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• How to appear very professional on my first freelance project?

  - by iamserious

  I need some help on appearing very professional on my first freelance project. How / What should you do to achieve this? Background: I started as a full time web developer 18 months ago, two promotions later I am now a senior software engineer. I've never had any problems with designing / developing / coding a complicated system. I thought I could use some help for Christmas and I started bidding for a project and now I have one - from a very reputable lawyers association in London. I have no problem dealing with the actual implementation of the system, but I have no idea how to appear professional throughout the whole process. About the project: This lawyers association are starting a distant training courses and in addition to having a website to show off all their clients etc, they want a students area where their students would log in, download course materials allocated to them etc.. and an admin section where they assign courses to students / create new ones / upload materials etc.. Questions breakdown: 1) How should I start with the requirement gathering? Is using scrum a good idea, or should I use something like Volere Template - and what should I do with it? should I submit a copy to the client etc.. 2) How often should I meet the client? Would once a fortnight would be good? 3) What are the processes / protocols that I need to follow so that they would be satisfied with me and think that I am very professional 4) How much should I charge for the product? 5) How should I get a quote / contract / receipt for the whole project? 6) What are the steps that professional freelancers go through, during the life cycle of a project? My Research so far Looking at How much should I charge doesn't help.. I live in London, zone 1, though I have no idea how much a project of this size would cost. Help on this would be appreciated. How to be professional articles talks about the work / time management etc and not the actual process, what would real people do etc.. it's like academia theory, but not practical. If this needs revising, please let me know, do not close it because of whatever reason, I will edit the question or details to fit the needs. Thanks for reading a lengthy question.

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric (2D) game with moderate-scale multiplayer - 20-30 players. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Right now, clients are authoritative for their own position. The server performs validation and broad-scale cheat detection, and I fully realize that the system will never be fully robust against cheating. However, the performance and implementation tradeoffs work well for me right now. Given that I'm dealing with sprite graphics, the game has 8 defined directions rather than free movement. Whenever the player changes their direction or speed (walk, run, stop), a "true" 3D velocity is set on the entity and a packet it sent to the server with the new movement state. In addition, every 250ms additional packets are transmitted with the player's current position for state updates on the server as well as for client prediction. After the server validates the packet, it gets automatically distributed to all of the other "nearby" players. Client-side, all entities with non-zero velocity (ie/ moving entities) are tracked and updated by a rudimentary "physics" system - basically nothing more than changing the position by the velocity according to the elapsed time slice (40ms or so). What I'm struggling with is how to implement clean movement prediction. I have the nagging suspicion that I've made a design mistake somewhere. I've been over the Unreal, Half-life, and all other movement prediction/lag compensation articles I could find, but they all seam geared toward shooters: "Don't send each control change, send updates every 120ms, server is authoritative, client predicts, etc". Unfortunately, that style of design won't work well for me - there's no 3D environment so each individual state change is important. 1) Most of the samples I saw tightly couple movement prediction right into the entities themselves. For example, storing the previous state along with the current state. I'd like to avoid that and keep entities with their "current state" only. Is there a better way to handle this? 2) What should happen when the player stops? I can't interpolate to the correct position, since they might need to walk backwards or another strange direction if their position is too far ahead. 3) What should happen when entities collide? If the current player collides with something, the answer is simple - just stop the player from moving. But what happens if two entities take up the same space on the server? What if the local prediction causes a remote entity to collide with the player or another entity - do I stop them as well? If the prediction had the misfortune of sticking them in front of a wall that the player has gone around, the prediction will never be able to compensate and once the error gets to high the entity will snap to the new position.

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• How do you make a bullet ricochet off a vertical wall?

  - by Bagofsheep

  First things first. I am using C# with XNA. My game is top-down and the player can shoot bullets. I've managed to get the bullets to ricochet correctly off horizontal walls. Yet, despite using similar methods (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3203952/mirroring-an-angle) and reading other answered questions about this subject I have not been able to get the bullets to ricochet off a vertical wall correctly. Any method I've tried has failed and sometimes made ricocheting off a horizontal wall buggy. Here is the collision code that calls the ricochet method: //Loop through returned tile rectangles from quad tree to test for wall collision. If a collision occurs perform collision logic. for (int r = 0; r < returnObjects.Count; r++) if (Bullets[i].BoundingRectangle.Intersects(returnObjects[r])) Bullets[i].doCollision(returnObjects[r]); Now here is the code for the doCollision method. public void doCollision(Rectangle surface) { if (Ricochet) doRicochet(surface); else Trash = true; } Finally, here is the code for the doRicochet method. public void doRicochet(Rectangle surface) { if (Position.X > surface.Left && Position.X < surface.Right) { //Mirror the bullet's angle. Rotation = -1 * Rotation; //Moves the bullet in the direction of its rotation by given amount. moveFaceDirection(Sprite.Width * BulletScale.X); } else if (Position.Y > surface.Top && Position.Y < surface.Bottom) { } } Since I am only dealing with vertical and horizontal walls at the moment, the if statements simply determine if the object is colliding from the right or left, or from the top or bottom. If the object's X position is within the boundaries of the tile's X boundaries (left and right sides), it must be colliding from the top, and vice verse. As you can see, the else if statement is empty and is where the correct code needs to go.

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• Point line collision reaction

  - by user4523

  I am trying to program point line segment collision detection and reaction. I am doing this for fun and to learn. The point moves (it has a velocity, and can be controlled by the user), whilst the lines are strait and stationary. The lines are not axis aligned. Everything is in 2D. It is quite straight forward to work out if a collision has occurred. For each frame, the point moves from A to B. AB is a line, and if it crosses the line segment, a collision has occurred (or will occur) and I am able to work out the point of intersection (poi). The problem I am having is with the reaction. Ideally I would like the point to be prevented from moving across the line. In one frame, I can move the point back to the poi (or only alow it to move as far as the poi), and alter the velocity. The problem I am having with this approach (I think) is that, next frame the user may try to cross the line again. Although the point is on the poi, the point may not be exactly on the line. Since it is not axis aligned, I think there is always some subtle rounding issue (A float representation of a point on a line might be rounded to a point that is slightly on one side or the other). Because of this, next frame the path might not intersect the line (because it can start on the other side and move away from it) and the point is effectively allowed to cross the line. Firstly, does the analysis sound correct? Having accepted (maybe) that I cannot always exactly position the point on the line, I tried to move the point away from the line slightly (either along the normal to the line, or along the path vector). I then get a problem at edges. Attempting to fix one collision by moving the point away from the line (even slightly) can cause it to cross another line (one shape I am dealing with is a star, with sharp corners). This can mean that the solution to one collision inadvertently creates another collision, which is ignored. Again, does this sound correct? Anyway, whatever I try, I am having difficulty with edges, and the point is occasionally able to penetrate the polygons and cross lines, which is undesirable. Whilst I can find a lot of information about collision detection on the web (and on this site) I can find precious little information on collision reaction. Does any one know of any good point line collision reaction tutorials? Or is my approach too flawed/over complicated?

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• Advantages to Multiple Methods over Switch

  - by tandu

  I received a code review from a senior developer today asking "By the way, what is your objection to dispatching functions by way of a switch statement?" I have read in many places about how pumping an argument through switch to call methods is bad OOP, not as extensible, etc. However, I can't really come up with a definitive answer for him. I would like to settle this for myself once and for all. Here are our competing code suggestions (php used as an example, but can apply more universally): class Switch { public function go($arg) { switch ($arg) { case "one": echo "one\n"; break; case "two": echo "two\n"; break; case "three": echo "three\n"; break; default: throw new Exception("Unknown call: $arg"); break; } } } class Oop { public function go_one() { echo "one\n"; } public function go_two() { echo "two\n"; } public function go_three() { echo "three\n"; } public function __call($_, $__) { throw new Exception("Unknown call $_ with arguments: " . print_r($__, true)); } } Part of his argument was "It (switch method) has a much cleaner way of handling default cases than what you have in the generic __call() magic method." I disagree about the cleanliness and in fact prefer call, but I would like to hear what others have to say. Arguments I can come up with in support of Oop scheme: A bit cleaner in terms of the code you have to write (less, easier to read, less keywords to consider) Not all actions delegated to a single method. Not much difference in execution here, but at least the text is more compartmentalized. In the same vein, another method can be added anywhere in the class instead of a specific spot. Methods are namespaced, which is nice. Does not apply here, but consider a case where Switch::go() operated on a member rather than a parameter. You would have to change the member first, then call the method. For Oop you can call the methods independently at any time. Arguments I can come up with in support of Switch scheme: For the sake of argument, cleaner method of dealing with a default (unknown) request Seems less magical, which might make unfamiliar developers feel more comfortable Anyone have anything to add for either side? I'd like to have a good answer for him.

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• Object Oriented Design of a Small Java Game

  - by user2733436

  This is the problem i am dealing with. I have to make a simple game of NIM. I am learning java using a book so far i have only coded programs that deal with 2 classes. This program would have about 4 classes i guess including the main class. My problem is i am having a difficult time designing classes how they will interact with each other. I really want to think and use a object oriented approach. So the first thing i did was design the Pile CLASS as it seemed the easiest and made the most sense to me in terms of what methods go in it. Here is what i have got down for the Pile Class so far. package Nim; import java.util.Random; public class Pile { private int initialSize; public Pile(){ } Random rand = new Random(); public void setPile(){ initialSize = (rand.nextInt(100-10)+10); } public void reducePile(int x){ initialSize = initialSize - x; } public int getPile(){ return initialSize; } public boolean hasStick(){ if(initialSize>0){ return true; } else { return false; } } } Now i need help in designing the Player Class. By that i mean i am not asking for anyone to write code for me as that defeats the purpose of learning i was just wondering how would i design the player class and what would go on it. My guess is that the player class would contain method for choosing move for computer and also receiving the move human user makes. Lastly i am guessing in the Game class i am guessing the turns would be handeled. I am really lost right now so i was wondering if someone can help me think through this problem it would be great. Starting with the player class would be appreciated. I know there are some solutions for this problem online but i refuse to look at because i want to develop my own approach to such problems and i am confident if i can get through this problem i can solve other problems. I apologize if this question is a bit poor but in specific i need help in designing the Player class.

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• What is hiberfil.sys and How Do I Delete It?

  - by The Geek

  You’re no doubt reading this article because there’s a gigantic hiberfil.sys file sitting in the root of your drive, and you want to get rid of it to free up some space… but you can’t! Luckily, you actually can delete it, and today we’ll show you how. The more memory you have in your PC, the bigger the file will be. So What is hiberfil.sys Anyway? Windows has two power management modes that you can choose from: one is Sleep Mode, which keeps the PC running in a low power state so you can almost instantly get back to what you were working on. The other is Hibernate mode, which completely writes the memory out to the hard drive, and then powers the PC down entirely, so you can even take the battery out, put it back in, start back up, and be right back where you were. Hibernate mode uses the hiberfil.sys file to store the the current state (memory) of the PC, and since it’s managed by Windows, you can’t delete the file. So if you never use it, and want to disable Hibernate mode, keep reading. Personally I stick with Sleep Mode the vast majority of the time, but I do use Hibernate quite often. Disable Hibernate (and Delete hiberfil.sys) in Windows 7 or Vista You’ll need to open an administrator mode command prompt by right-clicking on the command prompt in the start menu, and then choosing Run as Administrator. Once you’re there, type in the following command: powercfg -h off You should immediately notice that the Hibernate option is gone from the Shut down menu. You’ll also notice that the file is magically gone! For more about dealing with Hibernate like setting how long it takes to head into Hibernate mode, you can check out our article on How to Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7. Disabling Hibernate Mode in Windows XP It’s a lot easier in Windows XP to get rid of Hibernate mode… in fact, we’ve already covered it before, but we’ll cover it again. Just head into Control Panel –> Power Options, and then find the Hibernate tab. Uncheck the box, reboot your PC, and then you can delete the hiberfil.sys file. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or VistaDisable Delete Confirmation Dialog in Windows 7 or VistaClear IE7 Browsing History From the Command LineHide, Delete, or Destroy the Recycle Bin Icon in Windows 7 or VistaClear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in 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 Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides

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• Trying to find resources to learn how to test software [closed]

  - by Davek804

  First off, yes this is a general question, and I'd be perfectly happy to move this to another portion of SE, but I didn't see a more fitting sub. Basically, I am hoping a more experienced QA tester can come along and really fill in some basics for me. So far, websites seem to be sparse in terms of explaining languages involved, basic practices, etc. So, I'm sorry in advance if this is too general, but towards the end of this post I ask some specific questions if it's just absolutely unacceptable to speak in general terms. I just landed a position as Junior Systems and QA Engineer with a social media startup. Their QA and testing is almost nonexistent, so if I do a good job, I imagine I'll find a lot of bugs and have a secure role in the business. I'm pretty good with the systems aspect of my role, but I need to learn more about the QA and testing aspects. We run hardware that's touchscreen based - the user can use and interact with the devices. So, in terms of my QA role, in the short term, I need to build scripts to test the hardware/software as a 'user' to try to uncover bugs. First off, what language should these scripts be written in? Does anyone have some examples? What about the longer term 'automated testing'? I'm familiar with regression testing as the developer adds in new features, sure, but the 50,000 other types of testing, not so much. Most of our hardware runs dotnet/C# code, with some of the servers running Java - but I don't expect to need to run tests on the Java side at this point. I hope to meet with one developer today and try to get a good idea of the output from the hardware so that I can 'mock' this data that gets sent to servers, to try to bugtest. Eventually, we will be moving the hardware to be closer to where I live and work, so that I can test virtually and on real hardware. So a lot of the bugs we're dealing with now are like this: the Local Server, which kiosks report their data to gets updated from the kiosks, but the remote server does not. Or, vis versa when the user registers on a kiosk, the remote server updates but the local server does not. But yeah, without much more detail, I imagine a lot of this info isn't helpful. I've bought a book "How Google Tests Software", but it's really a book more about 'how their software testing is different from Microsoft'. It doesn't teach how to test so much as why their methods are better. Does anyone have a good book that I can buy? An ebook maybe? My local Barnes and Noble kinda had a terrible selection. I also figure a book from 2005 is not necessarily that good either.

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• Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework.  You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release.  Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it.  For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers.  For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool.  Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds).  It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories.  Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it.  Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there.  You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time.  This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions.  By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically.  To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity.  ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios.  This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue.  This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development.  They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Mod Rewrite Help - Pseudo-Subdirectories

  - by Gimpyfuzznut

  I am dealing with a frustrating problem with Joomla that is going to require some url trickery. The idea is straight-forward but after reading a bunch of guides for mod-rewrite, I still can't seem to get it work. Let's say my site is www.mysite.com. Joomla is already performing some rewriting for SEF urls so I have links like www.mysite.com/home and www.mysite.com/news and so on. I want to be able to have (4) pseudo-subdirectories like www.mysite.com/mode1/ and www.mysite.com/mode2/ and so on. These subdirectories should work as if the subdirectory isn't there, ie both www.mysite.com/mode1/home and www.mysite.com/mode2/home should pull up the same www.mysite.com/home. It should point any www.mysite.com/mode1/anypagehere to www.mysite.com/anypagehere. The reason I am asking for this is because I will be reading the url for mode1, mode2, etc, to modify the template page. There will be a landing page that will direct people to /mode1/ and /mode2/ etc and the template will change based on that. Note, that I don't want to actually pass a parameter to the url accessible by a GET or whatever because Joomla removes it (perhaps because of my current mod_rewrite settings). I've pasted the current .htaccess file. RewriteBase /joomla ##########Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|\%3D) [OR] # Block out any script trying to base64_encode crap to send via URL RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode.*\(.*\) [OR] # Block out any script that includes a <script> tag in URL RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR] # Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR] # Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) # Send all blocked request to homepage with 403 Forbidden error! RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L] ########## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) index.php #RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L] ########## End - Joomla! core SEF Section

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• Extract Key and Certificate from Kemp Loadmaster?

  - by Matt Simmons

  I'm trying very hard to get away from a set of Kemp Loadmasters that I bought years ago to provide HA access to our website. Part of that process is going to be putting the key and certificate in the new solution (HAproxy with nginx doing SSL). Unfortunately, I've come up against a problem... The Kemp has built-in certificate management, and it generates CSR's at the touch of a button. It also supported importing of signed certificates, however it does not, so far as I can tell, allow any kind of export of the key itself. There is a "backup key and certificates" ability, however here's the text from the manual: LoadMaster supports exporting of ALL certificate information. This includes private key, host and intermediate certificates. The export file is designed to be used for import into another LoadMaster and is encrypted. Export and import can be completed using the WUI at Certificates -> Backup/Restore Certs. Please make sure to note the pass phrase used to create the export, it will be required to complete the import. You can selectively resort only Virtual Service certificates including private keys, intermediate certificates or both. Well, that is great, but as for actually DEALING with the certs, I'm apparently out of luck. Of course, I'm not going to give up that easily. I ran "file" on the saved cert bundle and got this: $ file client1.certs.backup client1.certs.backup: gzip compressed data, from Unix Well, awesome, I thought. Maybe it's just a .tar.gz, so I unzipped it, and that went fine, but my attempts to untar it didn't work, and running "file" on it now just gives this: $ file client1.certs.backup client1.certs.backup: data So that's where I'm stuck. Anyone have experience with these?

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• What is there in Win 7 Pro (or Ultimate) that is not there in Home Premium? - Especially considering this situation..

  - by Senthil

  I want to know the REAL difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional/Utimate. In India, the cost of different versions: Ultimate - 11,200 INR Professional - 10,700 INR Home Premium - 6,600 INR The absolute cost of the first two is so high to me that the difference (500 INR) doesn't matter. So to me there is really no choice between the first two - If I decide to buy the Professional version, I'd rather go for Ultimate itself. What I want to know is, whether Home Premium is enough for my needs. I tried searching for comparison but many look like just marketing junk from MS. They are short and vague. According to this page, the major differences between Pro and HomePremium are Run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode. Connect to company networks easily and more securely with Domain Join. You can do both in Pro but not in Home Premium. I intend to use my Windows 7 for a small business - just starting up. So I'll be dealing with the following: All kinds of development tools, servers Very important - I will run Virtual Machine Software (MS VPC or VMWare or Sun VirtualBox etc..) My system will be acting as the server for most purposes till I can afford dedicated servers. Connect the system to a variety of network devices (PCs, Printers, etc..) Run productivity, business and financial apps Any other small software startup business requirement that I haven't thought of yet. Professional (and Ultimate) is twice as expensive as Home Premium. So it'd be great if someone can point out the things you cannot do with Home Premium, when you use it like I explained above, so that I can make a decision about which one to buy. I need some real-life experiences so that I can make an informed decision - not a decision based on marketing junk.

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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

  - by Mark Rackley

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

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• rr.com appended to URL and I don't know why

  - by Steph

  I've been having some pretty bad and intermittent internet connectivity issues. I keep getting timeouts on my browsers, or what appears to be timeouts on my browsers. In Chrome it's generally error 21. FF it times out. And so on. While this is happening, I can go into the command line and ping or traceroute the same domain and it works fine. I use my cellphone on the same network and it's fine connecting to the same domain. And when it fails, it's all domains that are down in all browsers, chrome, FF, etc. I also noticed that when I try to connect to 192.168.1.1 it says in chrome did you mean www.192.168.1.1rr.com but when I enter https://192.168.1.1 it's fine. It only seems to do this in Chrome. This is making me think I have a virus. I did some researching about something called road runner, but I can't find any related traces. I also ran a full virus scan using nod32 (eset) and nothing. Any suggestion or help would be greatly appreciated. The intermittent loss of total internet access is really annoying and I'm worried about why it's trying to append the rr.com domain in Chrome. I suspect I'm dealing with two different issues, but you never know. Also for the DNS I'm using Google's DNS servers, the famous 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4

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• Any ideas out there as to how the data can be recovered from an SSD?

  - by ben

  A friend had some form of catastrophic failure on an HP mini 1000, unbootable. Of course there was data that wasn't backed up. I've removed the SSD and hooked it up to a ZIF 40 enclosure but can not seem to get the drive to be recognized in Windows 7. In Disk Management it displays as present, but uninitialized. Attempting to initialize it presents an error Virtual Disk Manager - "The device is not ready". There is scant information on MIE (the custom OS), so I'm not even sure what kind of file system I'm dealing with. In any case, if the filesystem is indeed some flavor other than FAT or NTFS, is this error consistent with that? Are there any creative ideas out there as to how the data can be recovered? Update: Thanks for all the suggestions! I hadn't even considered running a live cd. Unfortunately no luck with Ubuntu (live cd) or explore2fs. The zif connection seems ok (color coded green led for proper connect, orange for not). The drive can't be initialized and therefore can't be formatted, so I guess there may be some real damage. Probably needs to head to a specialist. Thanks again for the feedback, much appreciated.

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• Issues resolving DNS entries for multi-homed servers

  - by I.T. Support

  This is difficult to explain, so bear with me. We have 2 domain controllers, each multi-homed to straddle 2 internal subnets, (subnet A and subnet B) and provide dns, dhcp, and ldap authentication. Both domain controllers each have 2 DNS entries. both entries have identical host names, but correspond to subnet A & subnet B respectively (example entries shown): dc1 host 192.168.8.1 dc1 host 192.168.9.1 dc2 host 192.168.8.2 dc2 host 192.168.9.2 We also have a 3rd subnet for our dmz, (subnet C) which neither domain controller has an IP address on, but our firewall/routing tables provide access to subnet A from subnet C and vice versa, but don't allow access to subnet B from subnet C. Here's my issue. How can I force/determine which dns entry is used when a server on subnet C queries either domain controller by host name? Right now it seems to randomly pick one of the two entries, swaps out the name for the IP address and that's that. The problem is if it randomly selects the entry that corresponds to the 9.x subnet B (no access from subnet C), then the server fails to resolve. If it picks the entry for the 8.x subnet A then it resolves (firewall/routing tables defined for communication between these 2 subnets) Here's what I'd like to know: What are Best Practices (if any) for dealing with DNS resolution on subnets that the DNS servers don't have a presence on? Can I control something akin to a metric value to force an order of DNS resolution when there are multiple entries for the same host name that correspond to different IP subnets? Should I even have 2 DNS HOST entries for the same name? Here's what I'd like to avoid: Making edits to the HOSTS files of servers on subnet C to force DNS resolution of the hostname to the appropriate subnet Adding NIC's to the DC's to have them straddle the DMZ as well, thus obtaining a third DNS entry that corresponds to subnet C Again, my apologies if this was too verbose / unclear. Thanks!

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• Mounting 2.5" SSD in Antec Atlas 550's 3.5" bay

  - by cecilkorik

  Just got some new SSDs to add to my servers, unfortunately there doesn't appear to be anywhere to actually mount them. The cases are Antec Atlas 550 mid-tower server cases. The problem is that the 3.5" bays are intended for 3.5" hard drives (obviously) not SSDs, so they are mounted from the bottom with rubber grommets to reduce vibration. There are NO side-holes in any of the 3.5" bays, all mounting has to be done from the bottom of the drive, through the thick rubber grommets, which requires special extra-long screws with large heads. Those screws will not work with the SSD, the thread is too coarse, 2.5" drives apparently use M3 screws with a finer pitch. The case's 3.5" bays have holes aligned for 2.5" drives and by moving the grommets into the appropriate holes they line up with the SSD. But that's as far as I can get. I don't have and cannot find any screws that use the finer M3 pitch that are long enough and have the wide head. I can't remove the grommets because the screw holes are much too wide without them, the entire head of the screw fits through. And again, there are no side-holes, so I can't use the mounting bracket that came with the drive nor any other 2.5"-3.5" bracket I've found. Here is a pic of what I am dealing with (note that the SSD is just resting on the case, it's not currently screwed in if that's not clear) Any ideas for safely mounting these little guys without resorting to duct tape or superglue would be very appreciated. If anyone knows where I could buy the appropriate type of M3 threaded screw or has any other ideas please help me out here.

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• How to Protect Sensitive (HIPAA) SQL Server Standard Data and Log Files

  - by Quesi

  I am dealing with electronic personal health information (ePHI or PHI) and HIPAA regulations require that only authorized users can access ePHI. Column-level encryption may be of value for some of the data, but I need the ability to do like searches on some of the PHI fields such as name. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is a feature of SQL Server 2008 for encrypting database and log files. As I understand it this prevents someone who gains access to the MDF, LDF, or backup files from being able to do anything with the files because they are encrypted. TDE is only on enterprise and developer versions of SQL Server and enterprise is cost-prohibitive for my particular scenario. How can I get similar protection on SQL Server Standard? Is there a way to encrypt the database and backup files (is there a third-party tool)? Or just as good, is there a way to prevent the files from being used if the disk were attached to another machine (linux or windows)? Administrator access to the files from the same machine is fine, but I just want to prevent any issues if the disk were removed and hooked up to another machine. What are some of the solutions for this that are out there?

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• Looking for a help desk ticketing system..

  - by Dan

  Hi guys Im looking for a good help desk ticket solution. It must perform the following actions for it to be useful. It needs to have a single point of contact via email..e.g [email protected] If we recieve a telephone(or an email outside of the system) we need to be able to create a ticket as if had been added via the single point of contact, this needs to be done with ease in order to save time. Certain people within our organisation deal with certain customers, so if the email/ custom input support call as mentioned in bullet 2 is picked up as having a relationship with that certain person in our organisation it needs to be sent to them/put in their queue for them to work on. If a person is out of office or sick any tickets sent to them must be forwarded to somebody else or put into a seperate pool of tickets that anybody can access. Perhaps have an agent that sorts through tickets in the pool and assigns them to anybody who is available, preferably the person with fewest tickets in their queue/list. Once a customer emails and the system logs it they immediately get a response with a ticket number and maybe details of who is dealing with the problem. Any correspondance in relation to a particular ticket is automatically grouped into some sort of message, and not made into a load of separate tickets. I.e system scans incoming email subjects for ticket numbers and assosciates it with exisiting tickets if that number exists. Any help is much appreciated Thanks P.S I have taken a look at OTRS but i'm not feeling it so unless someone can convince me I guess i'm after an alternative.

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• If spaces in filenames are possible, why do some of us still avoid using them?

  - by Chris W. Rea

  Somebody I know expressed irritation today regarding those of us who tend not to use spaces in our filenames, e.g. NamingThingsLikeThis.txt -- despite most modern operating systems supporting spaces in filenames. Non-technical people must look at filenames created by geeks and wonder where we learned English. So, what are the reasons that spaces in filenames are avoided or discouraged? The most obvious reason I could think of, and why I typically avoid it, are the extra quotes required on the command line when dealing with such files. Are there any other significant reasons, other than the practice being a vestigial preference? UPDATE: Thanks for all your answers! I'm surprised how popular this was. So, here's a summary: Six Reasons Why Geeks Prefer Filenames Without Spaces In Them It's irritating to put quotes around them when referenced on the command line (or elsewhere.) Some older operating systems didn't used to support them and us old dogs are used to that. Some tools still don't support spaces in filenames at all or very well. (But they should.) It's irritating to escape spaces when used where spaces must be escaped, such as URLs. Certain unenlightened services (e.g. file hosting, webmail) remove or replace spaces anyway! Names without spaces can be shorter, which is sometimes desirable as paths are limited.

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• SOLVED Install MythTV & 11.10 on Lenovo S12 (Intel atom) with wireless

  - by keepitsimpleengineer

  This is how I installed Ubuntu 11.10 and MythTV client on my Lenovo S12 (Intel Atom) laptop and use it using WiFi (see additional notes at end). I did this because the upgrade from 11.04 bricked the laptop. Note that the partitions on the Lenovo standard disk were already in place for this installation. Also note that my LAN is setup for fixed IP addresses. Downloaded and burned 11.10 x86 Desktop Ubuntu CD Connected the power supply cord, LAN wire and the external DVD USB drive. Ran Windows XP and made sure performance level "Performance" was set and "Wireless" was enabled. Booted S12 from CD Disabled Networking from icon on upper left panel icon Edited Connections… "Wired connection 1" ? Set IP address, accepted default netmask and set gateway. Also set DNS server. Good idea to check "Connection Information" here to verify everything's O.K. Selected Install Ubuntu from the initial "Install" window Verified the three items were checked (required disk space available, plugged into a power source, & connected to the Internet) Selected Download updates while installing and third party software. Hit Continue… At wireless selected don't want to connect…WiFi…now. Continue… At Installation type, selected Something else. Continue… At partition tale, selected the ext4 Linux partition, set the mount point as "/", and marked for formatting. Here I selected the main disk (/sda) for installing the boot manager. Continue… Selected or verified my Time zone. Continue… Selected my keyboard layout. Continue… Filled in the who are you fields. Make sure password is required to sign in is checked. Continue… Chose a picture. Continue… I selected import no accounts. Continue… Wait as the Install creeps along. If your screen goes blank, tap the space bar ? apparently the screen saver/power plan does this. There are several progress bars. The longest was "Installing system", and it was the next to the last one. Installation Complete window appears, Restart Now… Wait as it stops, The screen blanks then the message "…remove…media…close tray…press enter" I just unplugged the USB DVD and hit enter… It was disheartening but the screen turned Ubuntu Purple-beige and nothing happened, so I help down the power key until it shut down, the pressed it again and the Grub Boot screen appeared. Select Ubuntu… 25.The screen went blank with the little flashing underscore cursor on it and the disk light would occasionally flash. I hit the enter key and eventuality Ubuntu started. After a somewhat long time the unity desktop appeared. 11.10, unlike earlier versions, retains the connection information. Check this by checking the network icon on the upper left applet panel. Here the touch-pad·mouse quit working and I had to reboot. It takes and extremely long time to boot, sometimes requiring several power off/ power on (cold boot). You can try to get the default network manager to work, but it might not, it didn't on mine for WiFi. Thanks to: Chris at URL here's what to do… disconnect your wired Internet connection. input your wireless information into network manager open a terminal (unity dash, top of icon totem, open, and make sure the ruler&pen icon on the bottom is selected, 2nd from left) type in "terminal". Might be a good idea to drag and drop the terminal icon to the terminal, it's easy to get rid of later. click to open a terminal, and type in: sudo rmmod acer_wmi && echo "blacklist acer_wmi" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and hit enter. type in your password as asked. if you have correctly entered your WiFi information and you are near your AP, you should connect immediately if not, see the URL above ? you might need to replace "network manager" with "wicd" ? I did with 11.04. Update the new 11.10, in the upper left panel applet weird·gear icon is menu with a line about updating. It's the new way to invoke Update Manager. Your lenovo S12 (intel atom) should now run the new unity Ubuntu. Point your elbow at the ceiling and pat yourself on the back. Installing Mythbuntu Client 24.1 Open mythbuntu.org/repos (I urge you not to directly use Ubuntu Software Center for this) Install Mythbuntu Repos Save the file (in ~/Downloads, the default) Run the file ? it will update your repositories so that you will get the proper installation sources ? it will start Ubuntu Software Center to do this ? Click Install… You will need your password. Debconf window will open, select by making sure check mark is in the little box "Would you like to activate…". Forward… Which version? At the time of writing the current "Stable" version was 24.1, select 0.24.x… Forward… Read the message, then forward… Delete the downloaded file. Install synaptic (unity dash, top of icon totem, open, and make sure the ruler&pen icon on the bottom is selected, 2nd from left) type in "synaptic". Click on the synaptic icon. Ubuntu Software Center will open and allow you to install synaptic package manager. Open Synaptic (unity dash, top of icon totem, open, and make sure the ruler&pen icon on the bottom is selected, 2nd from left) type in "Synaptic". Might be a good idea to drag and drop the terminal icon to the terminal, it's easy to get rid of later. Run synaptic, read the intro, and close the intro window. Type in mythbuntu-control-centre in the Quick filter text box, and then select it "Mark for installation" by clicking on the box next to it's name. Marvel at the additional to be installed items, then select "?Mark"… At the top of the synaptic window click on the "? Apply" button. Marvel at the amount of stuff to be installed, the click on "Apply". When finished, close finished window and synaptic. Open mythbuntu-control-centre (unity dash, top of icon totem, open, and make sure the ruler&pen icon on the bottom is selected, 2nd from left) type in "mythbuntu". Might be a good idea to drag and drop the mythbuntu-control-centre icon to the terminal, it's easy to get rid of later. You can now configure and install the frontend. Go down the icon totem on the right side of the window and click as needed… System roles. ? No Backend, Desktop Frontend, and Ubuntu Desktop. Apply… & Apply changes… & Password… MySQL Configuration ? from backend ? Setup General Alt-N(ext) Alt-N(ext) Stetting Access Setup PIN code: ~~~~ Input Security key and click "Test Connection", if ?, then Apply… & Apply… {note: for some inexplicable reason, control centre hung on this, but when I restarted it, it was set properly} Graphics drivers, When I did this, only the Broadcom wireless driver showed up. I closed without doing anything. Services. I enabled SSH & Samba. Apply… & Apply… Repositories. Asked & Answered. MythExport. Pass, I believe it requires backend on the same system. Proprietary Codec Support. Check to enable, Apply… & Apply… System Updates. No action necessary, will be a part of the Ubuntu update mechanism. Themes and Artwork. For themes, I selected Enable/Update all. Apply… & Apply… Infrared & Startup behavior and Plugins. Defer until you know more. Close software centre. Open mythTV (unity dash, top of icon totem, open, and make sure the ruler&pen icon on the bottom is selected, 2nd from left) type in "mythTV". Might be a good idea to drag and drop the mythTV icon to the terminal, it's easy to get rid of later. Incorrect Group Membership. Fix this by clicking "Yes"… Log out/end. Do this by clicking "Yes"… For my Lenovo S12, I had to manually restart Ubuntu - and still with the very long restart…/no start/cold boot/reboot/pressing the shift key required Open mythTV (unity dash, top of icon totem, open, and make sure the ruler&pen icon on the bottom is selected, 2nd from left) type in "mythTV". Might be a good idea to drag and drop the mythTV icon to the terminal, it's easy to get rid of later. Will open with Select country & language. Do so. then get message with "No", hit "Ok" and arrive at the data base Configuration 1/2 screen. You will need your brackend password, from backend ? Setup General Database Configuration 1/2 Password:~? Enter this Hit Alt-n to go to the next page. Select "Use custom id…", then enter a custom ID, I use the machine's name. Hit finish, and MythTV should start up with all default settings. For the lenovo S12, the first thing you want to do is to set Playback profiles to "Normal". From Setup TV Settings Playback Alt-N(ext) Alt-N(ext) Playback Profiles (3/8) : Change Current Video Playback Profile to "Normal". You can fiddle with this setting later. For the lenovo S12, the second thing is to get the sound going. From Setup General Alt-N(ext) Alt-N(ext) Alt-N(ext) Audio System: The top of the screen is a button title "Scan for audio devices", move the highlight there and press the Space bar. Then Tab down to Audio Output Device: and left-right arrow until "ALSA:hw:Card=Intel,DEV=0" is selected. Then Alt-N(ext) until "Finish". Now you should have sound. You should now have MythTV working nicely on the Lenovo S12 Notes about wireless: Running Lenovo S12 on wireless is demanding on both power and WiFi connection. Best results will be obtained when running on power and wired connection. I run my S12 on wireless, actually two serial connections with two access points, something that is not easy to achieve. Here Mythbuntu client-server (in den) <? wireless link 1 <?office LAN? wireless link 2 <? Lenovo S12 Ubuntu 11.10 The office LAN is fixed IP behind an Untangle firewall router. There is another MythTV client on Ubuntu 10.10 computer in the office (which has always worked well). ProblemMythbuntu\Win7 client hangs with frozen frames, short segment of audio repeating. Hardware Rosewill RNX-G300EX IEEE 802.11b/g PCI Wireless Card on client-server 2 Linksys WRT54GL wireless broadband routers on LAN for link1 and link 2 WRT54GL FirmwareDD-WRT v24-sp2(07/22/09) voip set up to act as an access point. Note? many people advised this was an unworkable scheme, and in probably most cases it will be. Solution? Set up DD-WRT with the following Wireless settings… Basic Channel: Different fixed channels at least 4 difference, I use 6 & 11 Basic Sensitivity Range (ACK timing): 50 MAC filter use filter: Enable, Selected Permit only clients listed to access… Requires adding MAC addresses in "Edit MAC Filter List" This causes the 54GL's to ignore any but the listed MAC address, down side, no "guest" capability. Advanced Basic rate: All Advanced CTS Protection Mode: Off Advanced Frame Burst: Enable Advanced Max associate clients: 4 for client link 2, 1 for client-server link 1 Advanced AP isolation: Enable Advanced Preamble: Short Advanced Afterburner: On Advanced Wireless GUI access: Off Advanced WMM support: Off Other settings: default for supplied firmware. Why I suspect this worked? The 54GL Access Points's with the firmware's setting are set to handle a multiple client, wide area situation. With these mods I reconfigured them for a small area, few client situation, disabling Advanced WMM probably the most important. In addition, the client mythtv when used all other users of its access point are turned off except for a Skype phone. Also, the client-server is set up to allow other connections though it's LAN connection, and these are used to connect the TV and disc players, not used when client is being used.

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• Apache Alias Isn't In Directory Listing

  - by Phunt

  I've got a site running on my home server that's just a front end for me to grab files remotely. There's no pages, just a directory listing (Options Indexes...). I wanted to add a link to a directory outside of the webroot so I made an alias. After a minute of dealing with permissions, I can now navigate to the directory by typing the URL into the browser, but the directory isn't listed in the root index. Is there a way to do this without creating a symlink in the root? Server: Ubuntu 11.04, Apache 2.2.19 Relevant vhost: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName some.url.net DocumentRoot "/var/www/some.url.net" <Directory /var/www/some.url.net> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order Allow,Deny Allow From All AuthType Basic AuthName "TPS Reports" AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache2/passwd/some.url.net Require user user1 user2 </Directory> Alias /some_alias "/media/usb_drive/extra files" <Directory "/media/usb_drive/extra files"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Order Allow,Deny Allow From All </Directory> </VirtualHost>

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• Exporting Environment Variables in Ubuntu Linux

  - by stanigator

  I know many people have asked about environment variables before, but I am having a hard time dealing with these paths while ensuring I don't mess around with the original settings. How would you go about executing these commands in Ubuntu in terms of environment variables? Thanks in advance! Please put /home/stanley/Downloads/ns-allinone-2.34/bin:/home/stanley/Downloads/ns-allinone-2.34/tcl8.4.18/unix:/home/stanley/Downloads/ns-allinone-2.34/tk8.4.18/unix into your PATH environment; so that you'll be able to run itm/tclsh/wish/xgraph. IMPORTANT NOTICES: (1) You MUST put /home/stanley/Downloads/ns-allinone-2.34/otcl-1.13, /home/stanley/Downloads/ns-allinone-2.34/lib, into your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. If it complains about X libraries, add path to your X libraries into LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If you are using csh, you can set it like: setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH If you are using sh, you can set it like: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH= (2) You MUST put /home/stanley/Downloads/ns-allinone-2.34/tcl8.4.18/library into your TCL_LIBRARY environmental variable. Otherwise ns/nam will complain during startup.

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• WTH? Upgrading Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 Problem: No Internet Connection?

  - by damx

  Earlier today I tried upgrading my Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Kaola from the update manager. (FYI: all 9.10 updates were applied prior to this) Everything was going well downloading until I got an error dialog informing me that some software packages weren't downloaded because of an Internet connection. Would say it was halfway thru. Anyway, Was told that the software packages that it did download, however, would kept and I figure it's not a big deal. Just run it again. But first ran Firefox to verify my connection as I haven't had any connection problems. But my internet connection was/is fine as evident by this posting. With that cleared, I ran the update manager again, clicked on "Upgrade" and this time I received "Could not download the release notes. Please check your internet connection" huh? This is my first time dealing w/ Ubuntu and my first upgrade so I am hoping someone can help. Not sure what the problem can be. I am can surf the web w/ no problems. Please help. PS: There was no installing at any point. Just downloading. PSS: The software it managed to download the first time around is now visible in the update manager but don't think I should install as I see in the compiz description it's for v1:0.8-4-0ubuntu2 I figure it's designed for 10.04 and might ruin things further if I install

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