finally another in the IDialogViewModel. I thought MVVM would save us from such extravagant hackery! There are several folks out there with competing solutions to this problem and they are all hacks and don’t provide a clean, easily reusable, elegant solution. Most of the MVVM toolkits gloss over dialogs and when they do address them, they are just alert boxes that don’t require custom interfaces or view models. I’m planning on giving up on the MVVM view pattern, at least its orthodox implementation of it. What do you think? Has it been worth the trouble for you if you had any? Am I just a incompetent programmer or does MVVM not what it's hyped up to be?

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  • Save File to Sharepoint Server using JAX-WS

    - by Evan Porter
    I'm trying to save a file to a Sharepoint server using JAX-WS. The web service call is reporting a success, but the file doesn't show up. I used this command (from a WinXP) to generate the Java code to make the JAX-WS call: wsimport -keep -extension -Xnocompile http://hostname/sites/teamname/_vti_bin/Copy.asmx?WSDL I get a handle on the web service which I called port using the following: CopySoap port = null; if (userName != null && password != null) { Copy service = new Copy(); port = service.getCopySoap(); ((BindingProvider) port).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.USERNAME_PROPERTY, userName); ((BindingProvider) port).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.PASSWORD_PROPERTY, password); } else { throw new Exception("Holy Frijolé! Null userName and/or password!"); } I called the web service using the following: port.copyIntoItems(sourceUrl, destUrlCollection, fields , "Contents of the file".getBytes(), copyIntoItemsResult, copyResultCollection) The sourceUrl and the only url in destUrlCollection equals "hostname/sites/teamname/Tech Docs/Sub Folder". The FieldInformationCollection object named fields contains only one FieldInformation. The FieldInformation object has "HelloWorld.txt" as the value for displayName, internalName and value. The type property is set to FieldType.FILE. The id property is set to (java.util.UUID.randomUUID()).toString(). The call to copyIntoItems returns successfuly; copyIntoItemsResult contains a value of 0 and the only CopyResult object set in copyResultCollection has an error code of "SUCCESS" with a null error message. When I look into the "Tech Docs" library on Sharepoint, in the "Sub Folder" there's no file there. Why wouldn't it tell me what I did wrong? Did I just miss a step? Update (Feb 26th, 2011) I've changed my FieldInformation object's displayName and internalName properties to be "Title" as suggested. Still no joy, but a step in the right direction. After playing around with the urls for a bit, I got these results: With both the sourceUrl and the only destination URL equivalent, with no protocol, I get the SUCCESS response but no actual document appears in the document library. With both of the URLs equivalent but with an "http://" protocol specified, I get an UNKNOWN error with "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." as the message. With the source URL an empty string or null, I get an UNKNOWN error with " Value does not fall within the expected range." as the error message.

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  • CSS three column layout, liquid center, no left-margin!

    - by moontear
    Hi, I am all in favor of CSS based layouts, but this one I just can't figure out. With a table it is oh-so-easy: <html> <head><title>Three Column</title></head> <body> <p>Test</p> <table style="width: 100%; border: 1px solid black; min-height: 300px;"> <tr> <td style="border: 1px solid green;" colspan="3">Header</td> </tr> <tr> <td style="border: 1px solid green; width: 150px;" rowspan="2">Left</td> <td style="border: 1px solid yellow;">Content</td> <td style="border: 1px solid blue; width: 200px;" rowspan="2">Right</td> </tr> <tr> <td style="border: 1px solid fuchsia;">Additional stuff</td> </tr> <tr><td style="border: 1px solid green;" colspan="3">Footer</td></tr> </body> <html> Left is fixed width Right is fixed width Content is liquid Additional stuff sits beneath content Now here is the important part: "Left" may not exist. Again this is easy with the table. Delete the column and "Content" expands. Beautiful. I have looked through many examples (and "holy grails") of liquid and table less three-column CSS based layouts, but I have not found one which is not using some kind of margin-left for the middle column ("Content"). Any margin-left will suck once "Left" is gone as "Content" will just stay at it's place. I'm just about to switch to old school table based layout for this problem, so I'm hoping someone has some idea - I don't care about excess markup, wrappers and the like, I would just like to know how to solve this with plain CSS. Btw: look at how easy equal height columns are... Cheers PS: No CSS3 please

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  • web design PSD to html -> more direct ways?

    - by Assembler
    At work I see one colleague designing a site in Photoshop/Fireworks, I see another taking this data, slicing it up and using Dreamweaver to rebuild the same from scratch. It seems like too much mucking around! I know that Photoshop can output a tables based HTML, and Fireworks will create divs with absolute positioning; neither appear to be very helpful. Admittedly, I haven't tried much of (DW/FW) (CS4/CS3) since becoming a programmer, so I don't know if new versions are addressing this work flow issue, but are we still double handling things? Can we attach some sort of layout metadata (this is a rollover button, this will be a SWF, this will be text, this logo will hide "xyz" <h1> text etc) to slices to aid in layout generation? are there some secret tools which assist in this conversion process? Or are we still restricted to doing things by hand? The frustration continues when said hand built page needs to be reworked again to fit Smarty Templates/Wordpress/generic CMS. I acknowledge that designers need to be free of systems to be able to do whatever, but most conventional sites have: a header with navigation a sidebar with more links the main content part maybe another sidebar a footer Given the similarity of a lot of components, shouldn't there be a more systematic approach to going from sliced designs to functional HTML? Or am I over-simplifying things? -edit- Mmmmm.... I suppose I will accept an answer, but they weren't really what I was looking for. It just seems like designing the DOM is a bit of holy grail ("It's only a model!"), and maybe with all the "groovy" things you can do with HTML and Javascript, it would be mighty hard work, but with a set of constraints (that 960 stuff looks interesting), some well designed reset style sheets and a bit of... fairy dust? we should be able to improve the work flow. Photoshop's tables by themselves are pretty much useless, I agree, but surely we can take this data, and then select a group of cells and say "right, this is a text div, overflow:auto" or "these cells are an image block, style it with the same height/width as the selected area". Admittedly here at work there are other elephants in the room that need to make their formal introductions to management, but some parts of the designpage workflow seem... uneducated at best.

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