Search Results

Search found 171496 results on 6860 pages for 'not joe bloggs'.

Page 20/6860 | < Previous Page | 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27  | Next Page >

  • why do we need advanced knowledge of mathematics & physics for programming?

    - by Sumeet
    Guys, I have been very good in mathematics and physics in my schools and colleges. Right now I am a programmer. Even in the colleges I have to engrossed my self into computers and programming things all the time. As I used to like it very much. But I have always felt the lack of advanced mathematics and physics in all the work I have done (Programs). Programming never asked me any advanced mathematics and physics knowledge in what I was very good. It always ask u some optimized loops, and different programming technologies which has never been covered in advanced mathematics and physics. Even at the time of selection in big College , such a kind of advanced knowledge is required. Time by time I got out of touch of all that facts and concepts (advanced mathematics and physics). And now after, 5 years in job I found it hard to resolve Differentiations and integrations from Trigonometry. Which sometimes make me feel like I have wasted time in those concepts because they are never used. (At that time I knew that I am going to be a programmer) If one need to be a programmer why do all this advanced knowledge is required. One can go with elementry knowledge a bit more. You never got to think like scientists and R&D person in your Schols and colleges for being a programmer? Just think and let me know your thoughts. I must be wrong somewhere in what I think , but not able to figure that out..? Regards Sumeet

    Read the article

  • Experience with Take home Programming Test for Interviews

    - by Alan
    Okay this is not "programming" related per-se, but it is a situation that I believe the SO audience would be more familiar with, than say an ask.yahoo.com audience, so please forgive me. I had a phone screen the other day with a company that I really want to work for. It went pretty well, based on cues from the HR person, such as "Next step we're going to send you a programming test," and "Well, before I get ahead of myself, do you want to continue the interviewing process." and "We'll send out the test later this afternoon. It doesn't sound like you'll have trouble with it, but I want to be honest we do have a high failure rate on it." The questions asked weren't technical, just going down my resume, and talking about the work I've done, and how it relates to the position. Nothing I couldn't talk through. This was last Thursday. It's now Tuesday, and haven't received the test yet. I sent a follow up email yesterday to the lady who interviewed me, but haven't gotten a response. Anyone had a similar experience? Am I reading too much into this? Or was I off the mark by thinking I had moved on to the next step in the interview process. Since this is a company I really want to work for, I'm driving myself insane enumerating all the various what-if scenarios.

    Read the article

  • Error while linking libvorbisfile.dylib into Mac application

    - by computergeek6
    I'm working on a program that loads sounds from Ogg Vorbis files, but whatever I do, the XCode project just doesn't seem to want to link libvorbisfile.a into my program. I keep getting linking errors: "_ov_read", referenced from: GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o "_ov_clear", referenced from: GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o "_ov_info", referenced from: GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o "_ov_open", referenced from: GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o GSound::GSound(GWorld*, std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >)in GSound.o ld: symbol(s) not found

    Read the article

  • Should CV contain cases where certain party fools me and not pay salary? Is it "holiday" time or not?

    - by otto
    Suppose I am fooled to work in a start-up or a company that has been a very small over a long time, let say 10 years. I work them 3 months and I really enjoy the work -- I learn a lot of new skills such as Haskell, MapReduce, CouchDB and many other little things. Now the firm did not pay any salary: A) I may be unskilled, B) I did not meet some deadline (I don't know because I am not allowed to speak to the boss but I know that I am not getting any payment) or C) I was fooled. Some detail about C I heard that the firm have had similar cases from my friend, "The guy X was there and he said he does not trust the firm at all so he went to other firm". I don't know what the term "trust" mean here, anyway the firm consists of ignorant drop-outs that hires academic people, a bit irony. They hire people from student-organizations and let them work and promise ok -compensation but -- when you start working the co-employer starts all kind of instructions "Do not work so hard, do not work so long, do not work so much" -- it is like he is making sure you do not feel sad when he does not pay any salary (co-employer is an owner in the firm). Anyway, I learnt a ton in the company but it was very inefficient working. I worked only alone, not really working in a "company". Now should by resume contain references to the firm and the guy who did not pay me anything? Or should my resume read that I worked in XYZ -technologies -- but 1 year's NDA -- what can write here? Now I fear that if I put the firm to my resume: they will lie about my input to my next employer. I feel they are very dishonest. On the other hand, I want to make it sure that I have worked over the time. So: Should my CV contain the not-so-good or even awful employers that may be fooling people to work there? I am pretty sure everyone knows the firm and its habbits, circles are small but people are afraid to speak.

    Read the article

  • hibernate empty collection in component

    - by Jurgen H
    I have a component mapped using Hibernate. If all fields in the component in the database are null, the component itself is set to null by hibernate. This is the expected behavior and also what I need. The problem I have, is that when I add a bag to that component, the bag is initialized to an empty list. This means the component has a non null value... resulting in the component being created. Any idea how to fix this? <class name="foo.bar.Entity" table="Entity"> <id name="id" column="id"> <generator class="native" /> </id> <property name="departure" column="departure_time" /> <property name="arrival" column="arrival_time" /> <component name="statistics"> <bag name="linkStatistics" lazy="false" cascade="all" > <key column="entity_id" not-null="true" /> <one-to-many class="foo.bar.LinkStatistics" /> </bag> <property name="loggedTime" column="logged_time" /> ... </component> A criteria with Restirctions.isNull("statistics") does return the expected values.

    Read the article

  • Establishing connection from java to access 2010 64bit

    - by user993250
    after going through several tutorials and blog posts, i have unsuccessfully tried to set up a connection from java to a microsoft access database. my system specifications are win 7 [64 bit] odbcad32.ese [64 bit] access 2010 [64 bit] jre6 [64 bit] the code that i wrote for establishing a connection public Connection makeConn() throws ClassNotFoundException, SQLException { Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver"); conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ=C:\\Users\\ARIFAH\\Desktop\\sampleDb.mdb"); return conn; } in the data source [odbc]---[located at path %windir%\system32\odbcad32.exe] i performed the following task USER DNS TAB ADD-Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb ) [file ACEODBC.dll] -Finish Data Source Name: TestDriver ; Description: test driver for access 2010 64 bit ; DataBase-select -browse: C:\Users\ARIFAH\Desktop\sampleDb.mdb - ok apply ok now when i try to run my application, this is the error that i m getting, java.sql.SQLException: [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Could not find file '(unknown)'. at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbc.createSQLException(Unknown Source) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbc.standardError(Unknown Source) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbc.SQLDriverConnect(Unknown Source) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcConnection.initialize(Unknown Source) at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.connect(Unknown Source) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(Unknown Source) at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(Unknown Source) at dataBase.connection.makeConn(connection.java:22) at newmodulewizrd.ui.App.<init>(App.java:32) at archetypedcomponent.commands.newModuleHandler.execute(newModuleHandler.java:39) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.handlers.HandlerProxy.execute(HandlerProxy.java:294) at org.eclipse.core.commands.Command.executeWithChecks(Command.java:476) at org.eclipse.core.commands.ParameterizedCommand.executeWithChecks(ParameterizedCommand.java:508) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.handlers.HandlerService.executeCommand(HandlerService.java:169) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.handlers.SlaveHandlerService.executeCommand(SlaveHandlerService.java:241) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.handlers.SlaveHandlerService.executeCommand(SlaveHandlerService.java:241) at org.eclipse.ui.menus.CommandContributionItem.handleWidgetSelection(CommandContributionItem.java:770) at org.eclipse.ui.menus.CommandContributionItem.access$10(CommandContributionItem.java:756) at org.eclipse.ui.menus.CommandContributionItem$5.handleEvent(CommandContributionItem.java:746) at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(EventTable.java:84) at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Widget.java:1003) at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runDeferredEvents(Display.java:3910) at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:3503) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runEventLoop(Workbench.java:2405) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runUI(Workbench.java:2369) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.access$4(Workbench.java:2221) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$5.run(Workbench.java:500) at org.eclipse.core.databinding.observable.Realm.runWithDefault(Realm.java:332) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createAndRunWorkbench(Workbench.java:493) at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(PlatformUI.java:149) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:113) at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:194) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:368) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source) at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:559) at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:514) at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1311) at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:1287) *can somebody help with it??? *

    Read the article

  • Supporting users if they're not on your site

    - by Roger Hart
    Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

    Read the article

  • Man pages not finding entry

    - by Mike
    So, I'm not sure what is going on with my system (ubuntu 12.04), but my man pages do not seem to be working. I try man gcc and get the following response No manual entry for gcc See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available. However I see the man entry in /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz Here is what my /etc/manpath.config file looks like # manpath.config # # This file is used by the man-db package to configure the man and cat paths. # It is also used to provide a manpath for those without one by examining # their PATH environment variable. For details see the manpath(5) man page. # # Lines beginning with `#' are comments and are ignored. Any combination of # tabs or spaces may be used as `whitespace' separators. # # There are three mappings allowed in this file: # -------------------------------------------------------- # MANDATORY_MANPATH manpath_element # MANPATH_MAP path_element manpath_element # MANDB_MAP global_manpath [relative_catpath] #--------------------------------------------------------- # every automatically generated MANPATH includes these fields # #MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/src/pvm3/man # MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/man MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/share/man MANDATORY_MANPATH /usr/local/share/man #--------------------------------------------------------- # set up PATH to MANPATH mapping # ie. what man tree holds man pages for what binary directory. # # *PATH* -> *MANPATH* # MANPATH_MAP /bin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/bin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /sbin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/sbin /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/bin /usr/local/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/bin /usr/local/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/share/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/X11R6/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/bin/X11 /usr/X11R6/man MANPATH_MAP /usr/games /usr/share/man MANPATH_MAP /opt/bin /opt/man MANPATH_MAP /opt/sbin /opt/man #--------------------------------------------------------- # For a manpath element to be treated as a system manpath (as most of those # above should normally be), it must be mentioned below. Each line may have # an optional extra string indicating the catpath associated with the # manpath. If no catpath string is used, the catpath will default to the # given manpath. # # You *must* provide all system manpaths, including manpaths for alternate # operating systems, locale specific manpaths, and combinations of both, if # they exist, otherwise the permissions of the user running man/mandb will # be used to manipulate the manual pages. Also, mandb will not initialise # the database cache for any manpaths not mentioned below unless explicitly # requested to do so. # # In a per-user configuration file, this directive only controls the # location of catpaths and the creation of database caches; it has no effect # on privileges. # # Any manpaths that are subdirectories of other manpaths must be mentioned # *before* the containing manpath. E.g. /usr/man/preformat must be listed # before /usr/man. # # *MANPATH* -> *CATPATH* # MANDB_MAP /usr/man /var/cache/man/fsstnd MANDB_MAP /usr/share/man /var/cache/man MANDB_MAP /usr/local/man /var/cache/man/oldlocal MANDB_MAP /usr/local/share/man /var/cache/man/local MANDB_MAP /usr/X11R6/man /var/cache/man/X11R6 MANDB_MAP /opt/man /var/cache/man/opt # #--------------------------------------------------------- # Program definitions. These are commented out by default as the value # of the definition is already the default. To change: uncomment a # definition and modify it. # #DEFINE pager pager -s #DEFINE cat cat #DEFINE tr tr '\255\267\264\327' '\055\157\047\170' #DEFINE grep grep #DEFINE troff groff -mandoc #DEFINE nroff nroff -mandoc #DEFINE eqn eqn #DEFINE neqn neqn #DEFINE tbl tbl #DEFINE col col #DEFINE vgrind vgrind #DEFINE refer refer #DEFINE grap grap #DEFINE pic pic -S # #DEFINE compressor gzip -c7 #--------------------------------------------------------- # Misc definitions: same as program definitions above. # #DEFINE whatis_grep_flags -i #DEFINE apropos_grep_flags -iEw #DEFINE apropos_regex_grep_flags -iE #--------------------------------------------------------- # Section names. Manual sections will be searched in the order listed here; # the default is 1, n, l, 8, 3, 0, 2, 5, 4, 9, 6, 7. Multiple SECTION # directives may be given for clarity, and will be concatenated together in # the expected way. # If a particular extension is not in this list (say, 1mh), it will be # displayed with the rest of the section it belongs to. The effect of this # is that you only need to explicitly list extensions if you want to force a # particular order. Sections with extensions should usually be adjacent to # their main section (e.g. "1 1mh 8 ..."). # SECTION 1 n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7 # #--------------------------------------------------------- # Range of terminal widths permitted when displaying cat pages. If the # terminal falls outside this range, cat pages will not be created (if # missing) or displayed. # #MINCATWIDTH 80 #MAXCATWIDTH 80 # # If CATWIDTH is set to a non-zero number, cat pages will always be # formatted for a terminal of the given width, regardless of the width of # the terminal actually being used. This should generally be within the # range set by MINCATWIDTH and MAXCATWIDTH. # #CATWIDTH 0 # #--------------------------------------------------------- # Flags. # NOCACHE keeps man from creating cat pages. #NOCACHE Thanks for any help (p.s. even 'man man' fails) Edit: When I run ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/gcc* I get the following output lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 May 27 15:41 /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz -> gcc-4.6.1.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 217776 Apr 15 17:34 /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.6.1.gz

    Read the article

  • Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

    - by jasont
    The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

    Read the article

  • Different Not Automatically Implies Better

    - by Alois Kraus
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/11/05/154556.aspxRecently I was digging deeper why some WCF hosted workflow application did consume quite a lot of memory although it did basically only load a xaml workflow. The first tool of choice is Process Explorer or even better Process Hacker (has more options and the best feature copy&paste does work). The three most important numbers of a process with regards to memory are Working Set, Private Working Set and Private Bytes. Working set is the currently consumed physical memory (parts can be shared between processes e.g. loaded dlls which are read only) Private Working Set is the physical memory needed by this process which is not shareable Private Bytes is the number of non shareable which is only visible in the current process (e.g. all new, malloc, VirtualAlloc calls do create private bytes) When you have a bigger workflow it can consume under 64 bit easily 500MB for a 1-2 MB xaml file. This does not look very scalable. Under 64 bit the issue is excessive private bytes consumption and not the managed heap. The picture is quite different for 32 bit which looks a bit strange but it seems that the hosted VB compiler is a lot less memory hungry under 32 bit. I did try to repro the issue with a medium sized xaml file (400KB) which does contain 1000 variables and 1000 if which can be represented by C# code like this: string Var1; string Var2; ... string Var1000; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var1) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var1”); } if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var2) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var2”); } ....   Since WF is based on VB.NET expressions you are bound to the hosted VB.NET compiler which does result in (x64) 140 MB of private bytes which is ca. 140 KB for each if clause which is quite a lot if you think about the actually present functionality. But there is hope. .NET 4.5 does allow now C# expressions for WF which is a major step forward for all C# lovers. I did create some simple patcher to “cross compile” my xaml to C# expressions. Lets look at the result: C# Expressions VB Expressions x86 x86 On my home machine I have only 32 bit which gives you quite exactly half of the memory consumption under 64 bit. C# expressions are 10 times more memory hungry than VB.NET expressions! I wanted to do more with less memory but instead it did consume a magnitude more memory. That is surprising to say the least. The workflow does initialize in about the same time under x64 and x86 where the VB code does it in 2s whereas the C# version needs 18s. Also nearly ten times slower. That is a too high price to pay for any bigger sized xaml workflow to convert from VB.NET to C# expressions. If I do reduce the number of expressions to 500 then it does need 400MB which is about half of the memory. It seems that the cost per if does rise linear with the number of total expressions in a xaml workflow.  Expression Language Cost per IF Startup Time C# 1000 Ifs x64 1,5 MB 18s C# 500 Ifs x64 750 KB 9s VB 1000 Ifs x64 140 KB 2s VB 500 Ifs x64 70 KB 1s Now we can directly compare two MS implementations. It is clear that the VB.NET compiler uses the same underlying structure but it has much higher offset compared to the highly inefficient C# expression compiler. I have filed a connect bug here with a harsher wording about recent advances in memory consumption. The funniest thing is that one MS employee did give an Azure AppFabric demo around early 2011 which was so slow that he needed to investigate with xperf. He was after startup time and the call stacks with regards to VB.NET expression compilation were remarkably similar. In fact I only found this post by googling for parts of my call stacks. … “C# expressions will be coming soon to WF, and that will have different performance characteristics than VB” … What did he know Jan 2011 what I did no know until today? ;-). He knew that C# expression will come but that they will not be automatically have better footprint. It is about time to fix that. In its current state C# expressions are not usable for bigger workflows. That also explains the headline for today. You can cheat startup time by prestarting workflows so that the demo looks nice and snappy but it does hurt scalability a lot since you do need much more memory than necessary. I did find the stacks by enabling virtual allocation tracking within XPerf which is still the best tool out there. But first you need to look at your process to check where the memory is hiding: For the C# Expression compiler you do not need xperf. You can directly dump the managed heap and check with a profiler of your choice. But if the allocations are happening on the Private Data ( VirtualAlloc ) you can find it with xperf. There is a nice video on channel 9 explaining VirtualAlloc tracking it in greater detail. If your data allocations are on the Heap it does mean that the C/C++ runtime did create a heap for you where all malloc, new calls do allocate from it. You can enable heap tracing with xperf and full call stack support as well which is doable via xperf like it is shown also on channel 9. Or you can use WPRUI directly: To make “Heap Usage” it work you need to set for your executable the tracing flags (before you start it). For example devenv.exe HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\devenv.exe DWORD TracingFlags 1 Do not forget to disable it after you did complete profiling the process or it will impact the startup time quite a lot. You can with xperf attach directly to a running process and collect heap allocation information from a gone wild process. Very handy if you need to find out what a process was doing which has arrived in a funny state. “VirtualAlloc usage” does work without explicitly enabling stuff for a specific process and is always on machine wide. I had issues on my Windows 7 machines with the call stack collection and the latest Windows 8.1 Performance Toolkit. I was told that WPA from Windows 8.0 should work fine but I do not want to downgrade.

    Read the article

  • RapidXML - does not compile ?

    - by milan
    Hi, I am novice to rapidXML but first impresion was not positive, I made simple Visual Studio 6 C++ Hello World Application and added RapidXML hpp files to project and in main.cpp I put: #include "stdafx.h" #include < iostream > #include < string > #include "rapidxml.hpp" using namespace std; using namespace rapidxml; int main ( ) { char x[] = "<Something>Text</Something>\0" ; //<<<< funktioniert, aber mit '*' nicht xml_document<> doc ; doc.parse<0>(x) ; cout << "Name of my first node is: " << doc.first_node()->name() << endl ; xml_node<>* node = doc.first_node("Something") ; cout << "Node 'Something' has value: " << node->value() << endl ; } And it does not compile, any help ? Is RapidXML possible to run with Visual Studio 6 ? Error I am getting are: --------------------Configuration: aaa - Win32 Debug-------------------- Compiling... rapidxml.cpp c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(310) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(320) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(320) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(385) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(417) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(417) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(448) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(448) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(476) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(579) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(599) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(639) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::memory_pool<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(681) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(790) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_base<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(700) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(790) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_base<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(721) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(790) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_base<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(751) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(790) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_base<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(786) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(790) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_base<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(787) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(790) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_base<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(836) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(876) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_attribute<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(856) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(876) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_attribute<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(936) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1345) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_node<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(958) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1345) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_node<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(981) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1345) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_node<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1004) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1345) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_node<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1025) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1345) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_node<Ch>' being compiled c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1045) : error C2039: 'size_t' : is not a member of 'std' c:\Parser\rapidxml.cpp(1345) : see reference to class template instantiation 'rapidxml::xml_node<Ch>' being compiled Error executing cl.exe. rapidxml.obj - 25 error(s), 0 warning(s)

    Read the article

  • flash core engine by Dinesh [closed]

    - by hdinesh
    This post was a dump of the following code (without the highlights). No question, just a dump. Please update this q. with a real question to have it reopened. You (the asker) risk to be flagged as spammer (if not already) and a bad reputation. This is a q/a site, not a site to promote your own code libraries. package facers { import flash.display.*; import flash.events.*; import flash.geom.ColorTransform; import flash.utils.Dictionary; import org.papervision3d.cameras.*; import org.papervision3d.scenes.*; import org.papervision3d.objects.*; import org.papervision3d.objects.special.*; import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.*; import org.papervision3d.events.FileLoadEvent; import org.papervision3d.materials.special.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.shaders.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.*; import org.papervision3d.lights.*; import org.papervision3d.render.*; import org.papervision3d.view.*; import org.papervision3d.events.InteractiveScene3DEvent; import org.papervision3d.events.*; import org.papervision3d.core.utils.*; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Vertex3D; import caurina.transitions.*; public class Main extends Sprite { public var viewport :BasicView; public var displayObject :DisplayObject3D; private var light :PointLight3D; private var shadowPlane :Plane; private var dataArray :Array; private var material :BitmapFileMaterial; private var planeByContainer :Dictionary = new Dictionary(); private var paperSize :Number = 0.5; private var cloudSize :Number = 1500; private var rotSize :Number = 360; private var maxAlbums :Number = 50; private var num :Number = 0; public function Main():void { trace("START APPLICATION"); viewport = new BasicView(1024, 690, true, true, CameraType.FREE); viewport.camera.zoom = 50; viewport.camera.extra = { goPosition: new DisplayObject3D(),goTarget: new DisplayObject3D() }; addChild(viewport); displayObject = new DisplayObject3D(); viewport.scene.addChild(displayObject); createAlbum(); addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onRenderEvent); } private function createAlbum() { dataArray = new Array("images/thums/pic1.jpg", "images/thums/pic2.jpg", "images/thums/pic3.jpg", "images/thums/pic4.jpg", "images/thums/pic5.jpg", "images/thums/pic6.jpg", "images/thums/pic7.jpg", "images/thums/pic8.jpg", "images/thums/pic9.jpg", "images/thums/pic10.jpg", "images/thums/pic1.jpg", "images/thums/pic2.jpg", "images/thums/pic3.jpg", "images/thums/pic4.jpg", "images/thums/pic5.jpg", "images/thums/pic6.jpg", "images/thums/pic7.jpg", "images/thums/pic8.jpg", "images/thums/pic9.jpg", "images/thums/pic10.jpg"); for (var i:int = 0; i < dataArray.length; i++) { material = new BitmapFileMaterial(dataArray[i]); material.doubleSided = true; material.addEventListener(FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE, loadMaterial); } } public function loadMaterial(event:Event) { var plane:Plane = new Plane(material, 300, 180); displayObject.addChild(plane); var _x:int = Math.random() * cloudSize - cloudSize/2; var _y:int = Math.random() * cloudSize - cloudSize/2; var _z:int = Math.random() * cloudSize - cloudSize/2; var _rotationX:int = Math.random() * rotSize; var _rotationY:int = Math.random() * rotSize; var _rotationZ:int = Math.random() * rotSize; Tweener.addTween(plane, { x:_x, y:_y, z:_z, rotationX:_rotationX, rotationY:_rotationY, rotationZ:_rotationZ, time:5, transition:"easeIn" } ); } protected function onRenderEvent(event:Event):void { var rotY: Number = (mouseY-(stage.stageHeight/2))/(900/2)*(1200); var rotX: Number = (mouseX-(stage.stageWidth/2))/(600/2)*(-1200); displayObject.rotationY = viewport.camera.x + (rotX - viewport.camera.x) / 50; displayObject.rotationX = viewport.camera.y + (rotY - viewport.camera.y) / 30; viewport.singleRender(); } } } package designLab.events { import flash.display.BlendMode; import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.events.Event; import flash.filters.BlurFilter; // Import designLab import designLab.layer.IntroLayer; import designLab.shadow.ShadowCaster; import designLab.utils.LayerConstant; // Import Papervision3D import org.papervision3d.cameras.*; import org.papervision3d.scenes.*; import org.papervision3d.objects.*; import org.papervision3d.objects.special.*; import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.special.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.shaders.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.*; import org.papervision3d.lights.*; import org.papervision3d.render.*; import org.papervision3d.view.*; import org.papervision3d.events.InteractiveScene3DEvent; import org.papervision3d.events.*; import org.papervision3d.core.utils.*; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Vertex3D; public class CoreEnging extends Sprite { public var viewport :BasicView; // Create BasicView public var displayObject :DisplayObject3D; // Create DisplayObject public var shadowCaster :ShadowCaster; // Create ShadowCaster private var light :PointLight3D; // Create PointLight private var shadowPlane :Plane; // Create Plane private var layer :LayerConstant; // Create constant resource layer private static var instance :CoreEnging; // Create CoreEnging class static instance // CoreEnging class static instance mathod function public static function getinstance() { if (instance != null) return instance; else { instance = new CoreEnging(); return instance; } } // CoreEnging constrictor public function CoreEnging () { trace("INFO: Design Lab Application : Core Enging v0.1"); layer = new LayerConstant(); viewport = new BasicView(900, 600, true, true, CameraType.FREE); // pass the width, height, scaleToStage, interactive, cameraType to BasicView viewport.camera.zoom = 100; // Define the zoom level of camera addChild(viewport); createFloor(); // Create the floor displayObject = new DisplayObject3D(); // Create new instance of DisplayObject viewport.scene.addChild(displayObject); // Add the DisplayObject to the BasicView light = new PointLight3D(); // Create new instance of PointLight light.z = -50; // Position the Z of create instance light.x = 0; //Position the X of create instance light.rotationZ = 45; //Position the rotation angel of the Z of create instance light.y = 500; //Position the Y of create instance shadowCaster = new ShadowCaster("shadow", 0x000000, BlendMode.MULTIPLY, .1, [new BlurFilter(20, 20, 1)]); // pass shadowcaster name, color, blend mode, alpha and filters shadowCaster.setType(ShadowCaster.SPOTLIGHT); // Define the shadow type addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onRenderEvent); // Add frame render event } // Start create floor public function createFloor() { var spr:Sprite = new Sprite(); // Create Sprite spr.graphics.beginFill(0xFFFFFF); // Define the fill color for sprite spr.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, 600, 600); // Define the X, Y, width, height of the sprite var sprMaterial:MovieMaterial = new MovieMaterial(spr, true, true, true); //Create a texture from an existing sprite instance shadowPlane = new Plane(sprMaterial, 2000, 2000, 1, 1); // create new instance of the Plane and pass the texture material, width, height, segmentsW and segmentsH shadowPlane.rotationX = 80; //Position the rotation angel of the X of Plane shadowPlane.y = -200; //Position the Y of Plane viewport.scene.addChild(shadowPlane); // Add the Plane to the BasicView } // switch method function of the page layer control public function addLayer(type:String) { switch (type) { case layer.INTRO: var intro:IntroLayer = new IntroLayer(); break; } } // Create get mathod function for DisplayObject public function getDisplayObject():DisplayObject3D { return displayObject; } // Create get mathod function for BasicView public function getViewport():BasicView { return viewport; } // Rendering function protected function onRenderEvent(event:Event):void { var rotY: Number = (mouseY-(stage.stageHeight/2))/(900/2)*(1200); var rotX: Number = (mouseX-(stage.stageWidth/2))/(600/2)*(-1200); displayObject.rotationY = viewport.camera.x + (rotX - viewport.camera.x) / 50; displayObject.rotationX = viewport.camera.y + (rotY - viewport.camera.y) / 30; // Remove the shadow shadowCaster.invalidate(); // create new shadow on DisplayObject move shadowCaster.castModel(displayObject, light, shadowPlane); viewport.singleRender(); } } } package designLab.layer { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.events.Event; // Import designLab import designLab.materials.iBusinessCard; import designLab.events.CoreEnging; // Import Papervision3D import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Cube; import org.papervision3d.materials.ColorMaterial; import org.papervision3d.materials.MovieMaterial; public class IntroLayer { // IntroLayer constrictor public function IntroLayer() { trace("INFO: Load Intro layer"); var indexDP:DP_index = new DP_index(); //Create the library MovieClip var blackMaterial:MovieMaterial = new MovieMaterial(indexDP, true); //Create a texture from an existing library MovieClip instance blackMaterial.smooth = true; blackMaterial.doubleSided = false; var mycolor:ColorMaterial = new ColorMaterial(0x000000); //Create solid color material var mycard:iBusinessCard = new iBusinessCard(blackMaterial, blackMaterial, mycolor, 372, 10, 207); // Create custom 3D cube object to pass the Front, Back, All, CubeWidth, CubeDepth and CubeHeight CoreEnging.getinstance().getDisplayObject().addChild(mycard.create3DCube()); // Add the custom 3D cube to the DisplayObject } } } package designLab.materials { import flash.display.*; import flash.events.*; // Import Papervision3D import org.papervision3d.materials.*; import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.MaterialsList; import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Cube; public class iBusinessCard extends Sprite { private var materialsList :MaterialsList; private var cube :Cube; private var Front :MovieMaterial = new MovieMaterial(); private var Back :MovieMaterial = new MovieMaterial(); private var All :ColorMaterial = new ColorMaterial(); private var CubeWidth :Number; private var CubeDepth :Number; private var CubeHeight :Number; public function iBusinessCard(Front:MovieMaterial, Back:MovieMaterial, All:ColorMaterial, CubeWidth:Number, CubeDepth:Number, CubeHeight:Number) { setFront(Front); setBack(Back); setAll(All); setCubeWidth(CubeWidth); setCubeDepth(CubeDepth); setCubeHeight(CubeHeight); } public function create3DCube():Cube { materialsList = new MaterialsList(); materialsList.addMaterial(Front, "front"); materialsList.addMaterial(Back, "back"); materialsList.addMaterial(All, "left"); materialsList.addMaterial(All, "right"); materialsList.addMaterial(All, "top"); materialsList.addMaterial(All, "bottom"); cube = new Cube(materialsList, CubeWidth, CubeDepth, CubeHeight); cube.x = 0; cube.y = 0; cube.z = 0; cube.rotationY = 180; return cube; } public function setFront(Front:MovieMaterial) { this.Front = Front; } public function getFront():MovieMaterial { return Front; } public function setBack(Back:MovieMaterial) { this.Back = Back; } public function getBack():MovieMaterial { return Back; } public function setAll(All:ColorMaterial) { this.All = All; } public function getAll():ColorMaterial { return All; } public function setCubeWidth(CubeWidth:Number) { this.CubeWidth = CubeWidth; } public function getCubeWidth():Number { return CubeWidth; } public function setCubeDepth(CubeDepth:Number) { this.CubeDepth = CubeDepth; } public function getCubeDepth():Number { return CubeDepth; } public function setCubeHeight(CubeHeight:Number) { this.CubeHeight = CubeHeight; } public function getCubeHeight():Number { return CubeHeight; } } } package designLab.shadow { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.filters.BlurFilter; import flash.geom.Point; import flash.geom.Rectangle; import flash.utils.Dictionary; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.TriangleMesh3D; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Triangle3D; import org.papervision3d.core.geom.renderables.Vertex3D; import org.papervision3d.core.math.BoundingSphere; import org.papervision3d.core.math.Matrix3D; import org.papervision3d.core.math.Number3D; import org.papervision3d.core.math.Plane3D; import org.papervision3d.lights.PointLight3D; import org.papervision3d.materials.MovieMaterial; import org.papervision3d.objects.DisplayObject3D; import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Plane; public class ShadowCaster { private var vertexRefs:Dictionary; private var numberRefs:Dictionary; private var lightRay:Number3D = new Number3D() private var p3d:Plane3D = new Plane3D(); public var color:uint = 0; public var alpha:Number = 0; public var blend:String = ""; public var filters:Array; public var uid:String; private var _type:String = "point"; private var dir:Number3D; private var planeBounds:Dictionary; private var targetBounds:Dictionary; private var models:Dictionary; public static var DIRECTIONAL:String = "dir"; public static var SPOTLIGHT:String = "spot"; public function ShadowCaster(uid:String, color:uint = 0, blend:String = "multiply", alpha:Number = 1, filters:Array=null) { this.uid = uid; this.color = color; this.alpha = alpha; this.blend = blend; this.filters = filters ? filters : [new BlurFilter()]; numberRefs = new Dictionary(true); targetBounds = new Dictionary(true); planeBounds = new Dictionary(true); models = new Dictionary(true); } public function castModel(model:DisplayObject3D, light:PointLight3D, plane:Plane, faces:Boolean = true, cull:Boolean = false):void{ var ar:Array; if(models[model]) { ar = models[model]; }else{ ar = new Array(); getChildMesh(model, ar); models[model] = ar; } var reset:Boolean = true; for each(var t:TriangleMesh3D in ar){ if(faces) castFaces(light, t, plane, cull, reset); else castBoundingSphere(light, t, plane, 0.75, reset); reset = false; } } private function getChildMesh(do3d:DisplayObject3D, ar):void{ if(do3d is TriangleMesh3D) ar.push(do3d); for each(var d:DisplayObject3D in do3d.children) getChildMesh(d, ar); } public function setType(type:String="point"):void{ _type = type; } public function getType():String{ return _type; } public function castBoundingSphere(light:PointLight3D, target:TriangleMesh3D, plane:Plane, scaleRadius:Number=0.8, clear:Boolean = true):void{ var planeVertices:Array = plane.geometry.vertices; //convert to target space? var world:Matrix3D = plane.world; var inv:Matrix3D = Matrix3D.inverse(plane.transform); var lp:Number3D = new Number3D(light.x, light.y, light.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(inv, lp); p3d.setNormalAndPoint(plane.geometry.faces[0].faceNormal, new Number3D()); var b:BoundingSphere = target.geometry.boundingSphere; var bounds:Object = planeBounds[plane]; if(!bounds){ bounds = plane.boundingBox(); planeBounds[plane] = bounds; } var tbounds:Object = targetBounds[target]; if(!tbounds){ tbounds = target.boundingBox(); targetBounds[target] = tbounds; } var planeMovie:Sprite = Sprite(MovieMaterial(plane.material).movie); var movieSize:Point = new Point(planeMovie.width, planeMovie.height); var castClip:Sprite = getCastClip(plane); castClip.blendMode = this.blend; castClip.filters = this.filters; castClip.alpha = this.alpha; if(clear) castClip.graphics.clear(); vertexRefs = new Dictionary(true); var tlp:Number3D = new Number3D(light.x, light.y, light.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(Matrix3D.inverse(target.world), tlp); var center:Number3D = new Number3D(tbounds.min.x+tbounds.size.x*0.5, tbounds.min.y+tbounds.size.y*0.5, tbounds.min.z+tbounds.size.z*0.5); var dif:Number3D = Number3D.sub(lp, center); dif.normalize(); var other:Number3D = new Number3D(); other.x = -dif.y; other.y = dif.x; other.z = 0; other.normalize(); var cross:Number3D = Number3D.cross(new Number3D(plane.transform.n12, plane.transform.n22, plane.transform.n32), p3d.normal); cross.normalize(); //cross = new Number3D(-dif.y, dif.x, 0); //cross.normalize(); cross.multiplyEq(b.radius*scaleRadius); if(_type == DIRECTIONAL){ var oPos:Number3D = new Number3D(target.x, target.y, target.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(target.world, oPos); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(inv, oPos); dir = new Number3D(oPos.x-lp.x, oPos.y-lp.y, oPos.z-lp.z); } //numberRefs = new Dictionary(true); var pos:Number3D; var c2d:Point; var r2d:Point; //_type = SPOTLIGHT; pos = projectVertex(new Vertex3D(center.x, center.y, center.z), lp, inv, target.world); c2d = get2dPoint(pos, bounds.min, bounds.size, movieSize); pos = projectVertex(new Vertex3D(center.x+cross.x, center.y+cross.y, center.z+cross.z), lp, inv, target.world); r2d = get2dPoint(pos, bounds.min, bounds.size, movieSize); var dx:Number = r2d.x-c2d.x; var dy:Number = r2d.y-c2d.y; var rad:Number = Math.sqrt(dx*dx+dy*dy); castClip.graphics.beginFill(color); castClip.graphics.moveTo(c2d.x, c2d.y); castClip.graphics.drawCircle(c2d.x, c2d.y, rad); castClip.graphics.endFill(); } public function getCastClip(plane:Plane):Sprite{ var planeMovie:Sprite = Sprite(MovieMaterial(plane.material).movie); var movieSize:Point = new Point(planeMovie.width, planeMovie.height); var castClip:Sprite;// = new Sprite(); if(planeMovie.getChildByName("castClip"+uid)) return Sprite(planeMovie.getChildByName("castClip"+uid)); else{ castClip = new Sprite(); castClip.name = "castClip"+uid; castClip.scrollRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, movieSize.x, movieSize.y); //castClip.alpha = 0.4; planeMovie.addChild(castClip); return castClip; } } public function castFaces(light:PointLight3D, target:TriangleMesh3D, plane:Plane, cull:Boolean=false, clear:Boolean = true):void{ var planeVertices:Array = plane.geometry.vertices; //convert to target space? var world:Matrix3D = plane.world; var inv:Matrix3D = Matrix3D.inverse(plane.transform); var lp:Number3D = new Number3D(light.x, light.y, light.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(inv, lp); var tlp:Number3D; if(cull){ tlp = new Number3D(light.x, light.y, light.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(Matrix3D.inverse(target.world), tlp); } //Matrix3D.multiplyVector(Matrix3D.inverse(target.transform), tlp); //p3d.setThreePoints(planeVertices[0].getPosition(), planeVertices[1].getPosition(), planeVertices[2].getPosition()); p3d.setNormalAndPoint(plane.geometry.faces[0].faceNormal, new Number3D()); if(_type == DIRECTIONAL){ var oPos:Number3D = new Number3D(target.x, target.y, target.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(target.world, oPos); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(inv, oPos); dir = new Number3D(oPos.x-lp.x, oPos.y-lp.y, oPos.z-lp.z); } var bounds:Object = planeBounds[plane]; if(!bounds){ bounds = plane.boundingBox(); planeBounds[plane] = bounds; } var castClip:Sprite = getCastClip(plane); castClip.blendMode = this.blend; castClip.filters = this.filters; castClip.alpha = this.alpha; var planeMovie:Sprite = Sprite(MovieMaterial(plane.material).movie); var movieSize:Point = new Point(planeMovie.width, planeMovie.height); if(clear) castClip.graphics.clear(); vertexRefs = new Dictionary(true); //numberRefs = new Dictionary(true); var pos:Number3D; var p2d:Point; var s2d:Point; var hitVert:Number3D = new Number3D(); for each(var t:Triangle3D in target.geometry.faces){ if( cull){ hitVert.x = t.v0.x; hitVert.y = t.v0.y; hitVert.z = t.v0.z; if(Number3D.dot(t.faceNormal, Number3D.sub(tlp, hitVert)) <= 0) continue; } castClip.graphics.beginFill(color); pos = projectVertex(t.v0, lp, inv, target.world); s2d = get2dPoint(pos, bounds.min, bounds.size, movieSize); castClip.graphics.moveTo(s2d.x, s2d.y); pos = projectVertex(t.v1, lp, inv, target.world); p2d = get2dPoint(pos, bounds.min, bounds.size, movieSize); castClip.graphics.lineTo(p2d.x, p2d.y); pos = projectVertex(t.v2, lp, inv, target.world); p2d = get2dPoint(pos, bounds.min, bounds.size, movieSize); castClip.graphics.lineTo(p2d.x, p2d.y); castClip.graphics.lineTo(s2d.x, s2d.y); castClip.graphics.endFill(); } } public function invalidate():void{ invalidateModels(); invalidatePlanes(); } public function invalidatePlanes():void{ planeBounds = new Dictionary(true); } public function invalidateTargets():void{ numberRefs = new Dictionary(true); targetBounds = new Dictionary(true); } public function invalidateModels():void{ models = new Dictionary(true); invalidateTargets(); } private function get2dPoint(pos3D:Number3D, min3D:Number3D, size3D:Number3D, movieSize:Point):Point{ return new Point((pos3D.x-min3D.x)/size3D.x*movieSize.x, ((-pos3D.y-min3D.y)/size3D.y*movieSize.y)); } private function projectVertex(v:Vertex3D, light:Number3D, invMat:Matrix3D, world:Matrix3D):Number3D{ var pos:Number3D = vertexRefs[v]; if(pos) return pos; var n:Number3D = numberRefs[v]; if(!n){ n = new Number3D(v.x, v.y, v.z); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(world, n); Matrix3D.multiplyVector(invMat, n); numberRefs[v] = n; } if(_type == SPOTLIGHT){ lightRay.x = light.x; lightRay.y = light.y; lightRay.z = light.z; }else{ lightRay.x = n.x-dir.x; lightRay.y = n.y-dir.y; lightRay.z = n.z-dir.z; } pos = p3d.getIntersectionLineNumbers(lightRay, n); vertexRefs[v] = pos; return pos; } } } package designLab.utils { public class LayerConstant { public const INTRO:String = "INTRO"; // Intro layer string constant } }*emphasized text*

    Read the article

  • 12.04 Unity 3D Not working where as Unity 2D works fine

    - by Stephen Martin
    I updated from 11.10 to 12.04 using the distribution upgrade, after that I couldn't log into using the Unity 3D desktop after logging in I would either never get unity's launcher or I would get the launcher and once I tried to do anything the windows lost their decoration and nothing would respond. If I use Unity 2D it works fine and in fact I'm using it to type this. I managed to get some info out of dmesg that looks like it's the route of whats happening. dmesg: [ 109.160165] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung [ 109.160180] [drm] capturing error event; look for more information in /debug/dri/0/i915_error_state [ 109.167587] [drm:i915_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_wait_request returns -11 (awaiting 1226 at 1218, next 1227) [ 109.672273] [drm:i915_reset] *ERROR* Failed to reset chip. output of lspci | grep vga 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) output of /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p IN 12.04 OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300) OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.2 Not software rendered: no Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: no The same command in 11.10: stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.11 Not software rendered: yes Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: yes stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ output of /var/log/Xorg.0.log [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 12.770] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2176x800 stride 8704, tiled [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 33.310] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-93A39E9580D1D5B855D779F4595485C2CC66E0CF.xkm [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 41.519] [mi] Increasing EQ size to 512 to prevent dropped events. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_state from debugfs and the full dmesg. [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 51.052] (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch I know im using the beta version so I'm not expecting it to work but does any one know what the problem may be or even why they Unity compatibility test is describing my video card as vmware when its an intel i915 and Ubuntu is running on the metal not virtualised. Unity 3D worked fine in 11.10

    Read the article

  • Unity 3D Not working where as Unity 2D works fine [closed]

    - by Stephen Martin
    I updated from 11.10 to 12.04 using the distribution upgrade, after that I couldn't log into using the Unity 3D desktop after logging in I would either never get unity's launcher or I would get the launcher and once I tried to do anything the windows lost their decoration and nothing would respond. If I use Unity 2D it works fine and in fact I'm using it to type this. I managed to get some info out of dmesg that looks like it's the route of whats happening. dmesg: [ 109.160165] [drm:i915_hangcheck_elapsed] *ERROR* Hangcheck timer elapsed... GPU hung [ 109.160180] [drm] capturing error event; look for more information in /debug/dri/0/i915_error_state [ 109.167587] [drm:i915_wait_request] *ERROR* i915_wait_request returns -11 (awaiting 1226 at 1218, next 1227) [ 109.672273] [drm:i915_reset] *ERROR* Failed to reset chip. output of lspci | grep vga 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) output of /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p IN 12.04 OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300) OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.2 Not software rendered: no Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: no The same command in 11.10: stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.11 Not software rendered: yes Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: yes GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: yes Unity 3D supported: yes stephenm@mcr-ubu1:~$ output of /var/log/Xorg.0.log [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 11.971] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 12.770] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2176x800 stride 8704, tiled [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 15.087] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 33.310] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-93A39E9580D1D5B855D779F4595485C2CC66E0CF.xkm [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.900] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.913] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 34.926] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): flip queue failed: Invalid argument [ 35.501] (WW) intel(0): Page flip failed: Invalid argument [ 41.519] [mi] Increasing EQ size to 512 to prevent dropped events. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): Detected a hung GPU, disabling acceleration. [ 42.079] (EE) intel(0): When reporting this, please include i915_error_state from debugfs and the full dmesg. [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): EDID vendor "LPL", prod id 307 [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Printing DDC gathered Modelines: [ 42.598] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1280x800"x0.0 69.30 1280 1328 1360 1405 800 803 809 822 -hsync -vsync (49.3 kHz) [ 51.052] (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch I know im using the beta version so I'm not expecting it to work but does any one know what the problem may be or even why they Unity compatibility test is describing my video card as vmware when its an intel i915 and Ubuntu is running on the metal not virtualised. Unity 3D worked fine in 11.10

    Read the article

  • Dual monitor not working completely in 12.10 after upgrade

    - by Mark Baldridge
    At 12.04, dual monitors worked perfectly. After upgrading to 12.10, the primary monitor works, the second monitor only partly works. I am sure there is some difference between the releases that I have missed setting properly. System settings - Displays show both correctly as Acer 22" monitors at 1680x1050 (16:10). An icon on monitor 2 is present, but elongated; almost an artifact, since other icons on the primary screen are absent, but this one icon is there on th second monitor. Selecting the icons on both screens exist. Painting is weird on monitor 2. Launcher exists and works on both screens, but even with sticky edges off, the cursor stops at the left edge of monitor 2. Clicking on text editor on screen 2 launcer will launch gedit there. If I drag it, it leaves a trail of after images like repaint is failing. If I drive the cursor on the launcher, the help tags like "LibreOffice Writer" appear, but stay on screen unless I drag the active gedit window over them. Then part of the help bubbles are overwritten, leaving behind after images of the gedit window on screen. What is really fascinating is that the System settings - Displays is now ignoring monitor selection, after allowing it earlier. Just before this, the help popup which said "Select a monitor to change its properties; drag to rearrange its placement" actually let me do that. Maybe a trick of where I grab the edge of the monitor in the Displays setting. I just found a working handle. When I drag monitor 1 to the right of monitor 2, "Apply" and confirm, both monitors work normally (although the right monitor lets the cursor slide off the right edge onto the left edge of monitor 1 - which sounds correct). Painting of windows does not leave an after image. However, success is only temporary. The setting survives the reboot, but painting on the left monitor, now monitor 2, now replicates the issues from before. The after image of the gedit window and the small window for "Are you sure you want to close all programs and restart the computer?" are still on monitor 2 (on the left now), even though they are not real windows, nor do they have processes behind them. Curiously, in Displays, the "green" monitor on the left in the display window is matched by the right monitor color in the monitor upper left corner. Probably makes sense as the one on the right is now monitor 1. If I repeat the "drag the left monitor to the right of the right monitor on the "Displays" window, things are oriented properly, with no display artifacts as I drag windows around either screen. Also the description bubbles that pop up are overwritten on both screens, so none of those artifacts either. This goodness does not survive a reboot, however. Have not tried logging out and back in. All of this after positing that the motherboard VGA and HDMI ports could have been the issue. So, I installed an e-GeForce 7600 GT Dual DVI (I know the web thinks it is not DVI, but VGA, but the connectors are DVI). No change to the weird behavior. The good parts continue to work, the weirdness also works, and swapping monitor positions seems to cure the issue. So, is there a setting I have missed? Given "swapping" monitor 1 and 2 on the System Settings... - Displays makes it work, just not across boot, I suspect so.

    Read the article

  • C Programming - My program is good enough for my assignment but I know its not good

    - by Joe
    Hi there I'm just starting an assignment for uni and it's raised a question for me. I don't understand how to return a string from a function without having a memory leak. char* trim(char* line) { int start = 0; int end = strlen(line) - 1; /* find the start position of the string */ while(isspace(line[start]) != 0) { start++; } //printf("start is %d\n", start); /* find the position end of the string */ while(isspace(line[end]) != 0) { end--; } //printf("end is %d\n", end); /* calculate string length and add 1 for the sentinel */ int len = end - start + 2; /* initialise char array to len and read in characters */ int i; char* trimmed = calloc(sizeof(char), len); for(i = 0; i < (len - 1); i++) { trimmed[i] = line[start + i]; } trimmed[len - 1] = '\0'; return trimmed; } as you can see I am returning a pointer to char which is an array. I found that if I tried to make the 'trimmed' array by something like: char trimmed[len]; then the compiler would throw up a message saying that a constant was expected on this line. I assume this meant that for some reason you can't use variables as the array length when initialising an array, although something tells me that can't be right. So instead I made my array by allocating some memory to a char pointer. I understand that this function is probably waaaaay sub-optimal for what it is trying to do, but what I really want to know is: 1. Can you normally initialise an array using a variable to declare the length like: char trimmed[len]; ? 2. If I had an array that was of that type (char trimmed[]) would it have the same return type as a pointer to char (ie char*). 3. If I make my array by callocing some memory and allocating it to a char pointer, how do I free this memory. It seems to me that once I have returned this array, I can't access it to free it as it is a local variable. Many thanks in advance Joe

    Read the article

  • cdc-acm driver: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem

    - by Sorcrer
    I am using Beagleboard-xm with 3.12 Kernel and ubuntu rootfs from Robert Nelson's site. I use a Telit HE910 GPS+GSM modem along with my project .So as per the HW user guide i have to apply a logic high for 5s on the input of this modem for enabling it So when I does this by toggling the gpio pin for 5s using a script I'm getting some messages on the terminal I am sure this message comes from the driver in usb/class/cdc-acm.c but couldn't find the reason behind this? How can I solve this issue?? root@arm:~# ./modem_on.sh Turning on Telit modem ...... going to sleep and toggle [ 70.791381] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.390258] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.406890] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.462188] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.478363] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.495269] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.510040] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.530090] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.619720] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.634429] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.649475] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.664459] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.678741] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.693389] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.708099] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. Script complete .......... The realted necessary portion of dmesg is below [ 30.623107] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process ended, respawning [ 70.629943] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-omap [ 70.782501] usb 1-2: config 1 interface 0 altsetting 0 endpoint 0x81 has an invalid bInterval 255, changing to 11 [ 70.782592] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=058b, idProduct=0041 [ 70.782623] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0 [ 70.791381] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 70.801483] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ 73.041625] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 2 [ 74.209930] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-omap [ 74.369049] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1bc7, idProduct=0021 [ 74.369110] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [ 74.369140] usb 1-2: Product: Telit Wireless Module [ 74.369171] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Telit wireless solutions [ 74.369201] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 357164042197668 [ 74.390258] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.400207] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ 74.406890] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.416900] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: ttyACM1: USB ACM device [ 74.462188] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.472259] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: ttyACM2: USB ACM device [ 74.478363] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.488372] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: ttyACM3: USB ACM device [ 74.495269] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.505279] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: ttyACM4: USB ACM device [ 74.510040] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.520141] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: ttyACM5: USB ACM device [ 74.530090] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.540283] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: ttyACM6: USB ACM device [ 74.619720] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.629455] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ 74.634429] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.644042] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: ttyACM1: USB ACM device [ 74.649475] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.659027] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: ttyACM2: USB ACM device [ 74.664459] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.674133] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: ttyACM3: USB ACM device [ 74.678741] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.688415] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: ttyACM4: USB ACM device [ 74.693389] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.703186] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: ttyACM5: USB ACM device [ 74.708099] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.717895] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: ttyACM6: USB ACM device `

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Observation of the View – Part 2

    - by pinaldave
    Earlier, I have written an article about SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Observation of the View. I received an email from one of the readers, asking if there would no problems when we create the Index on the base table. Well, we need to discuss this situation in two different cases. Before proceeding to the discussion, I strongly suggest you read my earlier articles. To avoid the duplication, I am not going to repeat the code and explanation over here. In all the earlier cases, I have explained in detail how Index created on the View is not utilized. SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 12 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Observation of the View SQL SERVER – Indexed View always Use Index on Table As per earlier blog posts, so far we have done the following: Create a Table Create a View Create Index On View Write SELECT with ORDER BY on View However, the blog reader who emailed me suggests the extension of the said logic, which is as follows: Create a Table Create a View Create Index On View Write SELECT with ORDER BY on View Create Index on the Base Table Write SELECT with ORDER BY on View After doing the last two steps, the question is “Will the query on the View utilize the Index on the View, or will it still use the Index of the base table?“ Let us first run the Create example. USE tempdb GO IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.views WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[SampleView]')) DROP VIEW [dbo].[SampleView] GO IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[mySampleTable]') AND TYPE IN (N'U')) DROP TABLE [dbo].[mySampleTable] GO -- Create SampleTable CREATE TABLE mySampleTable (ID1 INT, ID2 INT, SomeData VARCHAR(100)) INSERT INTO mySampleTable (ID1,ID2,SomeData) SELECT TOP 100000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY o1.name), ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY o2.name), o2.name FROM sys.all_objects o1 CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects o2 GO -- Create View CREATE VIEW SampleView WITH SCHEMABINDING AS SELECT ID1,ID2,SomeData FROM dbo.mySampleTable GO -- Create Index on View CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_ViewSample] ON [dbo].[SampleView] ( ID2 ASC ) GO -- Select from view SELECT ID1,ID2,SomeData FROM SampleView ORDER BY ID2 GO -- Create Index on Original Table -- On Column ID1 CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_OriginalTable] ON mySampleTable ( ID1 ASC ) GO -- On Column ID2 CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_OriginalTable_ID2] ON mySampleTable ( ID2 ) GO -- Select from view SELECT ID1,ID2,SomeData FROM SampleView ORDER BY ID2 GO Now let us see the execution plans for both of the SELECT statement. Before Index on Base Table (with Index on View): After Index on Base Table (with Index on View): Looking at both executions, it is very clear that with or without, the View is using Indexes. Alright, I have written 11 disadvantages of the Views. Now I have written one case where the View is using Indexes. Anybody who says that I am being harsh on Views can say now that I found one place where Index on View can be helpful. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL View, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • Ubuntu software center not opening [closed]

    - by I'll sudeepdino008
    Ubuntu software center is not opening, when I type: software-center in the command line, the following errors are generated: (software-center:8570): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:227:31: Failed to import: Error opening file: No such file or directory 2012-09-30 17:00:58,068 - softwarecenter.ui.gtk3.app - INFO - setting up proxy 'http://10.3.100.212:8080/' 2012-09-30 17:00:58,071 - softwarecenter.db.database - INFO - open() database: path=None use_axi=True use_agent=True 2012-09-30 17:00:58,327 - softwarecenter.backend.reviews - WARNING - Could not get usefulness from server, no username in config file 2012-09-30 17:00:58,428 - softwarecenter.ui.gtk3.app - INFO - show_available_packages: search_text is '', app is None. 2012-09-30 17:00:58,433 - softwarecenter.db.pkginfo_impl.aptcache - INFO - aptcache.open() Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/pkginfo_impl/aptcache.py", line 243, in open self._cache = apt.Cache(GtkMainIterationProgress()) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 102, in __init__ self.open(progress) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 145, in open self._cache = apt_pkg.Cache(progress) SystemError: E:Encountered a section with no Package: header, E:Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ppa.launchpad.net_webupd8team_themes_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. 2012-09-30 17:01:00,130 - softwarecenter.db.enquire - ERROR - _get_estimate_nr_apps_and_nr_pkgs failed Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/enquire.py", line 115, in _get_estimate_nr_apps_and_nr_pkgs tmp_matches = enquire.get_mset(0, len(self.db), None, xfilter) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/appfilter.py", line 89, in __call__ if (not pkgname in self.cache and File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/pkginfo_impl/aptcache.py", line 263, in __contains__ return self._cache.__contains__(k) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__contains__' Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/software-center", line 176, in <module> app.run(args) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/app.py", line 1422, in run self.show_available_packages(args) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/app.py", line 1352, in show_available_packages self.view_manager.set_active_view(ViewPages.AVAILABLE) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/session/viewmanager.py", line 154, in set_active_view view_widget.init_view() File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/panes/availablepane.py", line 171, in init_view self.apps_filter) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/views/catview_gtk.py", line 238, in __init__ self.build(desktopdir) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/views/catview_gtk.py", line 511, in build self._build_homepage_view() File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/views/catview_gtk.py", line 271, in _build_homepage_view self._append_whats_new() File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/views/catview_gtk.py", line 450, in _append_whats_new whats_new_cat = self._update_whats_new_content() File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/ui/gtk3/views/catview_gtk.py", line 439, in _update_whats_new_content docs = whats_new_cat.get_documents(self.db) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/categories.py", line 124, in get_documents nonblocking_load=False) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/enquire.py", line 317, in set_query self._blocking_perform_search() File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/enquire.py", line 212, in _blocking_perform_search matches = enquire.get_mset(0, self.limit, None, xfilter) File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/appfilter.py", line 89, in __call__ if (not pkgname in self.cache and File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/pkginfo_impl/aptcache.py", line 263, in __contains__ return self._cache.__contains__(k) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '__contains__'

    Read the article

  • ath9k driver does not weak up

    - by shantanu
    I know this is common question but i found no suitable answer, so i am asking this again. I installed ubuntu 11.10. I found the bug for ath9k, so set first network boot from BIOS menu. That's worked. I have upgraded to 12.04 yesterday. Now ath9k is creating problem again. First network boot is still enable. ath9k works at start. But failed(connect again and again) after couple of minutes. dmesg show error that it can not weak up in 500us. So i tried #compat-wireless-3.5.1-1. But result is same. I have also added #nohwcrypt=1 option in /etc/modeprob.d/ath9k.conf. Still no luck. I tried #rmmod and then modprobe sudo modprobe ath9k nohwcrypt=1 dmesg shows me error: [ 400.690086] ath9k: Driver unloaded [ 406.214329] ath9k 0000:06:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002) [ 406.214348] ath9k 0000:06:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [ 406.214368] ath9k 0000:06:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 406.428517] ath9k 0000:06:00.0: Failed to initialize device [ 406.428852] ath9k 0000:06:00.0: PCI INT A disabled [ 406.428887] ath9k: probe of 0000:06:00.0 failed with error -5 dmesg error when driver fail: 355.023521] ath: Chip reset failed [ 355.023524] ath: Unable to reset channel, reset status -22 [ 355.023556] ath: Unable to set channel [ 355.088569] ath: Failed to stop TX DMA, queues=0x10f! [ 355.122708] ath: DMA failed to stop in 10 ms AR_CR=0xffffffff AR_DIAG_SW=0xffffffff DMADBG_7=0xffffffff [ 355.122714] ath: Could not stop RX, we could be confusing the DMA engine when we start RX up [ 355.263962] ath: Chip reset failed [ 355.263966] ath: Unable to reset channel (2437 MHz), reset status -22 [ 358.996063] ath: Failed to wakeup in 500us [ 364.004182] ath: Failed to wakeup in 500us I can not install fresh ubuntu because i have lots of application installed. System : Acer Aspire 4250 AMD dual core 1.6GHZ Atheros Communications Inc. AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) EDITED Now i am in serious problem. No wifi device is not showing in ifconfig or lshw commands. Only ether-net interface shows. I tried (FN + WIFI) several times to enable the device but nothing helps. Now I have installed fresh ubuntu 12.04. Please help lshw -c network: *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 82566DC Gigabit Network Connection vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 19 bus info: pci@0000:00:19.0 logical name: eth0 version: 02 serial: 00:19:d1:7a:8e:f9 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e1000e driverversion=2.0.0-k duplex=full firmware=1.1-0 ip=192.168.1.114 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:45 memory:90300000-9031ffff memory:90324000-90324fff ioport:20c0(size=32) rfkill command does not show anything but no error.

    Read the article

  • Mysql 5.5 server not working

    - by rajesh
    I had Ubuntu 14.04 installed on my system. I recently updated ubuntu and now my mysql does not start and workbench says that mysql server has been stopped. And when i try to start it gives me the following error 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Checking server status... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Trying to connect to MySQL... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (111) (2003) 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Assuming server is not running 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Server start done. 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Checking server status... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Trying to connect to MySQL... 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Can't connect to MySQL server on '127.0.0.1' (111) (2003) 2014-08-12 23:02:04 - Assuming server is not running And also when i try to login using terminal (mysql -u root -p <password>) i get the following error: ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) I have also tried to reinstall Ubuntu but i am unable to do so. Gives me the following error: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done mysql-server-5.5 is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. I have data which i have not taken backup of as i am unable to log into the server. I am a newbie please help me resolve this issue without losing my data. Awaiting for your earliest response. Below is the error message from cat /var/log/mysql/error.log 140813 21:22:50 [Warning] Using unique option prefix myisam-recover instead of myisam-recover-options is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the full name instead. 140813 21:22:50 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.8 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda. 140813 21:22:50 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start 140813 21:22:51 InnoDB: 5.5.38 started; log sequence number 80726593570 140813 21:22:51 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '127.0.0.1'; port: 3306 140813 21:22:51 [Note] - '127.0.0.1' resolves to '127.0.0.1'; 140813 21:22:51 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '127.0.0.1'. 140813 21:22:51 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Incorrect file format 'user'

    Read the article

  • ZTE USB Modem AC2736, connection not possible in Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS

    - by Fredo
    It's a long post but nearly covers all my experiments and changes I did to my NM. Hope the information is complete and if there are still question, more information can be provided. I've a ZTE AC2736 USB Modem (CDMA modem) which worked fine in Ubuntu 10.04 /11.10. I recently switched to 12.04.1 (precise pangolin). after the switch the first issue I faced was to connect to internet using my USB modem (ISP: Reliance Brand: Netconnect). Tried to run the drivers provided by Reliance but they are old and won't support Kernel 2.6.30 above. since the code was not downloaded with ISO image (of 12.04) i couldn't compile the files provided in such driver. lsusb does detect it as Modem with output similar to 19d2:fff1 ZTE CDMA technologies inc. (or similar as i didn't note it down) If it is detected as USB storage it shows 19d2:fff5 (as per few online forums, i may be wrong here). I used the network Manager and configured the modem to dial #777 (default) and the ISP provided username:password combination. It tries to connect to internet (3-4 times automatically)but fails to get online. once I was able to connect in the monring hours and the message was flashed 'registered on CDMA home network'. I was able to run an update. the kernel was updated with 3.0.2 -pae OR something similar (can find out if required). I surfed the net for about 2 hours later before restarting. After the restart, again the Modem was not able to get me online. I kept trying for many times. I tried changing the setting in NM. One evening after dark I was able to connect to network with same message flash 'registered on CDMA home network' (the message was similar, i'm not precise here,sorry). I was able to surf the net for nearly 3 hours before I switched off my Laptop. I'm not able to get online after that day, It's been 3 days now. I'll try the observered theory of late/early hours sometime soon as mentioned below. Laptop configuration : Make: Lenovo Model: B480 Processor: Intel B950 RAM: 4G DDR3 HDD: 500 G Broadcom Wireless/Bluetooth/Ethernet LAN OS: FreeDOS / Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (dualboot) Kernel 3.0.2-pae Obeservation : I'm able to connect to internet in those hours when generally the speed is high (low usage by other network (wireless) users). like in early mornings or late nights. This is strange as connection should not be dependent on bandwidth usage. Any help would be appraciated to fix this issue. before I decide to cahnge the OS or ISP.

    Read the article

  • Proxy settings do not promulgate to fat or thin clients

    - by solizin47
    I work in Hertfordshire schools, which use a proxy eg http://wf1.thegrid.org.uk on port 80 to allow graded access by all users, within the schools, to the Internet. I have Ubuntu 10.04LTS successfully running and I want to set up 12.04LTS to replace it. Many other replies to this question have answered questions about stand-alone computers and not addressed the LTSP server and its clients. I have come to a complete stop over the problem of the proxy server settings not promulgating over the local network to Ubuntu 12.04 thin or fat clients. When you input this setting (there are others for HTTPS and FTP) into the System Settings/Network Manager GUI on the server, then when a user logs into the server, both Firefox and Chrome can read the settings and will gain access to the Internet. HOWEVER, these settings are not promulgated to either thin or fat clients on the local network. Their System Settings/Network Manager GUI remains stubbornly blank. I have rebuilt the image after inputting the proxy settings, but it appears they are not part of the image. /etc/environment (on the server) already has: PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games" http_proxy="http://wf1.thegrid.org.uk:80/" https_proxy="https://wf1.thegrid.org.uk:80/" ftp_proxy="ftp://proxy.intra.thegrid.org.uk:3128/" I have also tried this export http_proxy="http://wf1.thegrid.org.uk:80" export https_proxy="http://wf1.thegrid.org.uk:80" export ftp_proxy="http://proxy.intra.thegrid.org.uk:3128" within /etc/environment, and that had no effect, either. etc/apt/apt.conf also has: Acquire::http::proxy "http://wf1.thegrid.org.uk:80/"; Acquire::https::proxy "https://wf1.thegrid.org.uk:80/"; Acquire::ftp::proxy "ftp://proxy.intra.thegrid.org.uk:3128/"; The clients still have no proxy settings in their Network Manager, and no client user can access the Internet from Firefox or Chrome. Three questions: Why doesn't the “Apply system wide” button work? It does on 10.04, and every new user, and all existing users have access to the internet through the proxy without problem. How can I set up proxy settings that work for all the 12.04 clients? I noticed that if user West input the settings himself, they would follow him around the clients. However, this is not secure, because there are grades of settings which prevent visits to various sites, eg wf3 allows fewer sites than wf2 or wf1, so I can't allow users to input this setting themselves. Since the proxy setting followed the user around the clients, the setting must be somewhere in the user profile, since none of the other users have the proxy settings. Do you know where, and how I could fix the setting for users, or better, groups? The setting must then be unchangeable by the user, with no access to the Network Manager. If either 2. or 3. can't be done, then the Ubuntu 12.04LTS server is simply no use to us...

    Read the article

  • Office 2010: It&rsquo;s not just DOC(X) and XLS(X)

    - by andrewbrust
    Office 2010 has released to manufacturing.  The bits have left the (product team’s) building.  Will you upgrade? This version of Office is officially numbered 14, a designation that correlates with the various releases, through the years, of Microsoft Word.  There were six major versions of Word for DOS, during whose release cycles came three 16-bit Windows versions.  Then, starting with Word 95 and counting through Word 2007, there have been six more versions – all for the 32-bit Windows platform.  Skip version 13 to ward off folksy bad luck (and, perhaps, the bugs that could come with it) and that brings us to version 14, which includes implementations for both 32- and 64-bit Windows platforms.  We’ve come a long way baby.  Or have we? As it does every three years or so, debate will now start to rage on over whether we need a “14th” version the PC platform’s standard word processor, or a “13th” version of the spreadsheet.  If you accept the premise of that question, then you may be on a slippery slope toward answering it in the negative.  Thing is, that premise is valid for certain customers and not others. The Microsoft Office product has morphed from one that offered core word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email functionality to a suite of applications that provides unique, new value-added features, and even whole applications, in the context of those core services.  The core apps thus grow in mission: Excel is a BI tool.  Word is a collaborative editorial system for the production of publications.  PowerPoint is a media production platform for for live presentations and, increasingly, for delivering more effective presentations online.  Outlook is a time and task management system.  Access is a rich client front-end for data-driven self-service SharePoint applications.  OneNote helps you capture ideas, corral random thoughts in a semi-structured way, and then tie them back to other, more rigidly structured, Office documents. Google Docs and other cloud productivity platforms like Zoho don’t really do these things.  And there is a growing chorus of voices who say that they shouldn’t, because those ancillary capabilities are over-engineered, over-produced and “under-necessary.”  They might say Microsoft is layering on superfluous capabilities to avoid admitting that Office’s core capabilities, the ones people really need, have become commoditized. It’s hard to take sides in that argument, because different people, and the different companies that employ them, have different needs.  For my own needs, it all comes down to three basic questions: will the new version of Office save me time, will it make the mundane parts of my job easier, and will it augment my services to customers?  I need my time back.  I need to spend more of it with my family, and more of it focusing on my own core capabilities rather than the administrative tasks around them.  And I also need my customers to be able to get more value out of the services I provide. Help me triage my inbox, help me get proposals done more quickly and make them easier to read.  Let me get my presentations done faster, make them more effective and make it easier for me to reuse materials from other presentations.  And, since I’m in the BI and data business, help me and my customers manage data and analytics more easily, both on the desktop and online. Those are my criteria.  And, with those in mind, Office 2010 is looking like a worthwhile upgrade.  Perhaps it’s not earth-shattering, but it offers a combination of incremental improvements and a few new major capabilities that I think are quite compelling.  I provide a brief roundup of them here.  It’s admittedly arbitrary and not comprehensive, but I think it tells the Office 2010 story effectively. Across the Suite More than any other, this release of Office aims to give collaboration a real workout.  In certain apps, for the first time, documents can be opened simultaneously by multiple users, with colleagues’ changes appearing in near real-time.  Web-browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will be available to extend collaboration to contributors who are off the corporate network. The ribbon user interface is now more pervasive (for example, it appears in OneNote and in Outlook’s main window).  It’s also customizable, allowing users to add, easily, buttons and options of their choosing, into new tabs, or into new groups within existing tabs. Microsoft has also taken the File menu (which was the “Office Button” menu in the 2007 release) and made it into a full-screen “Backstage” view where document-wide operations, like saving, printing and online publishing are performed. And because, more and more, heavily formatted content is cut and pasted between documents and applications, Office 2010 makes it easier to manage the retention or jettisoning of that formatting right as the paste operation is performed.  That’s much nicer than stripping it off, or adding it back, afterwards. And, speaking of pasting, a number of Office apps now make it especially easy to insert screenshots within their documents.  I know that’s useful to me, because I often document or critique applications and need to show them in action.  For the vast majority of users, I expect that this feature will be more useful for capturing snapshots of Web pages, but we’ll have to see whether this feature becomes popular.   Excel At first glance, Excel 2010 looks and acts nearly identically to the 2007 version.  But additional glances are necessary.  It’s important to understand that lots of people in the working world use Excel as more of a database, analytics and mathematical modeling tool than merely as a spreadsheet.  And it’s also important to understand that Excel wasn’t designed to handle such workloads past a certain scale.  That all changes with this release. The first reason things change is that Excel has been tuned for performance.  It’s been optimized for multi-threaded operation; previously lengthy processes have been shortened, especially for large data sets; more rows and columns are allowed and, for the first time, Excel (and the rest of Office) is available in a 64-bit version.  For Excel, this means users can take advantage of more than the 2GB of memory that the 32-bit version is limited to. On the analysis side, Excel 2010 adds Sparklines (tiny charts that fit into a single cell and can therefore be presented down an entire column or across a row) and Slicers (a more user-friendly filter mechanism for PivotTables and charts, which visually indicates what the filtered state of a given data member is).  But most important, Excel 2010 supports the new PowerPIvot add-in which brings true self-service BI to Office.  PowerPivot allows users to import data from almost anywhere, model it, and then analyze it.  Rather than forcing users to build “spreadmarts” or use corporate-built data warehouses, PowerPivot models function as true columnar, in-memory OLAP cubes that can accommodate millions of rows of data and deliver fast drill-down performance. And speaking of OLAP, Excel 2010 now supports an important Analysis Services OLAP feature called write-back.  Write-back is especially useful in financial forecasting scenarios for which Excel is the natural home.  Support for write-back is long overdue, but I’m still glad it’s there, because I had almost given up on it.   PowerPoint This version of PowerPoint marks its progression from a presentation tool to a video and photo editing and production tool.  Whether or not it’s successful in this pursuit, and if offering this is even a sensible goal, is another question. Regardless, the new capabilities are kind of interesting.  A greatly enhanced set of slide transitions with 3D effects; in-product photo and video editing; accommodation of embedded videos from services such as YouTube; and the ability to save a presentation as a video each lay testimony to PowerPoint’s transformation into a media tool and away from a pure presentation tool. These capabilities also recognize the importance of the Web as both a source for materials and a channel for disseminating PowerPoint output. Congruent with that is PowerPoint’s new ability to broadcast a slide presentation, using a quickly-generated public URL, without involving the hassle or expense of a Web meeting service like GoToMeeting or Microsoft’s own LiveMeeting.  Slides presented through this broadcast feature retain full color fidelity and transitions and animations are preserved as well.   Outlook Microsoft’s ubiquitous email/calendar/contact/task management tool gains long overdue speed improvements, especially against POP3 email accounts.  Outlook 2010 also supports multiple Exchange accounts, rather than just one; tighter integration with OneNote; and a new Social Connector providing integration with, and presence information from, online social network services like LinkedIn and Facebook (not to mention Windows Live).  A revamped conversation view now includes messages that are part of a given thread regardless of which folder they may be stored in. I don’t know yet how well the Social Connector will work or whether it will keep Outlook relevant to those who live on Facebook and LinkedIn.  But among the other features, there’s very little not to like.   OneNote To me, OneNote is the part of Office that just keeps getting better.  There is one major caveat to this, which I’ll cover in a moment, but let’s first catalog what new stuff OneNote 2010 brings.  The best part of OneNote, is the way each of its versions have managed hierarchy: Notebooks have sections, sections have pages, pages have sub pages, multiple notes can be contained in either, and each note supports infinite levels of indentation.  None of that is new to 2010, but the new version does make creation of pages and subpages easier and also makes simple work out of promoting and demoting pages from sub page to full page status.  And relationships between pages are quite easy to create now: much like a Wiki, simply typing a page’s name in double-square-brackets (“[[…]]”) creates a link to it. OneNote is also great at integrating content outside of its notebooks.  With a new Dock to Desktop feature, OneNote becomes aware of what window is displayed in the rest of the screen and, if it’s an Office document or a Web page, links the notes you’re typing, at the time, to it.  A single click from your notes later on will bring that same document or Web page back on-screen.  Embedding content from Web pages and elsewhere is also easier.  Using OneNote’s Windows Key+S combination to grab part of the screen now allows you to specify the destination of that bitmap instead of automatically creating a new note in the Unfiled Notes area.  Using the Send to OneNote buttons in Internet Explorer and Outlook result in the same choice. Collaboration gets better too.  Real-time multi-author editing is better accommodated and determining author lineage of particular changes is easily carried out. My one pet peeve with OneNote is the difficulty using it when I’m not one a Windows PC.  OneNote’s main competitor, Evernote, while I believe inferior in terms of features, has client versions for PC, Mac, Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone, iPad and Web browsers.  Since I have an Android phone and an iPad, I am practically forced to use it.  However, the OneNote Web app should help here, as should a forthcoming version of OneNote for Windows Phone 7.  In the mean time, it turns out that using OneNote’s Email Page ribbon button lets you move a OneNote page easily into EverNote (since every EverNote account gets a unique email address for adding notes) and that Evernote’s Email function combined with Outlook’s Send to OneNote button (in the Move group of the ribbon’s Home tab) can achieve the reverse.   Access To me, the big change in Access 2007 was its tight integration with SharePoint lists.  Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010 continue this integration with the introduction of SharePoint’s Access Services.  Much as Excel Services provides a SharePoint-hosted experience for viewing (and now editing) Excel spreadsheet, PivotTable and chart content, Access Services allows for SharePoint browser-hosted editing of Access data within the forms that are built in the Access client itself. To me this makes all kinds of sense.  Although it does beg the question of where to draw the line between Access, InfoPath, SharePoint list maintenance and SharePoint 2010’s new Business Connectivity Services.  Each of these tools provide overlapping data entry and data maintenance functionality. But if you do prefer Access, then you’ll like  things like templates and application parts that make it easier to get off the blank page.  These features help you quickly get tables, forms and reports built out.  To make things look nice, Access even gets its own version of Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature, letting you add data bars and data-driven text formatting.   Word As I said at the beginning of this post, upgrades to Office are about much more than enhancing the suite’s flagship word processing application. So are there any enhancements in Word worth mentioning?  I think so.  The most important one has to be the collaboration features.  Essentially, when a user opens a Word document that is in a SharePoint document library (or Windows Live SkyDrive folder), rather than the whole document being locked, Word has the ability to observe more granular locks on the individual paragraphs being edited.  Word also shows you who’s editing what and its Save function morphs into a sync feature that both saves your changes and loads those made by anyone editing the document concurrently. There’s also a new navigation pane that lets you manage sections in your document in much the same way as you manage slides in a PowerPoint deck.  Using the navigation pane, you can reorder sections, insert new ones, or promote and demote sections in the outline hierarchy.  Not earth shattering, but nice.   Other Apps and Summarized Findings What about InfoPath, Publisher, Visio and Project?  I haven’t looked at them yet.  And for this post, I think that’s fine.  While those apps (and, arguably, Access) cater to specific tasks, I think the apps we’ve looked at in this post service the general purpose needs of most users.  And the theme in those 2010 apps is clear: collaboration is key, the Web and productivity are indivisible, and making data and analytics into a self-service amenity is the way to go.  But perhaps most of all, features are still important, as long as they get you through your day faster, rather than adding complexity for its own sake.  I would argue that this is true for just about every product Microsoft makes: users want utility, not complexity.

    Read the article

  • In Technology, Ignorance is NOT Bliss

    - by Tanu Sood
    Author: Debra Lilley, ACE Director, UK Proof I’m not technical -  I’ve just finished a Latin America tour with OTN and a funny thing happened that I want to share with you; because it is quite a good analogy for how many of us use technology today and you know how I love analogies. In Costa Rica we had a really long journey up through the mountains to where our conference was to be. The road was windy and narrow and once it got dark there was no scenery to see, boredom set in. At one stage I looked at my watch to see the time, but in the dark I couldn’t make it out, so I thought I would be clever and use the torch in my smartphone! Even though as soon as I switched on the phone it showed the time, I ignored it and used the torch to read my watch. That’s us when we pay maintenance on software, ask for enhancements, and either chose not to upgrade or as I have seen so many times, upgrade but don’t use the new features. I know there are always other factors not least the upgrade costs themselves but in the later releases of all the Oracle family of applications Oracle have done a lot to make the interoperability of them with Oracle Fusion Middleware more successful and in many cases for the first time. My heritage is Oracle E Business Suite (EBS) and the availability of Oracle Weblogic for EBS is fantastic for an Oracle powered organisation that can move away from supporting multiple flavours of application server. The same release made available  - the no downtime patching that Oracle Database 11g introduced with Edition Based Redefinition. I am not saying you must use these features but you must be aware of what each release of your application brings and make a business based decision as to whether it is for you or not. I like to have a simple spreadsheet of features with no-value, nice-to-have, must-have ratings, but make the spreadsheet cumulative so that when you do upgrade you have all the features listed you previously didn’t take up. That way you can avoid the ‘using your phone to read your watch’ scenario. About the Author: Debra Lilley, Fusion Champion, UKOUG Board Member, Fusion User Experience Advocate and ACE Director. Lilley has 18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since 9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Lead and Oracle Alliance Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts  

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27  | Next Page >