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• Create and Backup Multiple Profiles in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Other browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey allow you to have multiple profiles but not Chrome…at least not until now. If you want to use multiple profiles and create backups for them then join us as we look at Google Chrome Backup. Note: There is a paid version of this program available but we used the free version for our article. Google Chrome Backup in Action During the installation process you will run across this particular window. It will have a default user name filled in as shown here…you will not need to do anything except click on Next to continue installing the program. When you start the program for the first time this is what you will see. Your default Chrome Profile will already be visible in the window. A quick look at the Profile Menu… In the Tools Menu you can go ahead and disable the Start program at Windows Startup setting…the only time that you will need the program running is if you are creating or restoring a profile. When you create a new profile the process will start with this window. You can access an Advanced Options mode if desired but most likely you will not need it. Here is a look at the Advanced Options mode. It is mainly focused on adding Switches to the new Chrome Shortcut. The drop-down menu for the Switches available… To create your new profile you will need to choose: A profile location A profile name (as you type/create the profile name it will automatically be added to the Profile Path) Make certain that the Create a new shortcut to access new profile option is checked For our example we decided to try out the Disable plugins switch option… Click OK to create the new profile. Once you have created your new profile, you will find a new shortcut on the Desktop. Notice that the shortcut’s name will be Google Chrome + profile name that you chose. Note: On our system we were able to move the new shortcut to the “Start Menu” without problems. Clicking on our new profile’s shortcut opened up a fresh and clean looking instance of Chrome. Just out of curiosity we did decide to check the shortcut to see if the Switch set up correctly. Unfortunately it did not in this instance…so your mileage with the Switches may vary. This was just a minor quirk and nothing to get excited or upset over…especially considering that you can create multiple profiles so easily. After opening up our default profile of Chrome you can see the individual profile icons (New & Default in order) sitting in the Taskbar side-by-side. And our two profiles open at the same time on our Desktop… Backing Profiles Up For the next part of our tests we decided to create a backup for each of our profiles. Starting the wizard will allow you to choose between creating or restoring a profile. Note: To create or restore a backup click on Run Wizard. When you reach the second part of the process you can go with the Backup default profile option or choose a particular one from a drop-down list using the Select a profile to backup option. We chose to backup the Default Profile first… In the third part of the process you will need to select a location to save the profile to. Once you have selected the location you will see the Target Path as shown here. You can choose your own name for the backup file…we decided to go with the default name instead since it contained the backup’s calendar date. A very nice feature is the ability to have the cache cleared before creating the backup. We clicked on Yes…choose the option that best suits your needs. Once you have chosen either Yes or No the backup will then be created. Click Finish to complete the process. The backup file for our Default Profile at 14.0 MB in size. And the backup file for our Chrome Fresh Profile…2.81 MB. Restoring Profiles For the final part of our tests we decided to do a Restore. Select Restore and click Next to get the process started. In the second step you will need to browse for the Profile Backup File (and select the desired profile if you have created multiples). For our example we decided to overwrite the original Default Profile with the Chrome Fresh Profile. The third step lets you choose where to restore the chosen profile to…you can go with the Default Profile or choose one from the drop-down list using the Restore to a selected profile option. The final step will get you on your way to restoring the chosen profile. The program will conduct a check regarding the previous/old profile and ask if you would like to proceed with overwriting it. Definitely nice in case you change your mind at the last moment. Clicking Yes will finish the restoration. The only other odd quirk that we noticed while using the program was that the Next Button did not function after restoring the profile. You can easily get around the problem by clicking to close the window. Which one is which? After the restore process we had identical twins. Conclusion If you have been looking for a way to create multiple profiles in Google Chrome, then you might want to add this program to your system. Links Download Google Chrome Backup Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Backup and Restore Firefox Profiles EasilyBackup Different Browsers Easily with FavBackupBackup Your Browser with the New FavBackupStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default Browser TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools Track Daily Goals With 42Goals

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• Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

  - by dapostolov

  So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face;  he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1   Best Regards D.

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• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

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• How to Recover From a Virus Infection: 3 Things You Need to Do

  - by Chris Hoffman

  If your computer becomes infected with a virus or another piece of malware, removing the malware from your computer is only the first step. There’s more you need to do to ensure you’re secure. Note that not every antivirus alert is an actual infection. If your antivirus program catches a virus before it ever gets a chance to run on your computer, you’re safe. If it catches the malware later, you have a bigger problem. Change Your Passwords You’ve probably used your computer to log into your email, online banking websites, and other important accounts. Assuming you had malware on your computer, the malware could have logged your passwords and uploaded them to a malicious third party. With just your email account, the third party could reset your passwords on other websites and gain access to almost any of your online accounts. To prevent this, you’ll want to change the passwords for your important accounts — email, online banking, and whatever other important accounts you’ve logged into from the infected computer. You should probably use another computer that you know is clean to change the passwords, just to be safe. When changing your passwords, consider using a password manager to keep track of strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication to prevent people from logging into your important accounts even if they know your password. This will help protect you in the future. Ensure the Malware Is Actually Removed Once malware gets access to your computer and starts running, it has the ability to do many more nasty things to your computer. For example, some malware may install rootkit software and attempt to hide itself from the system. Many types of Trojans also “open the floodgates” after they’re running, downloading many different types of malware from malicious web servers to the local system. In other words, if your computer was infected, you’ll want to take extra precautions. You shouldn’t assume it’s clean just because your antivirus removed what it found. It’s probably a good idea to scan your computer with multiple antivirus products to ensure maximum detection. You may also want to run a bootable antivirus program, which runs outside of Windows. Such bootable antivirus programs will be able to detect rootkits that hide themselves from Windows and even the software running within Windows. avast! offers the ability to quickly create a bootable CD or USB drive for scanning, as do many other antivirus programs. You may also want to reinstall Windows (or use the Refresh feature on Windows 8) to get your computer back to a clean state. This is more time-consuming, especially if you don’t have good backups and can’t get back up and running quickly, but this is the only way you can have 100% confidence that your Windows system isn’t infected. It’s all a matter of how paranoid you want to be. Figure Out How the Malware Arrived If your computer became infected, the malware must have arrived somehow. You’ll want to examine your computer’s security and your habits to prevent more malware from slipping through in the same way. Windows is complex. For example, there are over 50 different types of potentially dangerous file extensions that can contain malware to keep track of. We’ve tried to cover many of the most important security practices you should be following, but here are some of the more important questions to ask: Are you using an antivirus? – If you don’t have an antivirus installed, you should. If you have Microsoft Security Essentials (known as Windows Defender on Windows 8), you may want to switch to a different antivirus like the free version of avast!. Microsoft’s antivirus product has been doing very poorly in tests. Do you have Java installed? – Java is a huge source of security problems. The majority of computers on the Internet have an out-of-date, vulnerable version of Java installed, which would allow malicious websites to install malware on your computer. If you have Java installed, uninstall it. If you actually need Java for something (like Minecraft), at least disable the Java browser plugin. If you’re not sure whether you need Java, you probably don’t. Are any browser plugins out-of-date? – Visit Mozilla’s Plugin Check website (yes, it also works in other browsers, not just Firefox) and see if you have any critically vulnerable plugins installed. If you do, ensure you update them — or uninstall them. You probably don’t need older plugins like QuickTime or RealPlayer installed on your computer, although Flash is still widely used. Are your web browser and operating system set to automatically update? – You should be installing updates for Windows via Windows Update when they appear. Modern web browsers are set to automatically update, so they should be fine — unless you went out of your way to disable automatic updates. Using out-of-date web browsers and Windows versions is dangerous. Are you being careful about what you run? – Watch out when downloading software to ensure you don’t accidentally click sketchy advertisements and download harmful software. Avoid pirated software that may be full of malware. Don’t run programs from email attachments. Be careful about what you run and where you get it from in general. If you can’t figure out how the malware arrived because everything looks okay, there’s not much more you can do. Just try to follow proper security practices. You may also want to keep an extra-close eye on your credit card statement for a while if you did any online-shopping recently. As so much malware is now related to organized crime, credit card numbers are a popular target.     

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• Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

  - by user3002473

  Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

  - by John Murphy

  During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

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• I Know What I Did This Summer: Put Down Trex Decking

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re wondering why I would bore everyone with my pictures and frequent status updates/tweets from the past week – it’s so I could document the process of refurbishing my deck, or what some would call a porch. When we go to take a vacation, buy a car, do anything – we also read personal blogs to get the real story. So, if you’re curious about what it takes to tackle this sort of project, read on. Skills/Equipment/Manpower We Possessed I took the old decking out by myself. I’m about 230 lbs, more than 6′ tall, and I’m pretty healthy. This took about 8 hours over two afternoons. Three of us put the deck back together. My wife has two engineering degrees. Her father also has two engineering degrees. Lots of brainpower available here. Also, her dad ran the public works department for a country for more than 20 years – so lots and lots of practical experience on hand. We had a compound mitre saw, a skilsaw, 2-3 crowbars, a framing hammer, 3 cordless drills, a corded drill, lots of sawhorses, a power sander, an angle grinder, a 10×10 Coleman canopy tent, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, outdoor speakers and lots of iTunes playlists, plenty of water and cold beer. Why We Did This Our deck was relatively young – it was built in 2005. However, the pressure treated boards must not have been adequately maintained before we bought the house. I had powerwashed the deck every other year and had it stained a few times. The boards just rotted. We’re going to be in the house for a long time, and we wanted something that would look nice and require little maintenance. More bad deck boards The deck boards were in bad shape Things We Learned The two most important things: The hidden fasteners have to be put in JUST right. Wedge them into the grooved board, then bend down the bit that is screwed down. We didn’t do this on the first board and couldn’t get the second board to fit nearly close enough. Watching the official TREX YouTube video helped immensely, and we should have watched that first. When pre-drilling holes for the boards that need screwed down – DO NOT pre-drill through the underlying framing wood. ONLY pre-drill through the TREX itself. The screw won’t seat in the board properly. Instead of sitting down flush with the board, it will stop at the top of the board and just spin. I had to call the the place that sold me the screws to find this out. So about a third of our screws look like crap. If it doesn’t look or feel right – stop everything and pick up your computer or your phone. It’s not right, and it will be much easier to stop and find out why. We didn’t do this, and now I’m going to see every screw that’s not flush with the boards and get upset. Oh well. The Process How much time did it take? Well I spent about 8 hours taking the deck apart. And then the 3 of use spent 8 hours the first day, 10 hours the second day, 8 hours the third, and another 6 hours on the fourth day. That’s like 104 man-hours. We supposedly saved four or five thousand dollars in labor, but don’t do the math here or you might get a bit upset. The main thing is that we got what we wanted, and there won’t be any surprises later. Now for some pictures… This 6”+ pry bar made the destruction of the old deck much easier Most of the joists, once exposed, were OK. This joist wasn’t sitting on ANYTHING before. We think a lazy gas person cut the board to sneak a gas line in. Awesome… These monster lag bolts had to be accounted for when putting in the additional framing The border pattern Sheri wanted to put in required a lot more framing. These were the first boards to go down – we screwed them in as there was no way to attach clips I sat, kicked in the boards, and then drilled these clips in – but my wife was able to go MUCH faster by using her hands to lock the boards in and drill on her knees. I liked locking the board in with my feet when they needed to be ‘encouraged’ to go straight. The first board took FOREVER to go in, but then when we got rolling, we were able to put in a 20′ board in less than 10 minutes. This was end of construction day #2 – we got much further than we thought we would. Ah, the dreaded last 10% – what to do here? Remember those ‘floating’ stringers? Yeah, we fixed that up a bit, too. My wife used a website (and her brain) to calculate exactly how to cut the stringers to give us the rise/run we needed with the proper clearance and all that jazz. The stairs with stringers and toe kicks – this was worth the effort It started raining on us as I screwed down the steps – this we managed to get our shade tent up on the deck to protect us from the rain too The stairs, finished Finished, mostly Good corner shot The top of the stairs Stairs, looking down Celebratory beer In Summary There are a few things we’re not happy with. I think we can fix them up – but later. I have a few things left to finish, rewire the lighting, get the gas grille put back in, and rehang some screen doors. I was expecting this to be a lot worse than it was. If I didn’t have the help, I would have never done it myself. But I’m glad that I did have that help and did do that project. It’s not often you get to spend that kind of qualify time with family and building cool stuff.

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• Secure Your Wireless Router: 8 Things You Can Do Right Now

  - by Chris Hoffman

  A security researcher recently discovered a backdoor in many D-Link routers, allowing anyone to access the router without knowing the username or password. This isn’t the first router security issue and won’t be the last. To protect yourself, you should ensure that your router is configured securely. This is about more than just enabling Wi-Fi encryption and not hosting an open Wi-Fi network. Disable Remote Access Routers offer a web interface, allowing you to configure them through a browser. The router runs a web server and makes this web page available when you’re on the router’s local network. However, most routers offer a “remote access” feature that allows you to access this web interface from anywhere in the world. Even if you set a username and password, if you have a D-Link router affected by this vulnerability, anyone would be able to log in without any credentials. If you have remote access disabled, you’d be safe from people remotely accessing your router and tampering with it. To do this, open your router’s web interface and look for the “Remote Access,” “Remote Administration,” or “Remote Management” feature. Ensure it’s disabled — it should be disabled by default on most routers, but it’s good to check. Update the Firmware Like our operating systems, web browsers, and every other piece of software we use, router software isn’t perfect. The router’s firmware — essentially the software running on the router — may have security flaws. Router manufacturers may release firmware updates that fix such security holes, although they quickly discontinue support for most routers and move on to the next models. Unfortunately, most routers don’t have an auto-update feature like Windows and our web browsers do — you have to check your router manufacturer’s website for a firmware update and install it manually via the router’s web interface. Check to be sure your router has the latest available firmware installed. Change Default Login Credentials Many routers have default login credentials that are fairly obvious, such as the password “admin”. If someone gained access to your router’s web interface through some sort of vulnerability or just by logging onto your Wi-Fi network, it would be easy to log in and tamper with the router’s settings. To avoid this, change the router’s password to a non-default password that an attacker couldn’t easily guess. Some routers even allow you to change the username you use to log into your router. Lock Down Wi-Fi Access If someone gains access to your Wi-Fi network, they could attempt to tamper with your router — or just do other bad things like snoop on your local file shares or use your connection to downloaded copyrighted content and get you in trouble. Running an open Wi-Fi network can be dangerous. To prevent this, ensure your router’s Wi-Fi is secure. This is pretty simple: Set it to use WPA2 encryption and use a reasonably secure passphrase. Don’t use the weaker WEP encryption or set an obvious passphrase like “password”. Disable UPnP A variety of UPnP flaws have been found in consumer routers. Tens of millions of consumer routers respond to UPnP requests from the Internet, allowing attackers on the Internet to remotely configure your router. Flash applets in your browser could use UPnP to open ports, making your computer more vulnerable. UPnP is fairly insecure for a variety of reasons. To avoid UPnP-based problems, disable UPnP on your router via its web interface. If you use software that needs ports forwarded — such as a BitTorrent client, game server, or communications program — you’ll have to forward ports on your router without relying on UPnP. Log Out of the Router’s Web Interface When You’re Done Configuring It Cross site scripting (XSS) flaws have been found in some routers. A router with such an XSS flaw could be controlled by a malicious web page, allowing the web page to configure settings while you’re logged in. If your router is using its default username and password, it would be easy for the malicious web page to gain access. Even if you changed your router’s password, it would be theoretically possible for a website to use your logged-in session to access your router and modify its settings. To prevent this, just log out of your router when you’re done configuring it — if you can’t do that, you may want to clear your browser cookies. This isn’t something to be too paranoid about, but logging out of your router when you’re done using it is a quick and easy thing to do. Change the Router’s Local IP Address If you’re really paranoid, you may be able to change your router’s local IP address. For example, if its default address is 192.168.0.1, you could change it to 192.168.0.150. If the router itself were vulnerable and some sort of malicious script in your web browser attempted to exploit a cross site scripting vulnerability, accessing known-vulnerable routers at their local IP address and tampering with them, the attack would fail. This step isn’t completely necessary, especially since it wouldn’t protect against local attackers — if someone were on your network or software was running on your PC, they’d be able to determine your router’s IP address and connect to it. Install Third-Party Firmwares If you’re really worried about security, you could also install a third-party firmware such as DD-WRT or OpenWRT. You won’t find obscure back doors added by the router’s manufacturer in these alternative firmwares. Consumer routers are shaping up to be a perfect storm of security problems — they’re not automatically updated with new security patches, they’re connected directly to the Internet, manufacturers quickly stop supporting them, and many consumer routers seem to be full of bad code that leads to UPnP exploits and easy-to-exploit backdoors. It’s smart to take some basic precautions. Image Credit: Nuscreen on Flickr     

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• Cocos2d: Moving background on update: offsett issue

  - by mm24

  working with Objective C, iOS and Cocos2d I am developing a vertical scrolling shooter game for iPhone (retina display models with 640 width x 960 height pixel resolution). My basic algorithm works as following: I create two instances of an image that has exactly 640 width x 960 height pixel of resolution, which we will call imageA and imageB I then set the two imags with exactly 480.0f of offset from each other, as the screenSize of a CCScene is set by default to 480.0f. At each update method call I move the two images by the same value. I make sure that their offsett stays to 480.0f However when running the game I see a 1 pixel height line between the two images. This literally bugs me and would like to adjust this. What am I doing wrong? This is a zoom in on the background when the "offsett line" is visible. The white line you can see divides the two background images and is not meant to exist as both images are completely black :): If I change the yPositionOfSecondElement value to 479.0f until the first loop the two images overlap correctly, but as soon as the loop starts the two images starts having an offsett of -1.0f. Here is the initialization code: -(void) init { //... screenHeight = 480.0f; yPositionOfSecondElement= screenHeight;//I tried subtracting an offsett of -1 but eventually the image would go wrong again yPositionOfFirstElement = 0.0f; loopedBackgroundImageInstanceA = [BackgroundLoopedImage loopImageForLevel:levelName]; loopedBackgroundImageInstanceA.anchorPoint = CGPointMake(0.5f, 0.0f); loopedBackgroundImageInstanceA.position = CGPointMake(160.0f, yPositionOfFirstElement); [node addChild:loopedBackgroundImageInstanceA z:zLevelBackground]; //loopedBackgroundImageInstanceA.color= ccRED; loopedBackgroundImageInstanceB = [BackgroundLoopedImage loopImageForLevel:levelName]; loopedBackgroundImageInstanceB.anchorPoint = CGPointMake(0.5f, 0.0f); loopedBackgroundImageInstanceB.position = CGPointMake(160.0f, yPositionOfSecondElement); [node addChild:loopedBackgroundImageInstanceB z:zLevelBackground]; //.... } And here is the move code called at each update: -(void) moveBackgroundSprites:(BackgroundLoopedImage*)imageA :(BackgroundLoopedImage*)imageB :(ccTime)delta { isEligibleToMove=false; //This is done to avoid rounding errors float yStep = delta * [GameController sharedGameController].currentBackgroundSpeed; NSString* formattedNumber = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%.02f", yStep]; yStep = atof([formattedNumber UTF8String]); //First should adjust position of images [self adjustPosition:imageA :imageB]; //The can get the actual image position CGPoint posA = imageA.position; CGPoint posB = imageB.position; //Here could verify if the checksum is equal to the required difference (should be 479.0f) if (![self verifyCheckSum:posA :posB]) { CCLOG(@"does not comply A"); } //At this stage can compute the hypotetical new position CGPoint newPosA = CGPointMake(posA.x, posA.y - yStep); CGPoint newPosB = CGPointMake(posB.x, posB.y - yStep); // Reposition stripes when they're out of bounds if (newPosA.y <= -yPositionOfSecondElement) { newPosA.y = yPositionOfSecondElement; [imageA shuffle]; if (timeElapsed>=endTime && hasReachedEndLevel==FALSE) { hasReachedEndLevel=TRUE; shouldMoveImageEnd=TRUE; } } else if (newPosB.y <= -yPositionOfSecondElement) { newPosB.y = yPositionOfSecondElement; [imageB shuffle]; if (timeElapsed>=endTime && hasReachedEndLevel==FALSE) { hasReachedEndLevel=TRUE; shouldMoveImageEnd=TRUE; } } //Here should verify that the check sum is equal to 479.0f if (![self verifyCheckSum:posA :posB]) { CCLOG(@"does not comply B"); } imageA.position = newPosA; imageB.position = newPosB; //Here could verify that the check sum is equal to 479.0f if (![self verifyCheckSum:posA :posB]) { CCLOG(@"does not comply C"); } isEligibleToMove=true; } -(BOOL) verifyCheckSum:(CGPoint)posA :(CGPoint)posB { BOOL comply = false; float sum = 0.0f; if (posA.y > posB.y) { sum = posA.y - posB.y; } else if (posB.y > posA.y){ sum = posB.y - posA.y; } else{ return false; } if (sum!=yPositionOfSecondElement) { comply= false; } else{ comply=true; } return comply; } And here is what happens on the update: if(shouldMoveImageA && shouldMoveImageB) { if (isEligibleToMove) { [self moveBackgroundSprites:loopedBackgroundImageInstanceA :loopedBackgroundImageInstanceB :delta]; } Forget about shouldMoveImageA and shouldMoveImageB, this is just for when the background reaches the end of level, this works.

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• Query optimization using composite indexes

  - by xmarch

  Many times, during the process of creating a new Coherence application, developers do not pay attention to the way cache queries are constructed; they only check that these queries comply with functional specs. Later, performance testing shows that these perform poorly and it is then when developers start working on improvements until the non-functional performance requirements are met. This post describes the optimization process of a real-life scenario, where using a composite attribute index has brought a radical improvement in query execution times.  The execution times went down from 4 seconds to 2 milliseconds! E-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca In the context of a new e-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca, Oracle Coherence has been used to calculate and store SKU prices. In this architecture, a Coherence cache stores the final SKU prices used for Endeca baseline indexing. Each SKU price is calculated from a base SKU price and a series of calculations based on information from corporate global discounts. Corporate global discounts information is stored in an auxiliary Coherence cache with over 800.000 entries. In particular, to obtain each price the process needs to execute six queries over the global discount cache. After the implementation was finished, we discovered that the most expensive steps in the price calculation discount process were the global discounts cache query. This query has 10 parameters and is executed 6 times for each SKU price calculation. The steps taken to optimise this query are described below; Starting point Initial query was: String filter = "levelId = :iLevelId AND  salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId "+ "AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND brand = :iBrand AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Map<String, Object> params = new HashMap<String, Object>(10); // Fill all parameters. params.put("iLevelId", xxxx); // Executing filter. Filter globalDiscountsFilter = QueryHelper.createFilter(filter, params); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(globalDiscountsFilter); With the small dataset used for development the cache queries performed very well. However, when carrying out performance testing with a real-world sample size of 800,000 entries, each query execution was taking more than 4 seconds. First round of optimizations The first optimisation step was the creation of separate Coherence index for each of the 10 attributes used by the filter. This avoided object deserialization while executing the query. Each index was created as follows: globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(new ReflectionExtractor("getXXX" ) , false, null); After adding these indexes the query execution time was reduced to between 450 ms and 1s. However, these execution times were still not good enough.  Second round of optimizations In this optimisation phase a Coherence query explain plan was used to identify how many entires each index reduced the results set by, along with the cost in ms of executing that part of the query. Though the explain plan showed that all the indexes for the query were being used, it also showed that the ordering of the query parameters was "sub-optimal".  Parameters associated to object attributes with high-cardinality should appear at the beginning of the filter, or more specifically, the attributes that filters out the highest of number records should be placed at the beginning. But examining corporate global discount data we realized that depending on the values of the parameters used in the query the “good” order for the attributes was different. In particular, if the attributes brand and family had specific values it was more optimal to have a different query changing the order of the attributes. Ultimately, we ended up with three different optimal variants of the query that were used in its relevant cases: String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId AND brand = :iBrand "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId  AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Using the appropriate query depending on the value of brand and family parameters the query execution time dropped to between 100 ms and 150 ms. But these these execution times were still not good enough and the solution was cumbersome. Third and last round of optimizations The third and final optimization was to introduce a composite index. However, this did mean that it was not possible to use the Coherence Query Language (CohQL), as composite indexes are not currently supporte in CohQL. As the original query had 8 parameters using EqualsFilter, 1 using GreaterEqualsFilter and 1 using LessEqualsFilter, the composite index was built for the 8 attributes using EqualsFilter. The final query had an EqualsFilter for the multiple extractor, a GreaterEqualsFilter and a LessEqualsFilter for the 2 remaining attributes.  All individual indexes were dropped except the ones being used for LessEqualsFilter and GreaterEqualsFilter. We were now running in an scenario with an 8-attributes composite filter and 2 single attribute filters. The composite index created was as follows: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(me, false, null); And the final query was: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); // Fill composite parameters.String SalesCompanyId = xxxx;...AndFilter composite = new AndFilter(new EqualsFilter(me,                   Arrays.asList(iSalesChannelId, iLevelId, iAreaId, iDepartmentId, iFamilyId, iManufacturer, iBrand, SalesCompanyId)),                                     new GreaterEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getEndDate" ), iEndDate)); AndFilter finalFilter = new AndFilter(composite, new LessEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getStartDate" ), iStartDate)); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(finalFilter);      Using this composite index the query improved dramatically and the execution time dropped to between 2 ms and  4 ms.  These execution times completely met the non-functional performance requirements . It should be noticed than when using the composite index the order of the attributes inside the ValueExtractor was not relevant.

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• returning correct multiTouch id

  - by Max

  I've spent countless hours on reading tutorials and looking at every question related to multiTouch from here and Stackoverflow. But I just cannot figure out how to do this correctly. I use a loop to get my pointerId, I dont see alot of people doing this but its the only way I've managed to get it somewhat working. I have two joysticks on my screen, one for moving and one for controlling my sprites rotation and the angle he shoots, like in Monster Shooter. Both these work fine. My problem is that when I Move my sprite at the same time as Im shooting, my touchingPoint for my movement is set to the touchingPoint of my shooting, since the x and y is higher on the touchingPoint of my shooting (moving-stick on left side of screen, shooting-stick on right side), my sprite speeds up, this creates an unwanted change in speed for my sprite. I will post my entire onTouch method here with some variable-changes to make it more understandable. Since I do not know where Im going wrong. public void update(MotionEvent event) { if (event == null && lastEvent == null) { return; } else if (event == null && lastEvent != null) { event = lastEvent; } else { lastEvent = event; } int pointerCount = event.getPointerCount(); for (int i = 0; i < pointerCount; i++) { int x = (int) event.getX(i); int y = (int) event.getY(i); int id = event.getPointerId(i); int action = event.getActionMasked(); int actionIndex = event.getActionIndex(); String actionString; switch (action) { case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN: actionString = "DOWN"; break; case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP: shooting=false; // when shooting is true, it shoots dragging=false; // when dragging is true, it moves actionString = "UP"; break; case MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_DOWN: actionString = "PNTR DOWN"; break; case MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_UP: shooting=false; dragging=false; actionString = "PNTR UP"; break; case MotionEvent.ACTION_CANCEL: shooting=false; dragging=false; actionString = "CANCEL"; break; case MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE: try{ if((int) event.getX(id) > 0 && (int) event.getX(id) < touchingBox && (int) event.getY(id) > touchingBox && (int) event.getY(id) < view.getHeight()){ movingPoint.x = (int) event.getX(id); movingPoint.y = (int) event.getY(id); dragging = true; } else if((int) event.getX(id) > touchingBox && (int) event.getX(id) < view.getWidth() && (int) event.getY(id) > touchingBox && (int) event.getY(id) < view.getHeight()){ shootingPoint.x = (int) event.getX(id); shootingPoint.y = (int) event.getY(id); shooting=true; }else{ shooting=false; dragging=false; } }catch(Exception e){ } actionString = "MOVE"; break; default: actionString = ""; } Wouldnt post this much code if I wasnt at an absolute loss of what I'm doing wrong. I simply can not get a good understanding of how multiTouching works. basicly movingPoint changes for both my first and second finger. I bind it to a box, but aslong as I hold one finger within this box, it changes its value based on where my second finger touches. It moves in the right direction and nothing gives an error, the problem is the speed-change, its almost like it adds up the two touchingPoints.

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• o write a C++ program to encrypt and decrypt certain codes.

  - by Amber

  Step 1: Write a function int GetText(char[],int); which fills a character array from a requested file. That is, the function should prompt the user to input the filename, and then read up to the number of characters given as the second argument, terminating when the number has been reached or when the end of file is encountered. The file should then be closed. The number of characters placed in the array is then returned as the value of the function. Every character in the file should be transferred to the array. Whitespace should not be removed. When testing, assume that no more than 5000 characters will be read. The function should be placed in a file called coding.cpp while the main will be in ass5.cpp. To enable the prototypes to be accessible, the file coding.h contains the prototypes for all the functions that are to be written in coding.cpp for this assignment. (You may write other functions. If they are called from any of the functions in coding.h, they must appear in coding.cpp where their prototypes should also appear. Do not alter coding.h. Any other functions written for this assignment should be placed, along with their prototypes, with the main function.) Step 2: Write a function int SimplifyText(char[],int); which simplifies the text in the first argument, an array containing the number of characters as given in the second argument, by converting all alphabetic characters to lower case, removing all non-alpha characters, and replacing multiple whitespace by one blank. Any leading whitespace at the beginning of the array should be removed completely. The resulting number of characters should be returned as the value of the function. Note that another array cannot appear in the function (as the file does not contain one). For example, if the array contained the 29 characters "The 39 Steps" by John Buchan (with the " appearing in the array), the simplified text would be the steps by john buchan of length 24. The array should not contain a null character at the end. Step 3: Using the file test.txt, test your program so far. You will need to write a function void PrintText(const char[],int,int); that prints out the contents of the array, whose length is the second argument, breaking the lines to exactly the number of characters in the third argument. Be warned that, if the array contains newlines (as it would when read from a file), lines will be broken earlier than the specified length. Step 4: Write a function void Caesar(const char[],int,char[],int); which takes the first argument array, with length given by the second argument and codes it into the third argument array, using the shift given in the fourth argument. The shift must be performed cyclicly and must also be able to handle negative shifts. Shifts exceeding 26 can be reduced by modulo arithmetic. (Is C++'s modulo operations on negative numbers a problem here?) Demonstrate that the test file, as simplified, can be coded and decoded using a given shift by listing the original input text, the simplified text (indicating the new length), the coded text and finally the decoded text. Step 5: The permutation cypher does not limit the character substitution to just a shift. In fact, each of the 26 characters is coded to one of the others in an arbitrary way. So, for example, a might become f, b become q, c become d, but a letter never remains the same. How the letters are rearranged can be specified using a seed to the random number generator. The code can then be decoded, if the decoder has the same random number generator and knows the seed. Write the function void Permute(const char[],int,char[],unsigned long); with the same first three arguments as Caesar above, with the fourth argument being the seed. The function will have to make up a permutation table as follows: To find what a is coded as, generate a random number from 1 to 25. Add that to a to get the coded letter. Mark that letter as used. For b, generate 1 to 24, then step that many letters after b, ignoring the used letter if encountered. For c, generate 1 to 23, ignoring a or b's codes if encountered. Wrap around at z. Here's an example, for only the 6 letters a, b, c, d, e, f. For the letter a, generate, from 1-5, a 2. Then a - c. c is marked as used. For the letter b, generate, from 1-4, a 3. So count 3 from b, skipping c (since it is marked as used) yielding the coding of b - f. Mark f as used. For c, generate, from 1-3, a 3. So count 3 from c, skipping f, giving a. Note the wrap at the last letter back to the first. And so on, yielding a - c b - f c - a d - b (it got a 2) e - d f - e Thus, for a given seed, a translation table is required. To decode a piece of text, we need the table generated to be re-arranged so that the right hand column is in order. In fact you can just store the table in the reverse way (e.g., if a gets encoded to c, put a opposite c is the table). Write a function called void DePermute(const char[],int,char[], unsigned long); to reverse the permutation cypher. Again, test your functions using the test file. At this point, any main program used to test these functions will not be required as part of the assignment. The remainder of the assignment uses some of these functions, and needs its own main function. When submitted, all the above functions will be tested by the marker's own main function. Step 6: If the seed number is unknown, decoding is difficult. Write a main program which: (i) reads in a piece of text using GetText; (ii) simplifies the text using SimplifyText; (iii) prints the text using PrintText; (iv) requests two letters to swap. If we think 'a' in the text should be 'q' we would type aq as input. The text would be modified by swapping the a's and q's, and the text reprinted. Repeat this last step until the user considers the text is decoded, when the input of the same letter twice (requesting a letter to be swapped with itself) terminates the program. Step 7: If we have a large enough sample of coded text, we can use knowledge of English to aid in finding the permutation. The first clue is in the frequency of occurrence of each letter. Write a function void LetterFreq(const char[],int,freq[]); which takes the piece of text given as the first two arguments (same as above) and returns in the 26 long array of structs (the third argument), the table of the frequency of the 26 letters. This frequency table should be in decreasing order of popularity. A simple Selection Sort will suffice. (This will be described in lectures.) When printed, this summary would look something like v x r s z j p t n c l h u o i b w d g e a q y k f m 168106 68 66 59 54 48 45 44 35 26 24 22 20 20 20 17 13 12 12 4 4 1 0 0 0 The formatting will require the use of input/output manipulators. See the header file for the definition of the struct called freq. Modify the program so that, before each swap is requested, the current frequency of the letters is printed. This does not require further calls to LetterFreq, however. You may use the traditional order of regular letter frequencies (E T A I O N S H R D L U) as a guide when deciding what characters to exchange. Step 8: The decoding process can be made more difficult if blank is also coded. That is, consider the alphabet to be 27 letters. Rewrite LetterFreq and your main program to handle blank as another character to code. In the above frequency order, space usually comes first.

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• Write a C++ program to encrypt and decrypt certain codes.

  - by Amber

  Step 1: Write a function int GetText(char[],int); which fills a character array from a requested file. That is, the function should prompt the user to input the filename, and then read up to the number of characters given as the second argument, terminating when the number has been reached or when the end of file is encountered. The file should then be closed. The number of characters placed in the array is then returned as the value of the function. Every character in the file should be transferred to the array. Whitespace should not be removed. When testing, assume that no more than 5000 characters will be read. The function should be placed in a file called coding.cpp while the main will be in ass5.cpp. To enable the prototypes to be accessible, the file coding.h contains the prototypes for all the functions that are to be written in coding.cpp for this assignment. (You may write other functions. If they are called from any of the functions in coding.h, they must appear in coding.cpp where their prototypes should also appear. Do not alter coding.h. Any other functions written for this assignment should be placed, along with their prototypes, with the main function.) Step 2: Write a function int SimplifyText(char[],int); which simplifies the text in the first argument, an array containing the number of characters as given in the second argument, by converting all alphabetic characters to lower case, removing all non-alpha characters, and replacing multiple whitespace by one blank. Any leading whitespace at the beginning of the array should be removed completely. The resulting number of characters should be returned as the value of the function. Note that another array cannot appear in the function (as the file does not contain one). For example, if the array contained the 29 characters "The 39 Steps" by John Buchan (with the " appearing in the array), the simplified text would be the steps by john buchan of length 24. The array should not contain a null character at the end. Step 3: Using the file test.txt, test your program so far. You will need to write a function void PrintText(const char[],int,int); that prints out the contents of the array, whose length is the second argument, breaking the lines to exactly the number of characters in the third argument. Be warned that, if the array contains newlines (as it would when read from a file), lines will be broken earlier than the specified length. Step 4: Write a function void Caesar(const char[],int,char[],int); which takes the first argument array, with length given by the second argument and codes it into the third argument array, using the shift given in the fourth argument. The shift must be performed cyclicly and must also be able to handle negative shifts. Shifts exceeding 26 can be reduced by modulo arithmetic. (Is C++'s modulo operations on negative numbers a problem here?) Demonstrate that the test file, as simplified, can be coded and decoded using a given shift by listing the original input text, the simplified text (indicating the new length), the coded text and finally the decoded text. Step 5: The permutation cypher does not limit the character substitution to just a shift. In fact, each of the 26 characters is coded to one of the others in an arbitrary way. So, for example, a might become f, b become q, c become d, but a letter never remains the same. How the letters are rearranged can be specified using a seed to the random number generator. The code can then be decoded, if the decoder has the same random number generator and knows the seed. Write the function void Permute(const char[],int,char[],unsigned long); with the same first three arguments as Caesar above, with the fourth argument being the seed. The function will have to make up a permutation table as follows: To find what a is coded as, generate a random number from 1 to 25. Add that to a to get the coded letter. Mark that letter as used. For b, generate 1 to 24, then step that many letters after b, ignoring the used letter if encountered. For c, generate 1 to 23, ignoring a or b's codes if encountered. Wrap around at z. Here's an example, for only the 6 letters a, b, c, d, e, f. For the letter a, generate, from 1-5, a 2. Then a - c. c is marked as used. For the letter b, generate, from 1-4, a 3. So count 3 from b, skipping c (since it is marked as used) yielding the coding of b - f. Mark f as used. For c, generate, from 1-3, a 3. So count 3 from c, skipping f, giving a. Note the wrap at the last letter back to the first. And so on, yielding a - c b - f c - a d - b (it got a 2) e - d f - e Thus, for a given seed, a translation table is required. To decode a piece of text, we need the table generated to be re-arranged so that the right hand column is in order. In fact you can just store the table in the reverse way (e.g., if a gets encoded to c, put a opposite c is the table). Write a function called void DePermute(const char[],int,char[], unsigned long); to reverse the permutation cypher. Again, test your functions using the test file. At this point, any main program used to test these functions will not be required as part of the assignment. The remainder of the assignment uses some of these functions, and needs its own main function. When submitted, all the above functions will be tested by the marker's own main function. Step 6: If the seed number is unknown, decoding is difficult. Write a main program which: (i) reads in a piece of text using GetText; (ii) simplifies the text using SimplifyText; (iii) prints the text using PrintText; (iv) requests two letters to swap. If we think 'a' in the text should be 'q' we would type aq as input. The text would be modified by swapping the a's and q's, and the text reprinted. Repeat this last step until the user considers the text is decoded, when the input of the same letter twice (requesting a letter to be swapped with itself) terminates the program. Step 7: If we have a large enough sample of coded text, we can use knowledge of English to aid in finding the permutation. The first clue is in the frequency of occurrence of each letter. Write a function void LetterFreq(const char[],int,freq[]); which takes the piece of text given as the first two arguments (same as above) and returns in the 26 long array of structs (the third argument), the table of the frequency of the 26 letters. This frequency table should be in decreasing order of popularity. A simple Selection Sort will suffice. (This will be described in lectures.) When printed, this summary would look something like v x r s z j p t n c l h u o i b w d g e a q y k f m 168106 68 66 59 54 48 45 44 35 26 24 22 20 20 20 17 13 12 12 4 4 1 0 0 0 The formatting will require the use of input/output manipulators. See the header file for the definition of the struct called freq. Modify the program so that, before each swap is requested, the current frequency of the letters is printed. This does not require further calls to LetterFreq, however. You may use the traditional order of regular letter frequencies (E T A I O N S H R D L U) as a guide when deciding what characters to exchange. Step 8: The decoding process can be made more difficult if blank is also coded. That is, consider the alphabet to be 27 letters. Rewrite LetterFreq and your main program to handle blank as another character to code. In the above frequency order, space usually comes first.

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• EF4 CTP5 Conflicting changes detected. This may happen when trying to insert multiple entities with the same key.

  - by user658332

  hi, I am new to EF4 CTP5. I am just hanging at one problem.. I am using CodeFirst without Database, so when i execute application, it generated DB for me. here is my scenario, i have following Class structure... public class KVCalculationWish { public KVCalculationWish() { } public int KVCalculationWishId { get; set; } public string KVCalculationWishName { get; set; } public int KVSingleOfferId { get; set; } public virtual KVSingleOffer SingleOffer { get; set; } public int KVCalculationsForPersonId { get; set; } public virtual KVCalculationsForPerson CaculationsForPerson { get; set; } } public class KVSingleOffer { public KVSingleOffer() { } public int KVSingleOfferId { get; set; } public string KVSingleOfferName { get; set; } public KVCalculationWish CalculationWish { get; set; } } public class KVCalculationsForPerson { public KVCalculationsForPerson() { } public int KVCalculationsForPersonId { get; set; } public string KVCalculationsForPersonName { get; set; } public KVCalculationWish CalculationWish { get; set; } } public class EntiyRelation : DbContext { public EntiyRelation() { } public DbSet<KVCalculationWish> CalculationWish { get; set; } public DbSet<KVSingleOffer> SingleOffer { get; set; } public DbSet<KVCalculationsForPerson> CalculationsForPerson { get; set; } protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) { base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder); modelBuilder.Entity<KVCalculationWish>().HasOptional(m => m.SingleOffer).WithRequired(p => p.CalculationWish); modelBuilder.Entity<KVCalculationWish>().HasOptional(m => m.CaculationsForPerson).WithRequired(p => p.CalculationWish); } } i want to use KVCalcuationWish object in KVCalcuationsForPerson and KVSingleOffer class. So when i am creating object of KVCalcuationForPerson and KVSingleOffer class i initialize both object with New KVCalcuationWish object. like this KVCalculationsForPerson calcPerson = new KVCalculationsForPerson(); KVCalculationWish wish = new KVCalculationWish() { CaculationsForPerson = calcPerson }; calcPerson.KVCalculationsForPersonName = "Person Name"; calcPerson.CalculationWish = wish; KVSingleOffer singleOffer = new KVSingleOffer(); KVCalculationWish wish1 = new KVCalculationWish() { SingleOffer = singleOffer }; singleOffer.KVSingleOfferName = "Offer Name"; singleOffer.CalculationWish = wish1; but my problem is when i save this records using following code try { db.CalculationsForPerson.Add(calcPerson); db.SingleOffer.Add(singleOffer); db.SaveChanges(); } catch (Exception ex) { } i can save successfully in DB, but in Table KVCalcuationWish i am not able to get the ID of SingleOffer and CalcuationsForPerson class object. Following is the data of KVCalcuationWish table. KVCalcuationWishID KVCalcuationWishName KVSingleOfferID KVCalcuationsForPersonID 1 NULL 0 0 Following is the data of KVSingleOFfer Table KVSingleOfferID KVSingleOfferName 1 Offer Name Follwing is the data of KVCalcuationsForPerson Table KVSingleOfferID KVSingleOfferName 1 Person Name I want to have following possible output in KVCalcuationWish table. KVCalcuationWishID KVCalcuationWishName KVSingleOfferID KVCalcuationsForPersonID 1 NULL 1 NULL 2 NULL NULL 1 so what i want to achieve is ...... when i am save KVSingleOffer object i want separate record to be inserted and when i save KVCalcuationsForPerson object another separate record should be save to KVCalcuationwish table. Is that possible? Sorry for long description... but i really hang on this situation... Thanks & Regards, Joyous Suhas

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• Force RAID to read "exiled" disk?

  - by user197015

  We have a RAID 6 array (Infortrend EonStor DS S16F) that recently had two disks fail. Immediately prior to replacing these two disks, a third, good, disk was accidentally ejected from the array. After reinserting this disk it is marked as "exiled" by the array's firmware, and so even after replacing the two failed disks with new ones the array refuses to rebuild the logical volume and remains inaccessible. Since the temporarily-ejected disk is still functional and nothing has been written to the array since it was ejected, it seems that it should theoretically be possible to recover all the data on the array, but how can we convince the array to use the data from the "exiled" disk? Thanks for any help or advice you can offer.

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• Force10 S4810 "Overlapping route for management interface"

  - by Erik Reynolds

  We just got in a pair of Force10 S4810s and are getting tripped up on what should be a very basic configuration step. The S4810 has a gigabit copper management port (though ultimately we'd like to not use that and just trunk in a management vlan). We followed the configuration commands verbatim from a rapid config guide and keep getting a weird error. "Overlapping route for Management Interface." http://i.imgur.com/ojaTQ.png Current running config per request: http://pastebin.com/995v4RSG Any thoughts? I'm pretty baffled. (FWIW: I'm not at all a networking person -- though I'm quickly learning!) Thanks for your help!

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• Why did my RWA Computers gadget stop working?

  - by payling

  Our company has SBS 2011 and the "Computers" gadget in Remote Web Access has suddenly stopped working. The below error appears in place of the list of computers: "There was a problem loading a gadget. Contact the person who manages your server." There hasn't been any recent changes to the server that I know of. Also, when I go to SBS standard console and go to properties of a user to view the list of computers the user has access to it says "querying..." instead of a list of computers. Any troubleshooting tips? Can't seem to figure out what is going on. I've tried restarting the server and poking around in the event logs and I couldn't find anything wrong. Update 1: I came across another error when viewing properties for a user through the SBS standard console. "There is no such object on the server."

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• Remove hardware from "safely remove hardware" list on Windows 7

  - by ricsmania

  Hi, I have a USB wifi card (D-Link DWA-125) on a Windows 7 x64 computer. The problem is that the card appears on the "safely remove hardware" list, but I don't ever want to unplug it, so I would like to remove it from the list. So far I have only found solutions that mess with the registry (and don't really work properly) or that substitute the safely remove hardware with a third-party software. Or worse, hide the icon altogether. Yes, I do need the icon from USB drives and phones. So, is there a "clean" way to remove it from the list? Thanks.

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• Terminal Services printing

  - by Adam

  Hi We are using a hosted terminal server to run some applications on. We have three users who connect to the server through RDP and try to print to a networked printer called: HP Photosmart C7280. One of the users is using Windows XP Pro 32-bit on the host and when they print through the terminal server it works fine. Another one of the users is using Vista 32-bit on the host and when they print through the terminal server it works fine. The third user is using Windows 7 64-bit on the host and when they print through the terminal server it only print the first line of the page (A test page print 3/4s of the test page compared to printing all of the page when using the other 2 machines). We are only printing from Word 2007 and Excel 2007 on all machines. The server is Windows 2003. No errors in the event log. Any ideas?

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• Grails - Simple hasMany Problem - Using CheckBoxes rather than HTML Select in create.gsp

  - by gav

  My problem is this: I want to create a grails domain instance, defining the 'Many' instances of another domain that it has. I have the actual source in a Google Code Project but the following should illustrate the problem. class Person { String name static hasMany[skills:Skill] static constraints = { id (visible:false) skills (nullable:false, blank:false) } } class Skill { String name String description static constraints = { id (visible:false) name (nullable:false, blank:false) description (nullable:false, blank:false) } } If you use this model and def scaffold for the two Controllers then you end up with a form like this that doesn't work; My own attempt to get this to work enumerates the Skills as checkboxes and looks like this; But when I save the Volunteer the skills are null! This is the code for my save method; def save = { log.info "Saving: " + params.toString() def skills = params.skills log.info "Skills: " + skills def volunteerInstance = new Volunteer(params) log.info volunteerInstance if (volunteerInstance.save(flush: true)) { flash.message = "${message(code: 'default.created.message', args: [message(code: 'volunteer.label', default: 'Volunteer'), volunteerInstance.id])}" redirect(action: "show", id: volunteerInstance.id) log.info volunteerInstance } else { render(view: "create", model: [volunteerInstance: volunteerInstance]) } } This is my log output (I have custom toString() methods); 2010-05-10 21:06:41,494 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Saving: ["skills":["1", "2"], "name":"Ian", "_skills":["", ""], "create":"Create", "action":"save", "controller":"volunteer"] 2010-05-10 21:06:41,495 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Skills: [1, 2] 2010-05-10 21:06:41,508 [http-8080-3] INFO bumbumtrain.VolunteerController - Volunteer[ id: null | Name: Ian | Skills [Skill[ id: 1 | Name: Carpenter ] , Skill[ id: 2 | Name: Sound Engineer ] ]] Note that in the final log line the right Skills have been picked up and are part of the object instance. When the volunteer is saved the 'Skills' are ignored and not commited to the database despite the in memory version created clearly does have the items. Is it not possible to pass the Skills at construction time? There must be a way round this? I need a single form to allow a person to register but I want to normalise the data so that I can add more skills at a later time. If you think this should 'just work' then a link to a working example would be great. If I use the HTML Select then it works fine! Such as the following to make the Create page; <tr class="prop"> <td valign="top" class="name"> <label for="skills"><g:message code="volunteer.skills.label" default="Skills" /></label> </td> <td valign="top" class="value ${hasErrors(bean: volunteerInstance, field: 'skills', 'errors')}"> <g:select name="skills" from="${uk.co.bumbumtrain.Skill.list()}" multiple="yes" optionKey="id" size="5" value="${volunteerInstance?.skills}" /> </td> </tr> But I need it to work with checkboxes like this; <tr class="prop"> <td valign="top" class="name"> <label for="skills"><g:message code="volunteer.skills.label" default="Skills" /></label> </td> <td valign="top" class="value ${hasErrors(bean: volunteerInstance, field: 'skills', 'errors')}"> <g:each in="${skillInstanceList}" status="i" var="skillInstance"> <label for="${skillInstance?.name}"><g:message code="${skillInstance?.name}.label" default="${skillInstance?.name}" /></label> <g:checkBox name="skills" value="${skillInstance?.id.toString()}"/> </g:each> </td> </tr> The log output is exactly the same! With both style of form the Volunteer instance is created with the Skills correctly referenced in the 'Skills' variable. When saving, the latter fails with a null reference exception as shown at the top of this question. Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance! Gav

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• Asterisk - Trying to use call files to create a conference call between two dynamic numbers

  - by Hank

  I'm trying to setup an Asterisk system that will allow me to create a conference call between two dynamic numbers. It seems I can use 'call files' to make Asterisk initiate the call without needing an incoming call - http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk+auto-dial+out This example seems to be what I'd need: Channel: SIP/mytrunk/12345678 MaxRetries: 2 RetryTime: 60 WaitTime: 30 Context: callme Extension: 800 Priority: 2 I can generate this file with some scripting language and then place it into the Asterisk Call File folder. The problem I'm having is: How do I call out to two numbers and join them in a conference call? The MeetMe plugin/extension seems to be what I need in terms of conference calling, I'm just unsure as to how I'd use the two together and join them. Also, is it possible to have multiple 2-person conference calls at the same time? Is setting this up as simple as setting aside X amount of 'channels' in the meetme.conf?

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• Creating a user account on a mac you don't have admin access to [migrated]

  - by mouse

  I am trying to create a user account on a school computer so I can run processes (like compiling large libraries) with admin permissions settings. This way I can walk away and let other people user the computer, and come back after class to retrieve the binaries. Usually some smart person decides to shut the machine down, but if I had higher permissions they wouldn't be able to terminate my processes. Right now I use the guest account, which everyone has access to. If you think this is in some way unethical or a bad idea, please criticize. tl,dr I tried using the dscl series of commands in single user mode as root, as recommended by this site. It returns this error: Cannot open remote host, error: DSOpenDirServiceErr How can I create a local user on this machine to compile my code with higher permissions?

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• Can't get PXE boot working on WDS + Linux DHCP server

  - by askvictor

  Hi I'm trying to get WDS to PXE boot some laptops. The university is running a (linux) DHCP server for the entire network; we can't run our own. We can (and have) set options in that DHCP server to point to a tftp server and file (pxeboot.n12 on the WDS server we run). The client seems to get the pxeboot.n12 file (judging by the server logs), but then comes back with 'TFTP download failed Pres any key to reboot'. I've tried running a third-party tftp service on the WDS server, and found that the client pulls the first stage (pxeboot.n12) correctly, but then looks for the second stage (bootmgr.exe) in the root of the tftp folder - whereas WDS places it in \boot\x86\ (or \boot\x64). Similarly, it looks for a file called BCD, which doesn't exist (rather there are a few files scattered around with the extension .bcd). I'm confused if the WDS tftp server does some magic returning certain files, or if I haven't configured it correctly. The server is 2008 R2. Cheers, Victor

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• Unlock file on Windows Server 2003 without rebooting

  - by BalusC

  We've several Windows Server 2003 machines running, each with its own purposes. There are scheduled jobs which synchronizes some files over SFTP using WinSCP. Very sometimes a newly copied file is left locked in the "inbox" folder without any reason. The machine's own background task (programmed in Java) can't move it to the "processed" folder anymore after processing it. Manually moving it only yields the well known error message Cannot move [filename]: it is being used by another person or program. The only resort is to reboot the machine, but we would of course like to avoid that. Any suggestions? I tried Unlocker which works fine locally at WinXP, but doesn't work at those Win2K3 machines by remote desktop (unlock option doesn't show up in rightclick context menu).

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