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• What would cause my SendMail server not to acknowledge receiving a TCP Sequence?

  - by Mike B

  My TCP/IP Stack knowledge is a little rusty so please bear with me.... I have a CentOS 5.7 server with SendMail and am having seeing intermittent timeout issues sending email (particularly larger email) to other remote domains. It doesn't happen with all attachments or recipient domains. Just some. After some extended troubleshooting, I think I've narrowed it down to TCP Sequences not being acknowledged. Here's a breakdown of the TCP session from a packet capture I collected directly on my MTA (fooMTA): Packet 1 - 11: Standard TCP handshake followed by initial SMTP conversation. No errors. Packet #12 Recipient MTA: TCP sequence 231. Ack 91. Packet #13 FooMTA: TCP sequence 91. Ack 305. Packet #14 FooMTA: TCP sequence 1115. Ack 305. Packet #15 Recipient MTA: TCP sequence 305. Ack 2495. Packet #16 FooMTA: TCP sequence 2495. Ack 305. Packet #17 FooMTA: TCP sequence 5255. Ack 305. Packet #18: Recipient MTA: TCP sequence 305. Ack 5255. Packet #19: FooMTA: TCP sequence 6635. Ack 305. Packet #20: FooMTA: TCP sequence 8015. Ack 305. Packet #21: Recipient MTA: TCP Sequence 305. Ack 8015. Packet #22: FooMTA: TCP Sequence 10775. Ack 305. Packet #23: FooMTA: TCP Sequence 13535. Ack 305. Packet #24: Recipient MTA: TCP sequence 305. Ack 10775 Packet #25: FooMTA: TCP Sequence 14915. Ack 305 It keeps going like this with my server still thinking it hasn’t received sequence 305… in response the remote side eventually retransmits its prior data thinking that it never arrived. Eventually the gap gets so large that no new data is sent and the remote MTA keeps retransmitting old stuff. This contributes to an exponential backoff and eventually the remote side gives up. What’s strange to me is that I see the “missing” TCP sequence (305 in this case) arriving back to my server (via a packet capture collected directly from fooMTA) So I don’t get why my server keeps asking for it. Could this be firewall related? What would be the next step in troubleshooting?

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• Recovering from backup without original install media

  - by KGendron

  A machine from my old job had a complete hard drive failure. I have backups but I'm running into severe problems restoring from them. The only install media was a secondary restore partition on the system's hard drive. I hate whoever came up with that idea more than i can possibly express with words. I spent several days trying to recover the disk - it is pretty well shot and none of my best tricks could even get it to show up in the bios/ The machine that broke is an hp with xp media center edition on it (I don't know why either). The backups were created using the default windows backup tool - I have .bfk file on an external hardrive that i am trying to restore from. I've replaced the hard drive. My home machine is running windows 7 64bit and i'm trying to use it as a platform to restore to the other disk. I downloaded the window 7 nt-restore utility, however no matter what i do it restores to my C drive rather than the specified drive. Fortunately win7 security settings prevented it from being a complete disaster - but still not a happy thing. I tried firing up the xp virtual machine. I can browse to the backups but it says they are invalid and refuse to let me view/ continue with the restore. I tried installing XP to an extra harddrive on my machine - however it bluescreens on me during the install process and I cry. I tried installing xp pro to the new drive and attempted to restore over it, it of course blackscreened on me as that was a stupid idea. I made two partitions on the new hard drive (Apparently the bios on this accursed piece of junk doesn't allow hd partitions larger than 200G anyways and thus fails 40 minutes into the install with an ever-descriptive "Disk Read Error". Guess how i spent last weekend? My last idea was to install xp pro to the second partition and then use it to restore from backup to the first. After the first restart it gives me the error "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware". My brain made one of those bad hard drive clicky noises. I've tried several boot disks but they don't seem to work. If anyone has a link to a good one it would be greatly appreciated. Anyone have any more ideas? - I really hate asking on what seems like such a simple issue but i am quite literally at my wit's end. Thanks - and sorry for the really long post.

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• SQLS Timeouts - High Reads in Profiler

  - by lb01

  I've audited a SQLS2008 server with Profiler for one day.. the overhead didn't seem to trouble this new client my company has. They are using a legacy VB6 application as a front-end. They're experiencing timeouts once SQLS RAM usage is high. The server is currently running x64 sqls2008 on a VM with nearly 9 GB of RAM. SQL Server's 'max server memory option' is currently set to 6GB. I've put the results of the trace in a table and queried them using this query. SELECT TextData, ApplicationName, Reads FROM [TraceWednesday] WHERE textdata is not null and EventClass = 12 GROUP BY TextData, ApplicationName, Reads ORDER BY Reads DESC As I expected, some values are very high. Top Reads, in pages. 2504188 1965910 1445636 1252433 1239108 1210153 1088580 1072725 Am I correct in thinking that the top one (2504188 pages) is 20033504 KB, which then is roughly ~20'000 MB, 20GB? These queries are often executed and can take quite some time to run. Eventually RAM is used up because of the cache fattening, and timeouts occur once SQL cannot 'splash' pages in the buffer pool as much. Costs go up. Am I correct in my understanding? I've read that I should tune the associated T-SQL and create appropriate indices. Obviously cutting down the I/O would make SQL Server use less RAM. OR, maybe it might just slow down the process of chewing up the whole RAM. If a lot less pages are read, maybe it'll all run much better even when usage is high? (less time swapping, etc.) Currently, our only option is to restart SQL once a week when RAM usage is high, suddenly the timeouts disappear. SQL breathes again. I'm sure lots of DBAs have been in this situation.. I'm asking before I start digging out all of the bad T-SQL and put indices here and there, is there is something else I can do? Any advice except from what I know (not much yet..) Much appreciated. Leo.

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• ssh, "Last Login", `last` and OS X

  - by allentown

  I have hit the googles as much as I can on this, being specific to OS X, I am not finding an answer. Nothing is wrong, but curiosity levels are high. $ssh [email protected] Password: Last login: Wed Apr 7 21:28:03 2010 from my-laptop.local ^lonely tylenol^ Line 1 is my command line 2 is the shell asking for the password line 3 is where my question comes from line 4 comes out of /etc/motd I can find nothing in ~/ of an of the .bash* files that contains the string "Last Login", and would like to alter it. It performs some type of hostname lookup, which I can not determine. If I ssh to another host: $ssh [email protected] Last login: Wed Apr 7 21:14:51 2010 from 123-234-321-123-some.cal.isp.net.example hi there, you are on box 456 line 1 is my command line 2 is again, where my question comes from line 3 is from /etc/motd *The dash'd IP address is not reversed On this remote host, I have ~/.ssh and it's corresponding keys set up, so there was no password request Where is the "Last Login:" coming from, where does the date stamp come from, and most importantly, where does the hostname come from? While on [email protected] (box 456) $echo hostname remote.location.example456.com Or with dig, to make sure I have rDNS/PTR set up, for which I am not authoritative, but my ISP has correctly set... $dig -x 123.234.321.123 PTR remote.location.example456.com or $dig PTR 123.321.234.123.in-addr.arpa. +short remote.location.example456.com. my previous hostname used to be 123-234-321-123-some.cal.isp.net.example, which I set with hostname -s remote.location.example456.com, because it was obnoxious to see such a long name. That solves the value of $echo hostname which now returns remote.location.example456.com. Mac OS X, 10.6 is this case, does seem to honor: touch ~/.hushlogin If leave that file empty, I get nothing on the shell when I login. I want to know what controls the host resolution of the IP, and how it is all working. For example, running last reports a huge list of my logins, which have obtusely long hostnames, when they would be preferable to just be remote.location.example456.com. More confusing to me, reading the man page for wtmp and lastlog, it looks like lastlog is not used on OS X, /var/log/lastlog does not exist. Actually, none of these exist on 10.5 or 10.6: /var/run/utmp The utmp file. /var/log/wtmp The wtmp file. /var/log/lastlog The lastlog file. If I am to assume that the system is doing some kind of reverse lookup, I certainly do not know what it is, as it is not an accurate one.

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• Linux: find out what process is using all the RAM?

  - by Timur

  Before actually asking, just to be clear: yes, I know about disk cache, and no, it is not my case :) Sorry, for this preamble :) I'm using CentOS 5. Every application in the system is swapping heavily, and the system is very slow. When I do free -m, here is what I got: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3952 3929 22 0 1 18 -/+ buffers/cache: 3909 42 Swap: 16383 46 16337 So, I actually have only 42 Mb to use! As far as I understand, -/+ buffers/cache actually doesn't count the disk cache, so I indeed only have 42 Mb, right? I thought, I might be wrong, so I tried to switch off the disk caching and it had no effect - the picture remained the same. So, I decided to find out who is using all my RAM, and I used top for that. But, apparently, it reports that no process is using my RAM. The only process in my top is MySQL, but it is using 0.1% of RAM and 400Mb of swap. Same picture when I try to run other services or applications - all go in swap, top shows that MEM is not used (0.1% maximum for any process). top - 15:09:00 up 2:09, 2 users, load average: 0.02, 0.16, 0.11 Tasks: 112 total, 1 running, 111 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 4046868k total, 4001368k used, 45500k free, 748k buffers Swap: 16777208k total, 68840k used, 16708368k free, 16632k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ SWAP COMMAND 3214 ntp 15 0 23412 5044 3916 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 17m ntpd 2319 root 5 -10 12648 4460 3184 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 8188 iscsid 2168 root RT 0 22120 3692 2848 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 17m multipathd 5113 mysql 18 0 474m 2356 856 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.11 472m mysqld 4106 root 34 19 251m 1944 1360 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.11 249m yum-updatesd 4109 root 15 0 90152 1904 1772 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.18 86m sshd 5175 root 15 0 90156 1896 1772 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 86m sshd Restart doesn't help, and, by they way is very slow, which I wouldn't normally expect on this machine (4 cores, 4Gb RAM, RAID1). So, with that - I'm pretty sure that this is not a disk cache, who is using the RAM, because normally it should have been reduced and let other processes to use RAM, rather then go to swap. So, finally, the question is - if someone has any ideas how to find out what process is actually using the memory so heavily?

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• Repair corrupt hard disk on Mac without install CD

  - by Sarah

  The hard disk of my late 2009 MacBook Pro appears to have become corrupted. I am traveling and do not have my install CD (and won't for several weeks, nor will I be anywhere near an Apple store). The hard disk is not the original, which failed in June 2011. It's some Hitachi replacement installed by IT. History: I was typing an email this afternoon, my computer suddenly started making soft clicking sounds and then froze. I was not moving around. I rebooted, which took a while. I heard more clicking sounds and the computer froze at least once again. It's now kind of working, with mdworker sucking up one CPU. There are no awkward hard drive sounds when I run Chrome or play music. However, when I launched Stickies, I found no trace of my saved Stickies. I ran a live disk verification from within Disk Utility, and it reported Problem: As reported, I don't have access to an installation disc and am nowhere near an area where I can get one for at least two weeks. I have the option of asking someone to go to some trouble and expense to get one for me, but I'm not sure it's worth it: I've read that I can use fsck from single-user mode to repair the disk. Should I just try this? Is it risky? I'm concerned that the clicky sound portends imminent (mechanical) hard drive failure, so it's not worth doing a silly repair. This hard disk is backed up, but I definitely won't be able to access the backup while traveling. I'd like to maximize the probability that I can keep using my computer (and all its current files) while traveling. Update I bit the bullet and ran fsck -fy from single-user mode. It only needed one pass (modification) to reach the "okay" stage. However, rebooting took nearly 5 min and involved several rounds of scratchy sounds and a few bad clicks. I'm now back to kind of using my computer (the same files are missing as before). When I ran live disk verification from Disk Utility this time, however, it reported that the volume appears to be OK. Am I right to infer from the scratchy sounds, however, that my hard drive is still rapidly on its way out? Is there anything else I can do to increase its functionality over the next few weeks?

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• SQLS Timeouts - High Reads in Profiler

  - by lb01

  Hi I've audited a SQLS2008 server with Profiler for one day.. the overhead didn't seem to trouble this new client my company has. They are using a legacy VB6 application as a front-end. They're experiencing timeouts once SQLS RAM usage is high. The server is currently running x64 sqls2008 on a VM with nearly 9 GB of RAM. SQL Server's 'max server memory option' is currently set to 6GB. I've put the results of the trace in a table and queried them using this query. SELECT TextData, ApplicationName, Reads FROM [TraceWednesday] WHERE textdata is not null and EventClass = 12 GROUP BY TextData, ApplicationName, Reads ORDER BY Reads DESC As I expected, some values are very high. Top Reads, in pages. 2504188 1965910 1445636 1252433 1239108 1210153 1088580 1072725 Am I correct in thinking that the top one (2504188 pages) is 20033504 KB, which then is roughly ~20'000 MB, 20GB? These queries are often executed and can take quite some time to run. Eventually RAM is used up because of the cache fattening, and timeouts occur once SQL cannot 'splash' pages in the buffer pool as much. Costs go up. Am I correct in my understanding? I've read that I should tune the associated T-SQL and create appropriate indices. Obviously cutting down the I/O would make SQL Server use less RAM. OR, maybe it might just slow down the process of chewing up the whole RAM. If a lot less pages are read, maybe it'll all run much better even when usage is high? (less time swapping, etc.) Currently, our only option is to restart SQL once a week when RAM usage is high, suddenly the timeouts disappear. SQL breathes again. I'm sure lots of DBAs have been in this situation.. I'm asking before I start digging out all of the bad T-SQL and put indices here and there, is there is something else I can do? Any advice except from what I know (not much yet..) Much appreciated. Leo.

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• Windows 7 booting and startup repair issues

  - by aardvark

  I have a MSI FR720 laptop with Windows 7 and Lubuntu partions. For quite a while (6 months or so) I've been having issues booting from my hard drive, it'd take me between 5 minutes and several hours for me to be able to have it recognize the hard drive as a bootable device. I did several disk checks on it, and my hard drive seems in perfect condition, and the fact that booting would usually only work after removing the hard drive and trying to reset it in its slot or lightly shaking it makes me think it had something to do with the connection in the hard drive slot as opposed to the hard drive itself. I was having particular issues with it detecting the hard drive today so I decided to try booting it from an external hard drive dock. It detected it first try and so far has had no problems finding the bootable partitions on my hard drive. When I selected my Windows 7 partition from the boot menu it said that it hadn't been shut down properly last time and needed startup repair. I've done this several times over the last 6 months, so this is hardly unusual. I do startup repair, it fails, and then I try to do a system restore. The system restore also failed, and it says that no files were changed. I restart and try it again. However, this time when I get to the startup repair it's not detecting a Windows OS. I tried clicking next and doing a startup repair but the repair is always failing. If I ignore the startup repair option and instead select "Launch windows normally" it will get to the windows animation, stop halfway through and then crash into a BSoD. I can't read the error on the screen because it immediately switches to back and tries to restart. This is my first time asking a question like this online, so let me know if I need to provide any extra information and I'll do my best to give it I tried using diskpart to find the list of partitions and see if one's labelled as an active partition, but it says that no disk were detected. I can run Lubuntu just fine. I can also see all of my Windows 7 files from it EDIT: The startup repair diagnosis and repair log is this: -- Number of repair attempts: 1 Session details System Disk = Windows directory = AutoChk Run = 0 Number of root causes = 1 Test Performed: Name: Check for updates Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0 Time taken = 15ms Test Performed: Name: System disk test Result: Completed successfully. Error code = 0x0 Time taken = 31ms Root cause found. If a hard disk is installed, it is not responding. -- Any chance that this is a result of me doing this through an external dock through a USB drive?

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• How can I minimize the amount my router slows down my Internet connection speed?

  - by Lord Torgamus

  Background I'm working with what I assume is a pretty common Internet setup: a cable modem, a wireless router and a few Internet-connected devices. Lately, I've started being more demanding on my Internet connection, and noticed that using my router slows down my download speeds considerably. I just kind of dealt with it until Zune Marketplace on the Xbox 360 told me that a movie was going to take well over ten hours to download, and I just didn't want to wait that long. Good little scientist that I am, I tried to reduce the problem down to one variable. The test As a control, I turned off all the devices in the house that use wireless Internet, and unplugged all the wired devices except for the Xbox. I also power-cycled both the modem and the router. I then tried to download the movie again, and was told that it would still take over ten hours. Next, I unplugged the router, and connected the Xbox directly to the modem. The movie downloaded in just over one hour. As far as I can tell, this means that my ISP, other cable users near me, the remote servers, anything wireless-related and my machines' disk speeds can't be at fault. A similar experiment that replaced the Xbox with a wired laptop produced similar results. To me, this says "the router is responsible for things taking around ten times longer to download." My question I'd still prefer to use the router for a few reasons: it's a pain to connect and disconnect everything every time there's a big file to download direct connection to the modem isn't good for security only one machine can be connected directly to the modem at a time What can I do to have fast connection speeds while still using the router? I don't mind turning other machines off, as long as I don't have to mess with power and ethernet cables. EDIT : After asking this followup question and then this one, I installed dd-wrt on my router, and I seem to be getting higher and more consistent speeds. Perhaps more importantly, my memory use is fairly constant. I know this isn't an answer — which is why I'm not posting it as an answer — but it is how I resolved the situation, and hopefully it'll be helpful for someone.

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• Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider

  - by Gopinath

  If you going to buy iPhone 4S on a two year contract in USA, Europe or Australia you may not find it expensive. But if you are planning to buy it in any other parts of the world, you will definitely feel the heat of ridiculous iPhone 4S price. In India iPhone 4S costs approximately costs $1000 which is 30% more than the price tag of an unlocked iPhone sold in USA. Personally I love iPhones as there is no match for the user experience provided by Apple as well as the wide range of really meaning applications available for iPhone. But it breaks heart to spend $1000 for a phone and I’m forced to look at alternates available in the market. Here are the four iPhone 4S alternates available in almost all the countries where we can buy iPhone 4S Google Galaxy Nexus The Galaxy Nexus is Google’s own Android smartphone manufactured by Samsung and sold under the brand name of Google Nexus. Galaxy Nexus is the pure Android phone available in the market without any bloat software or custom user interfaces like other Androids available in the market. Galaxy Nexus is also the first Android phone to be shipped with the latest version of Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich. This phone is the benchmark for the rest of Android phones that are going to enter the market soon. In the words of Google this smartphone is called as “Galaxy Nexus: Simple. Beautiful. Beyond Smart.”.  BGR review summarizes the phone as This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favourite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry. Samsung Galaxy S II The one single company that is able to sell more smartphones than Apple is Samsung. Samsung recently displaced Apple from the top smartphone seller spot and occupied it with loads of pride. Samsung’s Galaxy S II fits as one the best alternatives to Apple’s iPhone 4S with it’s beautiful design and remarkable performance. Engadget summarizes Samsung Galaxy S2 review as It’s the best Android smartphone yet, but more importantly, it might well be the best smartphone, period. Of course, a 4.3-inch screen size won’t suit everyone, no matter how stupendously thin the device that carries it may be, and we also can’t say for sure that the Galaxy S II would justify a long-term iOS user foresaking his investment into one ecosystem and making the leap to another. Nonetheless, if you’re asking us what smartphone to buy today, unconstrained by such externalities, the Galaxy S II would be the clear choice. Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. Nokia Lumia 800 Here comes unexpected Windows Phone in to the boxing ring. May be they are not as great as Androids available in the market today, but they are picking up very quickly. Especially the Nokia Lumia 800 seems to be first ever Windows Phone 7 aimed at competing serious with Androids and iPhones available in the market. There are reports that Nokia Lumia 800 is outselling all Androids in UK and few high profile tech blogs are calling it as the king of Windows Phone. Considering this phone while evaluating the alternative of iPhone 4S will not disappoint you. We assure. Droid RAZR Remember the Motorola Driod that swept entire Android market share couple of years ago? The first two version of Motorola Droids were the best in the market and they out performed almost every other Android phone those days. The invasion of Samsung Androids, Motorola lost it charm. With the recent release of Droid RAZR, Motorola seems to be in the right direction to reclaiming the prestige. Droid RAZR is the thinnest smartphone available in the market and it’s beauty is not just skin deep. Here is a review of the phone from Engadget blog the RAZR’s beauty is not only skin deep. The LTE radio, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM make sure this sleek number is ready to run with the big boys. It kept pace with, and in some cases clearly outclassed its high-end competition. Despite its deficiencies in the display department and underwhelming battery life, the RAZR looks to be a perfectly viable alternative when considering the similarly-pricey Rezound and Galaxy Nexus Further Reading So we have seen the four alternates of iPhone 4S available in the market and I personally love to buy a Samsung smartphone if I’m don’t have money to afford an iPhone 4S. If you are interested in deep diving into the alternates, here few links that help you do more research Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy Nexus vs. Motorola Droid RAZR: How Their Specs Compare by Huffington Post Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Nexus Galaxy: Spec Smackdown by PC World Browser Speed Test: Nokia Lumia 800 vs. iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II – by Gizmodo iPhone 4S vs Samsung Galaxy S II by pocket lint Apple iPhone 4S vs. Samsung Galaxy S II by techie buzz This article titled,Looking For iPhone 4S Alternatives? Here Are 3 Smartphones You Should Consider, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• How To Switch Back to Outlook 2007 After the 2010 Beta Ends

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you switching back to Outlook 2007 after trying out Office 2010 beta?  Here’s how you can restore your Outlook data and keep everything working fine after the switch. Whenever you install a newer version of Outlook, it will convert your profile and data files to the latest format.  This makes them work the best in the newer version of Outlook, but may cause problems if you decide to revert to an older version.  If you installed Outlook 2010 beta, it automatically imported and converted your profile from Outlook 2007.  When the beta expires, you will either have to reinstall Office 2007 or purchase a copy of Office 2010. If you choose to reinstall Office 2007, you may notice an error message each time you open Outlook. Outlook will still work fine and all of your data will be saved, but this error message can get annoying.  Here’s how you can create a new profile, import all of your old data, and get rid of this error message. Banish the Error Message with a New Profile To get rid of this error message, we need to create a new Outlook profile.  First, make sure your Outlook data files are backed up.  Your messages, contacts, calendar, and more are stored in a .pst file in your appdata folder.  Enter the following in the address bar of an Explorer window to open your Outlook data folder, and replace username with your user name: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook Copy the Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) files that contain your data. Its name is usually your email address, though it may have a different name.  If in doubt, select all of the Outlook Personal Folders files, copy them, and save them in another safe place (such as your Documents folder). Now, let’s remove your old profile.  Open Control Panel, and select Mail.  In Windows Vista or 7, simply enter “Mail” in the search box and select the first entry. Click the “Show Profiles…” button. Now, select your Outlook profile, and click Remove.  This will not delete your data files, but will remove them from Outlook. Press Yes to confirm that you wish to remove this profile. Open Outlook, and you will be asked to create a new profile.  Enter a name for your new profile, and press Ok. Now enter your email account information to setup Outlook as normal. Outlook will attempt to automatically configure your account settings.  This usually works for accounts with popular email systems, but if it fails to find your information you can enter it manually.  Press finish when everything’s done. Outlook will now go ahead and download messages from your email account.  In our test, we used a Gmail account that still had all of our old messages online.  Those files are backed up in our old Outlook data files, so we can save time and not download them.  Click the Send/Receive button on the bottom of the window, and select “Cancel Send/Receive”. Restore Your Old Outlook Data Let’s add our old Outlook file back to Outlook 2007.  Exit Outlook, and then go back to Control Panel, and select Mail as above.  This time, click the Data Files button. Click the Add button on the top left. Select “Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)”, and click Ok. Now, select your old Outlook data file.  It should be in the folder that opens by default; if not, browse to the backup copy we saved earlier, and select it. Press Ok at the next dialog to accept the default settings. Now, select the data file we just imported, and click “Set as Default”. Now, all of your old messages, appointments, contacts, and everything else will be right in Outlook ready for you.  Click Ok, and then open Outlook to see the change. All of the data that was in Outlook 2010 is now ready to use in Outlook 2007.  You won’t have to wait to re-download all of your emails from the server since everything’s still here ready to be used.  And when you open Outlook, you won’t see any error messages, either! Conclusion Migrating your Outlook profile back to Outlook 2007 is fairly easy, and with these steps, you can avoid seeing an error message every time you open Outlook.  With all your data in tact, you’re ready to get back to work instead of getting frustrated with Outlook.  Many of us use webmail and keep all of our messages in the cloud, but even on broadband connections it can take a long time to download several gigabytes of emails. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Opening Attachments in Outlook 2007 by KeyboardQuickly Create Appointments from Tasks with Outlook 2007’s To-Do BarFix For Outlook 2007 Constantly Asking for Password on VistaPin Microsoft Outlook to the Desktop BackgroundOur Look at the LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook

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• Ask How-To Geek: Learning the Office Ribbon, Booting to USB with an Old BIOS, and Snapping Windows

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. Today we highlight how to master the new Office interface, USB boot a computer with outdated BIOS, and snap windows to preset locations. Learning the New Office Ribbon Dear How-To Geek, I feel silly asking this (in light of how long the new Office interface has been out) but my company finally got around to upgrading from Windows XP and Office 2000 so the new interface it totally new to me. Can you recommend any resources for quickly learning the Office ribbon and the new changes? I feel completely lost after two decades of the old Office interface. Help! Sincerely, Where the Hell is Everything? Dear Where the Hell, We think most people were with you at some point in the last few years. “Where the hell is…” could possibly be the slogan for the new ribbon interface. You could browse through some of the dry tutorials online or even get a weighty book on the topic but the best way to learn something new is to get hands on. Ribbon Hero turns learning the new Office features and ribbon layout into a game. It’s no vigorous round of Team Fortress mind you, but it’s significantly more fun than reading a training document. Check out how to install and configure Ribbon Hero here. You’ll be teaching your coworkers new tricks in no time. Boot via USB with an Old BIOS Dear How-To Geek, I’m trying to repurpose some old computers by updating them with lightweight Linux distros but the BIOS on most of the machines is ancient and creaky. How ancient? It doesn’t even support booting from a USB device! I have a large flash drive that I’ve turned into a master installation tool for jobs like this but I can’t use it. The computers in question have USB ports; they just aren’t recognized during the boot process. What can I do? USB Bootin’ in Boise Dear USB Bootin’, It’s great you’re working to breathe life into old hardware! You’ve run into one of the limitations of older BIOSes, USB was around but nobody was thinking about booting off of it. Fortunately if you have a computer old enough to have that kind of BIOS it’s likely to also has a floppy drive or a CDROM drive. While you could make a bootable CDROM for your application we understand that you want to keep using the master USB installer you’ve made. In light of that we recommend PLoP Boot Manager. Think of it like a boot manager for your boot manager. Using it you can create a bootable floppy or CDROM that will enable USB booting of your master USB drive. Make a CD and a floppy version and you’ll have everything in your toolkit you need for future computer refurbishing projects. Read up on creating bootable media with PLoP Boot Manager here. Snapping Windows to Preset Coordinates Dear How-To Geek, Once upon a time I had a company laptop that came with a little utility that snapped windows to preset areas of the screen. This was long before the snap-to-side features in Windows 7. You could essentially configure your screen into a grid pattern of your choosing and then windows would neatly snap into those grids. I have no idea what it was called or if was anymore than a gimmick from the computer manufacturer, but I’d really like to have it on my new computer! Bend and Snap in San Francisco, Dear Bend and Snap, If we had to guess, we’d guess your company must have had a set of laptops from Acer as the program you’re describing sounds exactly like Acer GridVista. Fortunately for you the application was extremely popular and Acer released it independently of their hardware. If, by chance, you’ve since upgraded to a multiple monitor setup the app even supports multiple monitors—many of the configurations are handy for arranging IM windows and other auxiliary communication tools. Check out our guide to installing and configuring Acer GridVista here for more information. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Download the New Year in Japan Windows 7 Theme from Microsoft Once More Unto the Breach – Facebook Apps Can Now Access Your Address and Phone Number Dial Zero Speeds You Through Annoying Customer Service Menus Complete Dropquest 2011 and Receive Free Dropbox Storage Desktop Computer versus Laptop Wallpaper The Kids Have No Idea What Old Tech Is [Video]

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• Remove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007

  - by Matthew Guay

  Have you tried out the Office 2010 beta, but want to go back to Office 2007?  Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to remove your Office 2010 beta and reinstall your Office 2007. The Office 2010 beta will expire on October 31, 2010, at which time you may see a dialog like the one below.  At that time, you will need to either upgrade to the final release of Office 2010, or reinstall your previous version of Office. Our computer was running the Office 2010 Home and Business Click to Run beta, and after uninstalling it we reinstalled Office 2007 Home and Student.  This was a Windows Vista computer, but the process will be exactly the same on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.  Additionally, the process to reinstall Office 2007 will be exactly the same regardless of the edition of Office 2007 you’re using. However, please note that if you are running a different edition of Office 2010, especially the 64 bit version, the process may be slightly different.  We will cover this scenario in another article. Remove Office 2010 Click to Run Beta: To remove Office 2010 Click to Run Beta, open Control Panel and select Uninstall a Program. If your computer is running Windows 7, enter “Uninstall a program” in your Start menu search. Scroll down, select “Microsoft Office Click-to-Run 2010 (Beta)”, and click the Uninstall button on the toolbar.  Note that there will be two entries for Office, so make sure to select the “Click-to-Run” entry. This will automatically remove all of Office 2010 and its components.  Click Yes to confirm you want to remove it. Office 2010 beta uninstalled fairly quickly, and a reboot will be required.  Once your computer is rebooted, Office 2010 will be entirely removed. Reinstall Office 2007 Now, you’re to the easy part.  Simply insert your Office 2007 CD, and it should automatically startup the setup.  If not, open Computer and double-click on your CD drive.   Now, double-click on setup.exe to start the installation. Enter your product key, and click Continue…   Click Install Now, or click Customize if you want to change the default installation settings. Wait while Office 2007 installs…it takes around 15 to 20 minutes in our experience.  Once it’s finished  close the installer. Now, open one of the Office applications.  A popup will open asking you to activate Office.  Make sure you’re connected to the internet, and click next; otherwise, you can select to activate over the phone if you do not have internet access. This should only take a minute, and Office 2007 will be activated and ready to run. Everything should work just as it did before you installed Office 2010.  Enjoy! Office Updates Make sure to install the latest updates for Office 2007, as these are not included in your disk.  Check Windows Update (search for Windows Update in the Start menu search), and install all of the available updates for Office 2007, including Service Pack 2. Conclusion This is a great way to keep using Office even if you don’t decide to purchase Office 2010 after it is released.  Additionally, if you’re were using another version of Office, such as Office 2003, then reinstall it as normal after following the steps to remove Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteDetect and Repair Applications In Microsoft Office 2007Save and Restore Your Microsoft Office SettingsDisable Office 2010 Beta Send-a-Smile from StartupHow to See the About Dialog and Version Information in Office 2007 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 If Web Browsers Were Modes of Transportation Google Translate (for animals) Out of 100 Tweeters Roadkill’s Scan Port scans for open ports Out of band Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 Cool Looking Screensavers for Windows

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• Change the User Interface Language in Ubuntu

  - by Matthew Guay

  Would you like to use your Ubuntu computer in another language?  Here’s how you can easily change your interface language in Ubuntu. Ubuntu’s default install only includes a couple languages, but it makes it easy to find and add a new interface language to your computer.  To get started, open the System menu, select Administration, and then click Language Support. Ubuntu may ask if you want to update or add components to your current default language when you first open the dialog.  Click Install to go ahead and install the additional components, or you can click Remind Me Later to wait as these will be installed automatically when you add a new language. Now we’re ready to find and add an interface language to Ubuntu.  Click Install / Remove Languages to add the language you want. Find the language you want in the list, and click the check box to install it.  Ubuntu will show you all the components it will install for the language; this often includes spellchecking files for OpenOffice as well.  Once you’ve made your selection, click Apply Changes to install your new language.  Make sure you’re connected to the internet, as Ubuntu will have to download the additional components you’ve selected. Enter your system password when prompted, and then Ubuntu will download the needed languages files and install them.   Back in the main Language & Text dialog, we’re now ready to set our new language as default.  Find your new language in the list, and then click and drag it to the top of the list. Notice that Thai is the first language listed, and English is the second.  This will make Thai the default language for menus and windows in this account.  The tooltip reminds us that this setting does not effect system settings like currency or date formats. To change these, select the Text Tab and pick your new language from the drop-down menu.  You can preview the changes in the bottom Example box. The changes we just made will only affect this user account; the login screen and startup will not be affected.  If you wish to change the language in the startup and login screens also, click Apply System-Wide in both dialogs.  Other user accounts will still retain their original language settings; if you wish to change them, you must do it from those accounts. Once you have your new language settings all set, you’ll need to log out of your account and log back in to see your new interface language.  When you re-login, Ubuntu may ask you if you want to update your user folders’ names to your new language.  For example, here Ubuntu is asking if we want to change our folders to their Thai equivalents.  If you wish to do so, click Update or its equivalents in your language. Now your interface will be almost completely translated into your new language.  As you can see here, applications with generic names are translated to Thai but ones with specific names like Shutter keep their original name. Even the help dialogs are translated, which makes it easy for users around to world to get started with Ubuntu.  Once again, you may notice some things that are still in English, but almost everything is translated. Adding a new interface language doesn’t add the new language to your keyboard, so you’ll still need to set that up.  Check out our article on adding languages to your keyboard to get this setup. If you wish to revert to your original language or switch to another new language, simply repeat the above steps, this time dragging your original or new language to the top instead of the one you chose previously. Conclusion Ubuntu has a large number of supported interface languages to make it user-friendly to people around the globe.  And since you can set the language for each user account, it’s easy for multi-lingual individuals to share the same computer. Or, if you’re using Windows, check out our article on how you can Change the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7, too! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restart the Ubuntu Gnome User Interface QuicklyChange the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7Create a Samba User on UbuntuInstall Samba Server on UbuntuSee Which Groups Your Linux User Belongs To 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 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED

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• Create an iTunes Account without a credit card

  - by Matthew Guay

  iTunes Store offers a large variety of free content, but to download it you have to have an account. Usually you have to enter your credit card information to sign up, but here’s an easy way to get an iTunes account for free downloads without entering any payment info. Although iTunes Store is known for paid downloads of movies, music, and more, it also has a treasure trove of free media.  Some of it, including Podcasts and iTunes U educational content do not require an account to download.  However, any other free content, including free iPhone/iPod Touch apps and free or promotional music, videos, and TV Shows all require an account to download.  If you try to download a free movie or music download, you will be required to enter payment information. Even though your card will not be charged, it will be kept on file so you can be charged if you download a for-pay item.  However, if you only plan to download free items, it may be preferable to not have your account linked to a credit card. The following steps will get you an account without entering your credit card info. Getting Started First, make sure you have iTunes installed.  If you don’t already have it, download and install it (link below) with the default settings. Now open iTunes, and click the iTunes Store link on the left. Click the App Store link on the top of this page. Select a free app to download.  A simple way to do this is to scroll down to the Top Free Apps box on the right side, hover your mouse over the first item, and click on the Free button that appears when you hover over it. A popup will open asking you to sign in with your Apple ID.  Click “Create New Account”. Click Continue to create your account. Check the box to accept the Store Terms and Conditions, and click Continue.   Enter your email address, password, security question, and date of birth, and uncheck the boxes to get email if you don’t want it…then click Continue. Now, you will be asked to provide a payment method.  Notice now that the last option says None!  Click that bullet option… Then enter your billing address.  Simply enter your normal billing address, even though you are not entering a payment method.  Click Continue and your account will be created! If you get the Address Verification screen just verify your county and click Done. An email will be sent to you to verify your account… Click on the link in your email to verify your account, iTunes will launch and you’re prompted to enter in the Apple ID and Password you just created. Your account is successfully created! Now you can easily download any free media from iTunes.  Keep an eye on the Free on iTunes box on the bottom of the iTunes Store page for interesting downloads, or if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, watch the popular Free downloads on the Apps page. And of course there is always great content on iTunes U to grab free as well. Purchasing for-pay media If you want to purchase an item on the iTunes store later, simply click on the item to download as normal.  Click Buy to proceed with the purchase. iTunes will prompt you that you need to enter payment information to complete the purchase.  Enter your Apple ID email and password, and then add the payment information as prompted.   Remove Payment Information from an iTunes Account If you’ve already entered payment information into your iTunes account, and would like to remove it, click Store in the top iTunes menu, and select View My Account. Enter your Apple ID email and password, and click View Account.   This will open your account information.  Click the Edit Payment Information button.   Now, click the None button to remove your payment information.  Click Done to save the changes. Your account will now prompt you to enter payment information if you try to make a purchase.  You could repeat these steps after making a purchase if you do not want iTunes to keep your payment info on file. Conclusion This is a great way to make an iTunes account without entering your credit card, or to remove your credit card info from your account.  Parents may especially enjoy this tip, as they can have an iTunes account on their kids computer or iPod Touch without worrying about them spending money with it. Links Download iTunes Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Switch Between Signatures in Outlook 2007 the Easy WayRedeem Pre-paid Zune Card Points for Zune Marketplace MediaCreate An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Understanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Draw Online using Harmony How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually

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• Book Review Charlene Li's New Book: Open Leadership

  - by david.talamelli

  A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I looked in our mail box. I had received an Advance Copy of Charlene Li's new book titled "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead". Charlene sent a tweet a while back asking anyone interested in receiving the book to submit their details. I sent off my details and didn't think I would hear anything back, so it was a pleasant surprise. With that I almost feel bad that it has taken me 3 weeks to read her book. It took this long mainly because it has been hard to fit in some quality reading time for myself with work, the kids, volunteering, etc..... I am happy to report I have finished her book and wanted to run through my initial thoughts with you. I first came across Charlene Li after reading her book "Groundswell" a few years ago, her latest book "Open Leadership" is a follow on from Groundswell and to me it seems like a natural progression from the question "Ok the business landscape is changing, what do we do now?" For me these two books have a different writing style to them. Groundswell from memory spoke about broad social media concepts and adoption and alerted us to some of the changes taking place in the SM landscape. Open Leadership seems to be focussed on taking those broad concepts and finding ways to implement them into your environment. That is breaking broad concepts down into individual action items that can be measured and analysed. As the business world changes Leaders must change their approach and let go of control to more control. One of the things I love reading about is seeing real life examples of how people and organisations are making these things happen. In this book Charlene has collected some great collateral and case studies from companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, The Red Cross and The State Bank of India (as a side-note, I wish now that I submitted my input for the Leaders I work with here at Oracle - there are some great examples here of people who empower their staff). As society becomes more adept at using social media it is inevitable that Leaders must become open with their employees, clients and partners. From the book some of the key points I took away are (I actually took away a lot more from this book, this is just an overview) : 1) Organisations should encourage risk taking. Without being a "hacker", how can we improve ourselves, our processes, our business, etc... The old saying you only fail by not trying applies here. If Leaders create a culture where people are afraid to stick their neck out - how will you innovate? 2) Leaders need to lead by example - if you want to promote an open and transparent business, a Leader needs to exemplify the traits they would like to see out of their employees. 3) The definition of a Leader is changing, open leadership is about being a catalyst to change that uses networks to spread a vision as opposed to traditional leadership that is viewed as a role. 4) There is a cultural and business shift taking place. Information is more wide-spread and is being disseminated faster than any other time in the past. Leaders who are open and transparent will thrive in this new business environment. 5) Leadership is not defined by a title - it is defined by a person's actions. Also anyone can be a Leader or has Leadership potential in them- it is a matter of drawing that out of people. I found this book useful and I also found myself looking at my own actions and the actions of others around me (including my management) to see how open and transparent I am in my work. For me I am glad I read this book as it validated my own thoughts of the changes we are seeing take place. This book has certainly given me some new ideas and helped me push my own boundaries of what I can do. The book has a number of action plans at the end of some of the chapters such as "Conducting you Openness Audit" that I think have helped me take thoughts and ideas and turn them into concrete action items. I have included a link to the introduction of the book here if anyone wants to have a read of it. If anyone else has read this book, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments/review. Leave your comments below. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• Your thoughts on Best Practices for Scientific Computing?

  - by John Smith

  A recent paper by Wilson et al (2014) pointed out 24 Best Practices for scientific programming. It's worth to have a look. I would like to hear opinions about these points from experienced programmers in scientific data analysis. Do you think these advices are helpful and practical? Or are they good only in an ideal world? Wilson G, Aruliah DA, Brown CT, Chue Hong NP, Davis M, Guy RT, Haddock SHD, Huff KD, Mitchell IM, Plumbley MD, Waugh B, White EP, Wilson P (2014) Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLoS Biol 12:e1001745. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001745 Box 1. Summary of Best Practices Write programs for people, not computers. (a) A program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once. (b) Make names consistent, distinctive, and meaningful. (c) Make code style and formatting consistent. Let the computer do the work. (a) Make the computer repeat tasks. (b) Save recent commands in a file for re-use. (c) Use a build tool to automate workflows. Make incremental changes. (a) Work in small steps with frequent feedback and course correction. (b) Use a version control system. (c) Put everything that has been created manually in version control. Don’t repeat yourself (or others). (a) Every piece of data must have a single authoritative representation in the system. (b) Modularize code rather than copying and pasting. (c) Re-use code instead of rewriting it. Plan for mistakes. (a) Add assertions to programs to check their operation. (b) Use an off-the-shelf unit testing library. (c) Turn bugs into test cases. (d) Use a symbolic debugger. Optimize software only after it works correctly. (a) Use a profiler to identify bottlenecks. (b) Write code in the highest-level language possible. Document design and purpose, not mechanics. (a) Document interfaces and reasons, not implementations. (b) Refactor code in preference to explaining how it works. (c) Embed the documentation for a piece of software in that software. Collaborate. (a) Use pre-merge code reviews. (b) Use pair programming when bringing someone new up to speed and when tackling particularly tricky problems. (c) Use an issue tracking tool. I'm relatively new to serious programming for scientific data analysis. When I tried to write code for pilot analyses of some of my data last year, I encountered tremendous amount of bugs both in my code and data. Bugs and errors had been around me all the time, but this time it was somewhat overwhelming. I managed to crunch the numbers at last, but I thought I couldn't put up with this mess any longer. Some actions must be taken. Without a sophisticated guide like the article above, I started to adopt "defensive style" of programming since then. A book titled "The Art of Readable Code" helped me a lot. I deployed meticulous input validations or assertions for every function, renamed a lot of variables and functions for better readability, and extracted many subroutines as reusable functions. Recently, I introduced Git and SourceTree for version control. At the moment, because my co-workers are much more reluctant about these issues, the collaboration practices (8a,b,c) have not been introduced. Actually, as the authors admitted, because all of these practices take some amount of time and effort to introduce, it may be generally hard to persuade your reluctant collaborators to comply them. I think I'm asking your opinions because I still suffer from many bugs despite all my effort on many of these practices. Bug fix may be, or should be, faster than before, but I couldn't really measure the improvement. Moreover, much of my time has been invested on defence, meaning that I haven't actually done much data analysis (offence) these days. Where is the point I should stop at in terms of productivity? I've already deployed: 1a,b,c, 2a, 3a,b,c, 4b,c, 5a,d, 6a,b, 7a,7b I'm about to have a go at: 5b,c Not yet: 2b,c, 4a, 7c, 8a,b,c (I could not really see the advantage of using GNU make (2c) for my purpose. Could anyone tell me how it helps my work with MATLAB?)

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

  - by Michael Snow

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

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• Hack Extension Files to Make Them Version-Compatible for Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  A well known drawback in using Firefox is the problem with extension compatibility when a new major version is released. Whether it is for a new extension that you are trying for the first time or an old favorite we have a way to get those extensions working for you again. There are multiple reasons why you might want to choose this method to fix a non-compatible extension: You are uncomfortable with tweaking the “about:config” settings You prefer to maintain the original “about:config” settings in a pristine state and like having compatibility checking active You are looking to gain some “geek cred” Keep in mind that most extensions will work perfectly well with a new version of Firefox and simply have the “version compatibility number” problem. But once in a while there may be one that needs to have some work done on it by the extension’s author. The Problem Here is a perfect example of everyone’s least favorite “extension message”. This is the last thing that you need when all that you want is for your favorite extension (or a new one) to work on a fresh clean install. Note: This works nicely to “replace” non-compatible extensions already present in your browser if you are simply upgrading. Hacking the XPI File For this procedure you will need to manually download the extension to your hard-drive (right click on the extension’s “Install Button” and select “Save As”). Once you have done that you are ready to start hacking the extension. For our example we chose the “GCal Popup Extension”. The best thing to do is place the extension in a new folder (i.e. the Desktop or other convenient location) then unzip it just the same way that you would with any regular zip file. Once it is unzipped you will see the various folders and files that were in the “xpi file” (we had four files here but depending on the extension the number may vary). There is only one file that you need to focus on…the “install.rdf” file. Note: At this point you should move the original extension file to a different location (i.e. outside of the folder) so that it is no longer present. Open the file in “Notepad” so that you can change the number for the “maxVersion”. Here the number is listed as “3.5.*” but we needed to make it higher… Replacing the “5” with a “7” is all that we needed to do. Once you have entered your new “maxVersion” number save the file. At this point you will need to re-zip all of the files back into a single file. Make certain that you “create” a file with the “.zip file extension” otherwise this will not work. Once you have the new zip file created you will need to rename the entire file including the “file extension”. For our example we copied and pasted the original extension name. Once you have changed the name click outside of the “text area”. You will see a small message window like this asking for confirmation…click “Yes” to finish the process. Now your modified/updated extension is ready to install. Drag the extension into your browser to install it and watch that wonderful “Restart to complete the installation.” message appear. As soon as your browser starts you can check the “Add-ons Manager Window” and see the version compatibility numbers for the extension. Looking very very nice! And just like that your extension should be up and running without any problems. Conclusion If you are looking to try something new, gain some geek cred, or just want to keep your Firefox install as close to the original condition as possible this method should get those extensions working nicely for you again. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Firefox Extensions Compatible After Firefox Update Breaks Them For No Good ReasonCheck Extension Compatibility for Upcoming Firefox ReleasesFirefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible ExtensionsHow To Force Extension Compatibility with Firefox 3.6+Test and Report Add-on Compatibility in Firefox 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more Download Microsoft Office Help tab

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• SQLAuthority News – Why VoIP Service Providers Should Think About NuoDB’s Geo Distribution

  - by Pinal Dave

  You can always tell when someone’s showing off their cool, cutting edge comms technology. They tend to raise their voice a lot. Back in the day they’d announce their gadget leadership to the rest of the herd by shouting into their cellphone. Usually the message was no more urgent than “Hi, I’m on my cellphone!” Now the same types will loudly name-drop a different technology to the rest of the airport lounge. “I’m leveraging the wifi,” a fellow passenger bellowed, the other day, as we filtered through the departure gate. Nobody needed to know that, but the subtext was “look at me everybody”. You can tell the really advanced mobile user – they tend to whisper. Their handset has a microphone (how cool is that!) and they know how to use it. Sometimes these shouty public broadcasters aren’t even connected anyway because the database for their Voice over IP (VoIP) platform can’t cope. This will happen if they are using a traditional SQL model to try and cope with a phone network which has far flung offices and hundreds of mobile employees. That, like shouting into your phone, is just wrong on so many levels. What VoIP needs now is a single, logical database across multiple servers in different geographies. It needs to be updated in real-time and automatically scaled out during times of peak demand. A VoIP system should scale up to handle increased traffic, but just as importantly is must then go back down in the off peak hours. Try this with a MySQL database. It can’t scale easily enough, so it will keep your developers busy. They’ll have spent many hours trying to knit the different databases together. Traditional relational databases can possibly achieve this, at a price. Mind you, you could extend baked bean cans and string to every point on the network and that would be no less elegant. That’s not really following engineering principles though is it? Having said that, most telcos and VoIP systems use a separate, independent solution for each office location, which they link together – loosely.  The more office locations, the more complex and expensive the solution becomes and so the more you spend on maintenance. Ideally, you’d have a fluid system that can automatically shift its shape as the need arises. That’s the point of software isn’t it – it adapts. Otherwise, we might as well return to the old days. A MySQL system isn’t exactly baked bean cans attached by string, but it’s closer in spirit to the old many teethed mechanical beast that was employed in the first type of automated switchboard. NuoBD’s NewSQL is designed to be a single database that works across multiple servers, which can scale easily, and scale on demand. That’s one system that gives high connectivity but no latency, complexity or maintenance issues. MySQL works in some circumstances, but a period of growth isn’t one of them. So as a company moves forward, the MySQL database can’t keep pace. Data storage and data replication errors creep in. Soon the diaspora of offices becomes a problem. Your telephone system isn’t just distributed, it is literally all over the place. Though voice calls are often a software function, some of the old habits of telephony remain. When you call an engineer out, some of them will listen to what you’re asking for and announce that it cannot be done. This is what happens if you ask, say, database engineers familiar with Oracle or Microsoft to fulfill your wish for a low maintenance system built on a single, fluid, scalable database. No can do, they’d say. In fact, I heard one shouting something similar into his VoIP handset at the airport. “I can’t get on the network, Mac. I’m on MySQL.” You can download NuoDB from here. “NuoDB provides the ability to replicate data globally in real-time, which is not available with any other product offering,” states Weeks.  “That alone is remarkable and it works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it.  I’ve tested it. The ability to deploy NuoDB removes a tremendous burden from our support and engineering teams.” Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: NuoDB

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• Installing gtk-config and/or fsv in Ubuntu 10.10

  - by Wayne Werner

  Hi, I'm trying to install the File System Visualizer (think "It's a UNIX System! I know this!" from Jurassic Park) on Ubuntu 10.10. I've got the .tar.gz downloaded, and extracted. However, when I ./configure, I get this output: loading cache ./config.cache checking for a BSD compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... yes checking for working aclocal... found checking for working autoconf... found checking for working automake... found checking for working autoheader... found checking for working makeinfo... missing checking for gcc... gcc checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works... yes checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) is a cross-compiler... no checking whether we are using GNU C... yes checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E checking for ranlib... ranlib checking for POSIXized ISC... no checking for dirent.h that defines DIR... yes checking for opendir in -ldir... no checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking whether time.h and sys/time.h may both be included... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for sys/time.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking for working const... yes checking for mode_t... yes checking for uid_t in sys/types.h... yes checking for pid_t... yes checking for size_t... yes checking for comparison_fn_t... yes checking for st_blocks in struct stat... yes checking whether struct tm is in sys/time.h or time.h... time.h checking for working alloca.h... yes checking for alloca... yes checking for working fnmatch... yes checking for strftime... yes checking for getcwd... yes checking for gettimeofday... yes checking for mktime... yes checking for strcspn... yes checking for strdup... yes checking for strspn... yes checking for strtod... yes checking for strtoul... yes checking for scandir... yes checking for inline... inline checking for off_t... yes checking for unistd.h... (cached) yes checking for getpagesize... yes checking for working mmap... yes checking for argz.h... yes checking for limits.h... yes checking for locale.h... yes checking for nl_types.h... yes checking for malloc.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for unistd.h... (cached) yes checking for sys/param.h... yes checking for getcwd... (cached) yes checking for munmap... yes checking for putenv... yes checking for setenv... yes checking for setlocale... yes checking for strchr... yes checking for strcasecmp... yes checking for strdup... (cached) yes checking for __argz_count... yes checking for __argz_stringify... yes checking for __argz_next... yes checking for stpcpy... yes checking for LC_MESSAGES... yes checking whether NLS is requested... yes checking whether included gettext is requested... no checking for libintl.h... yes checking for gettext in libc... yes checking for msgfmt... /usr/bin/msgfmt checking for dcgettext... yes checking for gmsgfmt... /usr/bin/msgfmt checking for xgettext... /usr/bin/xgettext checking for gtk-config... no checking for GTK - version >= 1.2.1... no *** The gtk-config script installed by GTK could not be found *** If GTK was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in *** your path, or set the GTK_CONFIG environment variable to the *** full path to gtk-config. configure: error: Cannot find proper GTK+ version Obviously it's looking for gtk-config. However, apparently it doesn't exist in the repos anymore. Then this post mentioned that gtkglarea solved their problem, as mentioned in this file. Of course that poster neatly forgets to mention exactly what and how gtkglarea solved their problem, and Google is mostly devoid of information on the problem. So I come here asking for help! I would like to install fsv, but it tells me gtk-config doesn't exist. How can I fix this problem in Ubuntu 10.10? Thanks!

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• Inserting and Deleting Sub Rows in GridView

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  A user in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) is asking how to insert  sub rows in GridView and also add delete functionality for the inserted sub rows. In this post I'm going to demonstrate how to this in ASP.NET WebForms.  The basic idea to achieve this is we just need to insert row data in the DataSource that is being used in GridView since the GridView rows will be generated based on the DataSource data. To make it more clear then let's build up a sample application. To start fire up Visual Studio and create a WebSite or Web Application project and then add a new WebForm. In the WebForm ASPX page add this GridView markup below:   1: <asp:gridview ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="GridView1_RowDataBound"> 2: <Columns> 3: <asp:BoundField DataField="RowNumber" HeaderText="Row Number" /> 4: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Header 1"> 5: <ItemTemplate> 6: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> 7: </ItemTemplate> 8: </asp:TemplateField> 9: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Header 2"> 10: <ItemTemplate> 11: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox2" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> 12: </ItemTemplate> 13: </asp:TemplateField> 14: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Header 3"> 15: <ItemTemplate> 16: <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox3" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> 17: </ItemTemplate> 18: </asp:TemplateField> 19: <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Action"> 20: <ItemTemplate> 21: <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" onclick="LinkButton1_Click" Text="Insert"></asp:LinkButton> 22: </ItemTemplate> 23: </asp:TemplateField> 24: </Columns> 25: </asp:gridview>   Then at the code behind source of ASPX page you can add this codes below:   1: private DataTable FillData() { 2:   3: DataTable dt = new DataTable(); 4: DataRow dr = null; 5:   6: //Create DataTable columns 7: dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); 8:   9: //Create Row for each columns 10: dr = dt.NewRow(); 11: dr["RowNumber"] = 1; 12: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 13:   14: dr = dt.NewRow(); 15: dr["RowNumber"] = 2; 16: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 17:   18: dr = dt.NewRow(); 19: dr["RowNumber"] = 3; 20: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 21:   22: dr = dt.NewRow(); 23: dr["RowNumber"] = 4; 24: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 25:   26: dr = dt.NewRow(); 27: dr["RowNumber"] = 5; 28: dt.Rows.Add(dr); 29:   30: //Store the DataTable in ViewState for future reference 31: ViewState["CurrentTable"] = dt; 32:   33: return dt; 34:   35: } 36:   37: private void BindGridView(DataTable dtSource) { 38: GridView1.DataSource = dtSource; 39: GridView1.DataBind(); 40: } 41:   42: private DataRow InsertRow(DataTable dtSource, string value) { 43: DataRow dr = dtSource.NewRow(); 44: dr["RowNumber"] = value; 45: return dr; 46: } 47: //private DataRow DeleteRow(DataTable dtSource, 48:   49: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { 50: if (!IsPostBack) { 51: BindGridView(FillData()); 52: } 53: } 54:   55: protected void LinkButton1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { 56: LinkButton lb = (LinkButton)sender; 57: GridViewRow row = (GridViewRow)lb.NamingContainer; 58: DataTable dtCurrentData = (DataTable)ViewState["CurrentTable"]; 59: if (lb.Text == "Insert") { 60: //Insert new row below the selected row 61: dtCurrentData.Rows.InsertAt(InsertRow(dtCurrentData, row.Cells[0].Text + "-sub"), row.RowIndex + 1); 62:   63: } 64: else { 65: //Delete selected sub row 66: dtCurrentData.Rows.RemoveAt(row.RowIndex); 67: } 68:   69: BindGridView(dtCurrentData); 70: ViewState["CurrentTable"] = dtCurrentData; 71: } 72:   73: protected void GridView1_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { 74: if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { 75: if (e.Row.Cells[0].Text.Contains("-sub")) { 76: ((LinkButton)e.Row.FindControl("LinkButton1")).Text = "Delete"; 77: } 78: } 79: }   As you can see the code above is pretty straight forward and self explainatory but just to give you a short explaination the code above is composed of three (3) private methods which are the FillData(), BindGridView and InsertRow(). The FillData() method is a method that returns a DataTable and basically creates a dummy data in the DataTable to be used as the GridView DataSource. You can replace the code in that method if you want to use actual data from database but for the purpose of this example I just fill the DataTable with a dummy data on it. The BindGridVew is a method that handles the actual binding of GridVew. The InsertRow() is a method that returns a DataRow. This method handles the insertion of the sub row. Now in the LinkButton OnClick event, we casted the sender to a LinkButton to determine the specific object that fires up the event and get the row values. We then reference the Data from ViewState to get the current data that is being used in the GridView. If the LinkButton text is "Insert" then we will insert new row to the DataSource ( in this case the DataTable) based on the rowIndex if not then Delete the sub row that was added. Here are some screen shots of the output below: On initial load:   After inserting a sub row:   That's it! I hope someone find this post useful!   Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,C#,GridView

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 17, Think Continuations, not Callbacks

  - by Reed

  In traditional asynchronous programming, we’d often use a callback to handle notification of a background task’s completion.  The Task class in the Task Parallel Library introduces a cleaner alternative to the traditional callback: continuation tasks. Asynchronous programming methods typically required callback functions.  For example, MSDN’s Asynchronous Delegates Programming Sample shows a class that factorizes a number.  The original method in the example has the following signature: public static bool Factorize(int number, ref int primefactor1, ref int primefactor2) { //... .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } However, calling this is quite “tricky”, even if we modernize the sample to use lambda expressions via C# 3.0.  Normally, we could call this method like so: int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool answer = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", primeFactor1, primeFactor2, answer); If we want to make this operation run in the background, and report to the console via a callback, things get tricker.  First, we need a delegate definition: public delegate bool AsyncFactorCaller( int number, ref int primefactor1, ref int primefactor2); Then we need to use BeginInvoke to run this method asynchronously: int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; AsyncFactorCaller caller = new AsyncFactorCaller(Factorize); caller.BeginInvoke(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2, result => { int factor1 = 0; int factor2 = 0; bool answer = caller.EndInvoke(ref factor1, ref factor2, result); Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", factor1, factor2, answer); }, null); This works, but is quite difficult to understand from a conceptual standpoint.  To combat this, the framework added the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern, but it isn’t much easier to understand or author. Using .NET 4’s new Task<T> class and a continuation, we can dramatically simplify the implementation of the above code, as well as make it much more understandable.  We do this via the Task.ContinueWith method.  This method will schedule a new Task upon completion of the original task, and provide the original Task (including its Result if it’s a Task<T>) as an argument.  Using Task, we can eliminate the delegate, and rewrite this code like so: var background = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }); background.ContinueWith(task => Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result)); This is much simpler to understand, in my opinion.  Here, we’re explicitly asking to start a new task, then continue the task with a resulting task.  In our case, our method used ref parameters (this was from the MSDN Sample), so there is a little bit of extra boiler plate involved, but the code is at least easy to understand. That being said, this isn’t dramatically shorter when compared with our C# 3 port of the MSDN code above.  However, if we were to extend our requirements a bit, we can start to see more advantages to the Task based approach.  For example, supposed we need to report the results in a user interface control instead of reporting it to the Console.  This would be a common operation, but now, we have to think about marshaling our calls back to the user interface.  This is probably going to require calling Control.Invoke or Dispatcher.Invoke within our callback, forcing us to specify a delegate within the delegate.  The maintainability and ease of understanding drops.  However, just as a standard Task can be created with a TaskScheduler that uses the UI synchronization context, so too can we continue a task with a specific context.  There are Task.ContinueWith method overloads which allow you to provide a TaskScheduler.  This means you can schedule the continuation to run on the UI thread, by simply doing: Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }).ContinueWith(task => textBox1.Text = string.Format("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result), TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext()); This is far more understandable than the alternative.  By using Task.ContinueWith in conjunction with TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(), we get a simple way to push any work onto a background thread, and update the user interface on the proper UI thread.  This technique works with Windows Presentation Foundation as well as Windows Forms, with no change in methodology.

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• SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

  What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How to find domain registrar and DNS hosting with good DNSSEC support?

  - by rsp

  Simplified problem I want to buy a domain and make a website that is fully secured with DNSSEC. Background I've been hearing about the insecurity of DNS for years. I've watched all of the talks by Dan Kaminsky and others from DNS exploits to The future of DNS Security Panel. I knew that using DNS without security is a disaster waiting to happen. I followed the development of the DNSSEC standard. I celebrated the key signing ceremony. Everything was on the right track to finally have a secure DNS system in place. And now more than 2 years later I wanted to just do what everyone said I should do: use DNSSEC for a new domain. So I need a domain registrar and a DNS hosting service that supports DNSSEC. Surprisingly it is not that easy to even find out who does support DNSSEC. It was actually much easier to find info on DNSSEC two years ago when everyone was going to support DNSSEC Real Soon Now but now years passed and I hardly see any progress done. I just hope that I was just looking in the wrong places and someone here will explain all of the doubts. I hope that other people who want to have a secure website will also find this question useful. What is needed registrar and DNS servers with full DNSSEC support for .com domains What is not needed IPv6 support Web hosting anything more What I found out so far Go Daddy offers Premium DNS service for additional $36 per year that lets you "Secure up to 5 domains with DNSSEC". easyDNS has DNSSEC available in Beta across all service levels (you need to enable the "beta" flag in configuration) but it doesn't seem to be production ready and judging from the lack of updates it isn't a feature of highest priority (the last update from March 2011 on the easyDNS blog). Name.com - according to The Register (US domain registrar does IPv6, DNSSEC) it has DNSSEC support since 2010 but right now (October 2012) I couldn't find anything related to DNSSEC on their website. Dynadot that is very often recommended doesn't support DNSSEC Namecheap that is also often recommended doesn't support DNSSEC. The support answer from 2011 suggested that it was being added but in 2012 still no ETA is given to customers. DynDNS was supposed to support DNSSEC, I found a link explaining DNSSEC support but it gives 404 Not Found page and offers a search box - when searching for DNSSEC I get "No results were found for your query." GKG was recommended online for DNSSEC support but it's hard to find any information on the level of DNSSEC support - there is a brief explanation on what is DNSSEC and how to sign Delegation Signer records in their FAQ but no information about the level of actual support can be found. Ask Slashdot: Which Registrars Support DNSSEC? from July 2011 - Answers list Go Daddy, DynDNS, GKG, Name.com as registrars that support DNSSEC but: see above. Related questions How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? What is needed to add DNSSEC to my site? DNS hosting better managed by Domain provider or Hosting provider? Registrar with good security, DNS hosting, and DNSSEC and IPv6 resolvers? In no. 1 no one is ever mentioning DNS at all. In no. 2 answers only mention the .se TLD, there are very few answers and they seem very outdated. In no. 3 one answer says "On projects that demand higher security, I might look for a web host that supports DNSSEC" but no more information is provided. The only relevant answers are in no. 4 where easyDNS is recommended by someone who has never used them personally. Meanwhile, as of October 2012, the support of DNSSEC is described as "in beta" on the easyDNS feature list. Another one recommends SiteGround but searching their site for DNSSEC returns no results. Other answers recommend web hosting providers that don't meet the requirement of DNSSEC support. Also the question mentioned above lists 9 very specific requirements other than only DNSSEC (like eg. HTTP-only login cookies, two-factor authentications, no DNS record limits, DNS statistics of queries/day, audit trails etc.) which might have excluded many possible recommendations if one is only interested in DNSSEC support. Conclusions I thought that by the end of 2012 the support of DNSSEC among domain registrars and DNS providers would be nearly universal. I am shocked that the support seems virtually nonexistent. Is this a result of some serious problems with the DNSSEC adoption? Or is it just not a hot topic and no one bothers anymore? According to the DNSSEC Scoreboard roughly about 0.1% of .com domains support DNSSEC. Could that be caused by the lack of DNSSEC support among registrars and DNS providers, is the information too hard to find or maybe no one cares? There is even no "dnssec" tag here. Questions The information is surprisingly hard to find. That is why I am asking for first-hand experience and personal recommendations. Has anyone here actually set up a website with DNSSEC, from the domain registration to the configuration of DNS servers? Can anyone recommend any of the registrars mentioned above? Can anyone recommend any registrar not mentioned above?

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